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CASE STUDY
Kaminario K2 Stores Data for the Massive ERP
System in the Nation’s Largest Food Redistributor
Challenge
Family-owned and operated for over 50 years, Dot Foods consolidates products and
resells them to distributors nationwide in less-than-truckload quantities. The company
prides itself on its mission to promote shared growth and a win-win for everyone in the
food supply chain. With more than nine locations nationwide, Dot Foods offers over
110,000 products from 600 manufacturers.
In order to efficiently run complex and transactionintensive operations, Dot Foods computerized all
areas of the business, including order-entry, picking
and putaway, routing and dispatch. At the core of
their highly virtualized IT environment is an ERP
system that holds data in a Microsoft SQL Server
database. Before Dot Foods acquired Kaminario’s
arrays, an HP 3PAR array with HDDs was used for
storage. Over time the array ran out of capacity and
its increased footprint raised power and cooling
requirements. The company also needed to
accelerate application performance to keep up with
the expanding business.
We selected K2 based
on its exceptional
scalability, resiliency and
performance offered at
an attractive price–even
when compared with
legacy arrays. K2 is a
storage solution that
can grow in our very
dynamic business.
Solution
~Eric Ellerman,
Dot Foods evaluated all-flash, hybrid and legacy
Network Manager at Dot Foods
storage to address their data and performance
challenges. Requirements included easy scalability
to accommodate data growth, seamless integration
into the VMware environment and 100% uptime. Prices of different arrays were
compared, as operating in a high-volume, low-margin business required a highly costefficient solution.
All-flash arrays from HP and Pure Storage didn’t meet Dot Foods’ requirements; several
hybrid arrays were excluded because they lacked Fibre Channel support. Kaminario K2
was selected based on its exceptional scalability, resiliency and consistent performance
offered at a very attractive price - even when compared with legacy arrays.
Collaborative relationship the Kaminario sales team was also a key decision factor.
One K2 array was deployed into production and the other one on a disaster recovery
(DR) site, for the total of 90TB of guaranteed/180TB of effective capacity. Zerto Virtual
Replication software was used to replicate application and database VMs to the second
K2, supporting warehouse and transportation functions with a sub-60-second RPO.
Combined with Zerto, K2 delivered a flexible and scalable infrastructure for production
and disaster recovery with an outstanding ease of installation and management.
Dot Foods immediately recognized better efficiency by using fewer, but larger,
VMware datastores. The company’s Lean IT staff was pleased to see daily manual tasks
automated, freeing up the time previously used on maintenance. Overall, runtime of
select PeopleSoft batch processes was improved by more than 30%. Thanks to the
5:1 compression data reduction rate resulting in a smaller footprint and lower power
and cooling costs, the company expects to see a reduced TCO. With K2, Dot Foods
is confident that they can reliably meet the commitments to their customers as the
business continues to grow.
© 2015 Kaminario All Rights Reserved | DOC1000029
USE CASE:
Production and DR storage for USwide food redistribution operations
APPLICATIONS:
ERP system with 4,200 users for
order-entry, picking and putaway,
routing and dispatch, and backoffice with 180TB of effective
capacity in Microsoft SQL Server
databases
GOALS:
»» Improve performance of critical
production workloads
»» Scale easily to keep up with
business growth
»» Seamlessly integrate into the
VMware environment
»» Ensure 100% uptime
»» Establish a DR site with a very
aggressive RPO
RESULTS:
»»Reduced storage cost/GB
with lower footprint, power
and cooling with 5:1 data
compression rate
»» Gained the equivalent of one
business operations employee
due to the 30% reduction in the
runtime of batch processes
»» Simplified VMware management
with reduced number of VMware
datastores
»» Improved overall storage TCO