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- 4-node FAS8040 MetroCluster system running NetApp ONTAP
- Flash Cache™ I/O accelerators in all nodes
- Brocade Fibre Channel SAN switches for back-end and front-end connectivity
- DS2246 disk shelves
BareApp
www.bareapp.se
Success Story+-
Pågen
Pågen, Sweden’s leading bakery and food exporter, needed to make sure that its businesscritical order management system was always online, seven days a week and all year around. To make sure of this, it upgraded its storage platform to a new NetApp® FAS8040 MetroCluster™ ONTAP® platform, gaining greater security for its operations, faster business performance, and easier management.Customer Profile+-
Pågen
Pågen is Sweden’s leading bakery, with an annual turnover of SEK 2.7 billion. The company was founded in 1878 as a little bakery in Malmö in the southern province of Scandinavia. Today, it is a fifthgeneration business that employs 1,400 staff. It has two bakeries, one in Malmo and one in Gothenburg. Pågen’s various types of bread, pastries, and cookies are sold in just about every Swedish grocery store, and Pågen is also one of Sweden’s leading food exporters. Key export markets are France, Great Britain, and Belgium, but its renowned Gifflar cakes and biscuits are exported to 25 countries. Other baked goods are sold in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Germany. The Swedish market is the strongest for Pågen, although its presence in the rest of Scandinavia is also formidable, especially in Denmark, where it is known for its Kanelgiffel, a cinnamon bun. Its most famous international product is Krisprolls.The Challenge+-
As a bakery, Pågen is absolutely
dependent on its order
management system to distribute
freshly baked bread to its Swedish
stores, seven days a week and all
year round. However, its steadily
consistent growth was placing
demands on its systems that were
threatening the company’s ability to
deliver.
Prior to 2010, Pågen had used an
IBM storage platform. As demands
increased, this platform was
replaced with a NetApp platform
consisting of a 7-Mode FAS3140
MetroCluster system and later
an additional 7-Mode FAS3250
MetroCluster system. These
performed well and supported the
business for a number of years.
However, as the company grew,
the FAS3140 system reached
its performance limit. This was
becoming critical because its
product distribution requires the
order management system to always be online. Performance
issues were threatening this
capability, and if the order
management system slowed down,
it could pose significant problems
for the business.
To provide a sense of scale, 5,000
customer invoices are sent every
day, and approximately 120,000
items are ordered every day.
Every day this activity generates
a large amount of data, which
needs to be processed using
the order management system’s
database. To support business
growth and business continuity,
Pågen needed to find a way to add
more performance to the storage
platform.
The Solution+-
Keen to improve its storage
performance with minimal
disruption to the business, Pågen
reached out to its IT partner,
BareApp. Because of Pågen’s
previous positive experience with
NetApp storage and BareApp’s
deep understanding of its
customer’s storage, BareApp
suggested that Pågen upgrade
the existing NetApp environment
with new controllers and disks,
while reusing parts of the existing
environment for the best total cost
of ownership (TCO).
As a result, Pågen replaced
its FAS3140 MetroCluster and
FAS3250 MetroCluster systems
with a new FAS8040 4-node
MetroCluster system running
NetApp ONTAP.
Ola Gustafson, infrastructure
manager, Pågen, explains the
rationale behind the move: “The
MetroCluster function provides
clustering with synchronous
mirroring. In turn, this delivers
continuous availability and zero
data loss, eliminating the need
for planned downtime, as well
as greatly reducing the risk of
unplanned downtime.”
In simple terms, the NetApp
ONTAP MetroCluster system makes
sure that all data from its order
management system is written
to two separate physical locations
synchronously. This safeguards
the order management information
in the event of a disaster. It also
provides a reliable foundation for
making sure that, even in the event
of a complete loss of one of its data
centers, the core business can keep
on operating.
Business Benefits+-
Smooth-running business
Since implementing the new
FAS8040 MetroCluster system,
the company has noticed that the
system delivers on its promise of
high performance and that the
database read and write latency has
decreased. Gustafson says, “It has
helped users become much more
efficient. For instance, online order
registrations and report generation
are much quicker. The invoicing
of 5,000 customers is smoother,
and administration times have also
decreased significantly.”
More security
As well as enabling greater
business efficiency and speed,
the FAS8040 MetroCluster
NetApp ONTAP platform has
introduced greater resiliency of the
storage infrastructure. Gustafson
explains, “The advantage of the
MetroCluster system is that the
storage system can be distributed
over two geographically separate
data centers with complete
synchronization. This means
maintenance, updates, and testing
can be done without downtime, and
we always have a real-time backup
in place.”
Less admin
Despite the advanced data
protection and resiliency that
the FAS8040 MetroCluster
platform provides to Pågen’s order
management system, it is a simple
platform to operate and manage.
“Its simplicity is a great advantage.
New resources are mirrored
automatically; no change in the
configuration is required. This frees
up time for the IT operations team,
allowing them to focus on core
business-enhancing tasks,” adds
Gustafson.
Reliable, flexible foundation
for the business
Pågen’s overarching requirements,
to install a storage platform
underpinning its critical order
management system and provide
a robust disaster recovery option,
have been met. This has provided
Gustafson with great reassurance
and confidence that the right
decision was made. He says, “It
performs extremely well, and since
we installed it, we haven’t had
any unplanned disruptions in the
ordering system. On one occasion,
during a power cut in one of the
data centers, it worked as designed,
and data was effortlessly delivered
from the redundant nodes at our
other data center.”
Environment+-
Industry
Food
The Challenge
Upgrade storage platform to
support business-critical order
management system that needs
to be online always.
The Solution
Implemented a new platform,
NetApp MetroCluster system
based on NetApp 4-node
FAS8040.
Benefits
- Reliable, robust platform that underpins business requirements
- Faster business operations
- Disaster recovery system that synchronously mirrors data and makes sure of zero RPO
- Easy to manage, less admin
- High performance