Heineken Netherlands uses fluid data to brew cost savings

Developments of the week in storage

Heineken Netherlands last week at VMworld discussed performance gains and cost reductions in its data center operations. Heineken is Europe's largest brewer and No. 3 worldwide. Operating more than 130 breweries and distributing to 70 countries, Heineken has a challenging IT environment and a heavy commitment to virtualization.

The company was facing issues with its aging HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array. Support costs were skyrocketing, capacity was tapped, firmware upgrades were not available and the system lacked reporting features. After reviewing available replacement systems, Compellent was chosen based on its compatibility across operating system platforms, native data replication between sites, performance of its solid state drives and key return on investment issues, including cost, 24/7 support and complete reporting features.

The results of the implementation were impressive, resulting in performance increases of 100% to 300% while reducing total drive count by 40%. Systems are now over 60% virtualized, moving to the corporate goal of 90% virtualization by 2012. The performance of the tiered storage in the SQL application was dramatic. The company now has 5% of its storage in SSD, 72% Fibre Channel and 23% in Serial ATA (SATA). Future cost benefit will be enhanced by the fact that 95% of future drive acquisitions will be low cost SATA drives. Other benefits include ease of system migration.

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Heineken Netherlands last week at VMworld discussed performance gains and cost reductions in its data center operations. Heineken is Europe's largest brewer and No. 3 worldwide. Operating more than 130 breweries and distributing to 70 countries, Heineken has a challenging IT environment and a heavy commitment to virtualization.

The company was facing issues with its aging HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array. Support costs were skyrocketing, capacity was tapped, firmware upgrades were not available and the system lacked reporting features. After reviewing available replacement systems, Compellent was chosen based on its compatibility across operating system platforms, native data replication between sites, performance of its solid state drives and key return on investment issues, including cost, 24/7 support and complete reporting features.

The results of the implementation were impressive, resulting in performance increases of 100% to 300% while reducing total drive count by 40%. Systems are now over 60% virtualized, moving to the corporate goal of 90% virtualization by 2012. The performance of the tiered storage in the SQL application was dramatic. The company now has 5% of its storage in SSD, 72% Fibre Channel and 23% in Serial ATA (SATA). Future cost benefit will be enhanced by the fact that 95% of future drive acquisitions will be low cost SATA drives. Other benefits include ease of system migration.

Last Tuesday evening Compellent was serving up ice cold draft beer in its booth at VMworld. The beer - Heineken, of course.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.