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Tasty Baking Company Slashes Data Center Energy Costs and Quickly Rolls Out SAP Upgrade
Customer Profile
Tasty Baking Company, founded in 1914 and headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is one of the country's leading bakers of snack cakes, pies, cookies, and donuts. Manufacturing facilities in Philadelphia and Oxford, Pennsylvania, produce more than 100 products under the Tastykake brand name. The company bakes 4.8 million products daily to generate annual revenue in excess of $250 million. (Source: www.tastykake.com)
The Challenge
Replace conventional infrastructure with more flexible, manageable solution for SAP and other critical applications Tasty Baking Company products serve as the industry benchmark for consistent taste, quality, and freshness. Maintaining such standards in a manufacturing operation that produces nearly five million perishable items daily can present major challenges to an IT organization. Brendan O'Malley, Tasty Baking Company vice president and chief information officer, says the company relies on technologies such as SAP to maximize productivity and efficiency: "Without SAP, we can't bake, ship, bill, collect–we simply can't operate. But keeping our SAP and other business-critical applications available around the clock requires a rock-solid infrastructure. Unfortunately, our existing infrastructure, built on physical servers and an aging SAN, increasingly limited our ability to implement and support needed functionality. And although we routinely backed up critical data off site, our inability to quickly and easily replicate server and application environments left us vulnerable to business disruption in the event of a primary-site disaster."
O'Malley adds that refreshing the company's SAP system was an "onerous," months-long process that made it impractical to implement updates more than twice yearly. On the compliance front, without tiered storage, meeting data retention requirements became increasingly costly. And as the server and storage landscape grew, so did the complexity of managing it.
To resolve these issues, Tasty Baking Company required a modernized, more cost-effective infrastructure that would:
- ensure application and data availability;
- enable full-function disaster recovery (DR);
- facilitate rapid integration and testing of new SAP and other application functionality to help the company stay efficient and competitive;
- be easily managed by a small IT team.
The Solution
Implement a business applications solution with VMware on NetApp In response to the Tasty Baking Company's request for proposal, organizations representing 10 major server and storage vendors presented alternative solutions. Razor Technology (www.razor-tech.com), a systems integrator specializing in end-to-end enterprise infrastructure solutions, most effectively addressed requirements with a virtualized infrastructure built on VMware and storage from NetApp.
"By standardizing on VMware, the Tasty Baking Company team can focus IT resources on a single infrastructure that delivers the ideal combination of flexibility and redundancy," says George Sucher, Vice President of Sales at Razor Technology. "And better than any other storage system, NetApp's solution complements the virtual-server model–NetApp's technology makes provisioning storage as fast as provisioning virtual machines." Tyler Britten, manager of Enterprise Architecture at Razor Technology, adds, "We've also found that NetApp's cloning and replication technologies enable testing efficiencies and virtual infrastructure/data protection that no one else in the industry can deliver as simply and cost effectively. Those capabilities are invaluable in an SAP environment."
NetApp storage, now the corporate standard at Tasty Baking Company, serves as the foundation for the virtual infrastructure. A NetApp FAS3020 system, configured with active-active controllers for highest availability, provides storage resources to 40 virtual servers running on 10 physical servers communicating via FC to the NetApp FAS3020HA system. The VMware-on-NetApp environment supports critical Tasty Baking Company business systems, including Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Exchange 2003, and SQL Server™ software, SAP R/3 software, a mobile sales application, and a data warehouse.
Business Benefits
Enhanced responsiveness to business needs, fast time to results the virtual infrastructure built on NetApp storage gives O'Malley's team unprecedented ability to respond to business and user needs. "In the past, when someone requested new server and storage resources, we often had to tell them they could expect delivery sometime next quarter. Now we ask, ‘What time do you need it?' Provisioning tasks that used to require enormous time and energy can be done very quickly."
The ability to move and allocate resources on the fly, combined with NetApp FlexClone® data volume/set replicating software, helps the Tasty Baking Company team more rigorously and rapidly test both processes and application upgrades. Previously, a routine testing process could take weeks while engineers copied the production system, backed it up and then restored it onto another server, ran processes against the test instance, duplicated additional test data, and so on.
"More often than not, weeks turned into months," O'Malley reveals. "As a result, we worried about the quality of our testing–it's difficult to encourage people to do rigorous and frequent testing when the process is so complex and time consuming. Today, using NetApp's cloning and provisioning technologies, we can set up a new testing environment in a day.
"The same NetApp technologies enable more frequent refreshes of our SAP environment," O'Malley goes on. "We can quickly and easily create and use fully scaled environments without buying lots of additional equipment. We just finished a major upgrade of our SAP system in just four months. That process would have taken at least six months in the old infrastructure and we would havehad less confidence in our testing and dry run practice. Instead of limiting our test system refreshes to twice a year, we can schedule them whenever there's a business benefit."
Protected business assets NetApp's backup, replication, recovery, and disaster recovery functionality gives Tasty Baking Company robust and cost-efficient protection of critical application and data assets. O'Malley says that although the company had already eliminated tape backup, a mixed bag of legacy tools made it difficult to manage disk-to-disk backup across the infrastructure. "We're moving all of our backups to use NetApp's standard tools. We'll also be able to seamlessly replicate both data and virtual machines to our off-site DR facility. The combination of NetApp and VMware will allow us to get back up and running from the remote site very quickly."
Management efficiency O'Malley emphasizes that having a single architecture across the product line, as well as a single set of management tools, makes it much easier and more cost effective to administer an entire storage landscape. "NetApp integrates more functionality–replication, cloning, deduplication, application-aware management tools–than any other vendor. NetApp's solution gives us better functionality right out of the box. Without it, we'd have had to piece together products from a variety of vendors Instead, we've been able to eliminate multiple toolsets, and focus existing staff on one toolset. Our IT team can provide better support because we don't deal with disparate systems and complicated processes."
Tasty Baking Company runs a lean IT organization–just seven people manage the entire infrastructure, including the network, telephone and mobile systems, servers and storage, and a 24x7 help desk. Implementing the VMware-on-NetApp environment has enabled unprecedented levels of infrastructure flexibility and redundancy, and simplified the administration of the system.
Maximum resource utilization and cost savings O'Malley says that a reduced server count funded the new infrastructure. "Not only did we eliminate some 30 physical servers, we also avoided the purchase of additional servers and storage that would have been required as part of our recent SAP upgrade. NetApp's space-reduction technologies such as thin provisioning and deduplication have helped us make better use of existing storage."
O'Malley also sees economy in NetApp's unified architecture, which supports mixed protocols and mixed classes of storage within the same array. Other savings come in the form of reduced power and cooling costs. O'Malley estimates as much as 75% energy savings with the new infrastructure, and data center real estate savings in excess of 80%.
Business-mindful partners "From our first introduction to the Razor Technology and NetApp team, we benefited from their business-centric approach to designing an infrastructure solution," summarizes O'Malley. "While competitors emphasized engineering elements, this team focused on addressing our business challenges. They recognized that it's the business results that matter–how does this solution interact with and improve our SAP environment? How will it help us protect critical business operations? How will it simplify our upcoming facility move, etc.
"I should add," O'Malley says, "that there was one point of concern prior to the vendor selection. The speed at which Razor Technology proposed completing the implementation and migration was a major point of differentiation–so much so that we were actually suspicious of their ability to deliver! But we ultimately saw just how much you can accomplish when you combine the right virtualization and storage technologies with the right migration tools and partners. The NetApp and Razor Technology team has helped us successfully and nondisruptively make the transition to a virtual infrastructure that is proving to be an important, enabling asset to our company."
Solution Components |
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NetApp Products NetApp FlexVol® and FlexClone technologies NetApp SnapRestore®, SnapMirror®, SnapManager® for Exchange, Single Mailbox Recovery (SMBR), and SnapDrive® software Protocols |
Environment Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server software SAP R/3 software |
About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.