Senwes reduces storage costs, improves performance, increases reliability with Infinidat

Infinidat, a global leader in enterprise petabyte-scale data storage solutions, has provided leading agricultural company, Senwes, with an enterprise data storage array that delivers faster-than-all-flash performance, high availability and multi-petabyte scale capacity. The solution has enabled the group to future proof its storage growth, improve performance and reliability and lower costs significantly.

About Senwes

Senwes is one of the leading agricultural companies in South Africa, with a rich and proud history that extends well over a century, a footprint of more than 140 sites across 9 provinces, and over 3 000 staff. Senwes’ solutions cover the entire agricultural supply chain, focusing on three core service areas: Input Supply, Financial and Technical Services, and Market Access.

For Senwes, IT plays an integral part and enables core business functions to be executed.It’s IT department functions as a centralised provider or ‘shared service’ within the group structure, delivering a full spectrum of IT services to the various areas of business across South Africa.

The challenges

Previously, Senwes chose a more traditional approach of refreshing and replacing their data storage environment every five years. This proved expensive and not always capable of meeting the demands of their exponential year on year growth.

Alf White, Group Executive - Information Technology at Senwes, said, “As Senwes grows, so does the volume of data we generate and use, making storage and accessibility increasingly difficult to predict in terms of capacity requirements. We realised a storage solution was needed that offers more flexibility and allows for expansion without a large initial capital outlay.”

The solution

After careful consideration, Senwes turned to Infinidat as its data storage solution outperformed every other vendor in terms of performance, price, scalability and reliability.

Hayden Sadler, Infinidat Country Manager for South Africa explained, “We provided Senwes with an InfiniBox F4000 solution, which immediately made available the 300TB capacity Senwes needed, while including 700TB of useable capacity for future demands. Senwes’ storage requirements are now covered for the next 7 years – at least.”

The Infinidat solution also provides 99.99999% uptime, thanks to the solution’s self-healing architecture, ability to quickly restore from any component failure, and non-disruptive upgrades and updates.

In addition, integrated synchronous and asynchronous replication provides the highest levels of data reliability for both onsite and offsite business continuity and disaster mitigation planning.

The pay off

Infinidat’s solution eliminated the compromise between performance, availability and cost, while future proofing growth of data and maintaining data sovereignty for Senwes. The company’s overall performance subsequently increased from 25,000 Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) to more than 750,000 IOPS.

White added, “Backups that used to take 15 minutes, now take less than 30 seconds to complete, adding to the overall efficiency and minimised downtime of the solution.”

Senwes can now react proactively to any potential issue in their environment, thanks to continuous monitoring of the solution which alerts Senwes to any variances – even issues such as temperature.

Furthermore, the InfiniBox F4000 requires no downtime for maintenance and updates, meaning that Senwes doesn’t have to worry about the impact to operations to undertake these tasks, or the costs associated with interrupting operations.

Senwes also benefitted from significant cost savings, as Infinidat’s InfiniBox solution reduced Senwes’ historic storage investment by almost 80% per terabyte. Future expansion is catered for by the inclusion of a fixed per terabyte dollar price that is lower than their initial per terabyte investment.

Typically, updates come attached with a cost, either in the form of licensing, additional hardware to support the new version, or downtime to install that results in lost operational time. With InfiniBox, updates are as free of charge as they are of hassle.

“Throughout the entire journey with Infinidat, we have been impressed at every turn. Infinidat has proven to be professional and knowledgeable across the entire project lifecycle from implementation to support. They have proven themselves to be more than just a service provider. They are true, innovative data management partners,” concluded White.

Click here to watch video testimonial from Senwes.