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Case Study
NexentaStor helps Vos Logis cs stay in the fast lane
and bypass storage slowdown
Challenge
Add capacity to store data
created by innov ve
proprietary logis cs systems
LoVos and other key
horizontal applic ons.
Bene ts
Expand exis ng storage capacity. Improve
overall performance of the total storage
environment. Ensure high availability of data,
business co
y with a so on that is
cost e ec ve and easy to understand.
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
Founded in June 1944, Vos Logis cs has grown from a single Chevrolet
delivering goods between Oss and Nijmegen in the Netherlands into a
leading independent European logis cs service provider. The company
has just under 1900 employees, a modern eet of 1,000 vehicles, 2,800
loading units, 125,000 square metres of storage space and a network of
30 group-owned loc ons spread across nine countries in mainland
Europe. Vos Logis cs is ac ve in the bulk and volume transport markets
and ranks amongst the largest road hauliers in Europe.
The company’s IT opera on is vital to Vos Logis cs’ core business by
enabling the e cient management of its truck eet and ensuring
compliancy with rules and re
ons in areas such as customs,
calcula ng the cost and price of cargo and processing payments for toll
roads. Through the years, Vos Logis cs has transormed itself into an
innova ve logis cs provider. The innov ve power is partly driven
through the state of the art IT-services that the company has put in
place.
Vos Logis cs has three datacenters. The primary data centre is located
at its headquarters in Oss with a backup/coloc on facility in Almere
(also in The Netherlands) and another in Poland. It has 140 virtualized
servers, 98% of which are in Oss (in total 450 works ons). The
company has its own logis cs system, known as LoVos, along with a
number of horizontal applica ons such as Exchange, SQL, a GPS system
for its trucks, SAS for data processing and analysis and Unit4 Coda
Financials.
CHALLENGES
Vos Logis cs relied on a NetApp system for its primary storage but with
data growth rates doubling every two years it was reaching full capacity
and the company was star
to experience a slow down in
performance. The IT department decided to look for a so on that
would help it to retain the NetApp system but take the pressure o it in
terms of performance while adding capacity.
High availability and business co
y were very s
cant factors
for Vos Logis cs because any do
me could lead to trucks having to
stop their journeys which could have knock on e ects on service levels,
delayed deliveries and unhappy customers.
Vos Logis cs began to look for a system to complement its exis
storage set up that was cost e ec ve and easy to understand, provided
high availability and speed improvements.
Sol on
Vos Logis cs integrated
commodity hardware with
NexentaStor so
re which
resulted in outstanding
performance of the complete
storage environment.
System Co gura on
128-bit e system
Virtualised server
environment based on
VMware
SQL servers
SAS repor ng
applic ons
LoVos logis cs system
“We are very happy with
everything about our Nexenta
experience: the ease of use,
quick deployment, exibility and
scalability, and the ability to
recover 90% quicker.”
Bob Mulders
Team leader server management
and service desk
Case Study
THE NEXENTA SOLUTION
Vos Logis cs chose NexentaStor running on a commodity hardware
based storage appliance with 18TB of raw storage to provide the much
needed boost to the exis
storage system and
- future proof it.
The seamless integra on of the Supermicro hardware and NexentaStor
so ware results in outstanding performance of Vos Logis cs’complete
storage so on. In
on to the cost advantages, NexentaStor
was also easy to understand, making it simpler to troubleshoot quickly
and e ec vely in case of do
me or failure.
NexentaStor is based on ZFS, the 128-bit e system and logical
volume manager which includes data integrity ver c on against
data corrup on, support for high storage capaci es, integr on of
snapshots and volume management, co
ous integrity checking
and automa c repair. The ability to take unlimited snapshots is a
s
cant feature for Vos Logis cs which now takes snapshots every
two hours.
Deploying a NexentaStor so on means the data does not have to be
replicated between systems to create high availability, a s
cant
requirement for Vos Logis cs. In add on to o ering the high
availability that Vos Logis cs was looking for, NexentaStor was also
able to support all the types of disks the company was using and
those it might look to use in the future.
The system took less than two days to deploy and it went live within a
week. It was very easy compared to other impleme
ons
undertaken by Vos Logis cs in the past and took less me than
a cipated. The IT partner’s outstanding support and the NexentaStor
so on made the setup of the new system and the data migra on
pain free and quickly.
Recovery me from failure has improved from ve minutes under the
previous system to less than 30 seconds. In addi on, the company’s
SQL Server and repor
applica ons are running anything from 20%
to 60% faster. Performance has also improved s
cantly.
Business Impact
Enables Vos Logis cs to retain its
exis
NetApp so on while
boos g performance and
capacity
Provides high availability,
unlimited snapshots and
s
cant improvement to
recovery me from failure
NexentaStor is easy and quick to
deploy, manage and
troubleshoot. It is cost e ec ve
and exible, suppor
a wide
range of disk types.
NEXENTASTOR BENEFITS
NexentaStor features such as de-duplic on, unlimited snapshots, thin provisioning and hybrid storage
pooling are designed to help enterprise customers implement cost-e ec ve, high performance storage. In
a
on it supports a wide range of protocols for
ed storage including CIFS, NFS, rsync, iSCSI, Fibre
Channel, SATA.
In a
on, NexentaStor’s ZFS found on delivers the scalability required to meet future storage
requirements and the snapshot capability to provide instant recovery of data.
As NexentaStor is based on open source technology, Vos Logis cs is not locked in to buying more
expensive products from a par cular vendor or paying unnecessary mark-ups for standard features.
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