ECMD puts Infinidat at the heart of its digital supply chain
 

For ECMD, moving specialist building materials around the world is only half the supply-chain challenge.  Keeping the technology behind that operation running at speed is just as critical.

As a manufacturer, importer and distributor ECMD has built a highly connected digital operation across five business divisions, with technology supporting everything from customer websites and mobile apps to databases, business applications and communications.  Behind it all sits Infinidat’s (https://www.infinidat.com) InfiniBox enterprise storage platform, providing the performance, resilience and scalability ECMD needs without creating another management headache for its lean IT team.

The move followed a review of ECMD’s storage infrastructure after the company’s previous IBM XIV platform began presenting rising maintenance and upgrade costs, along with uncertainty over future support.

Working with IT partner Dynamix Group, ECMD evaluated its options before selecting Infinidat’s InfiniBox F2230.  The company deployed an InfiniBox system in each of its two data centres, delivering 249TB of usable capacity per system after data protection.  

The platforms now form the storage foundation for ECMD’s VMware environment, supporting eight ESX hosts and around 120 virtual machines.  That infrastructure carries a broad mix of workloads, including custom applications, public-facing websites, mission-critical SQL Server databases, Microsoft Exchange and mobile applications used by employees, partners and customers.

But capacity and performance are only part of the equation. With its supply chain increasingly dependent on digital systems, ECMD also needs those systems to remain available when something goes wrong.

The company uses VMware Site Recovery Manager alongside Infinidat’s low-latency asynchronous replication to provide disaster recovery between its two data centres.  The approach helps protect critical workloads while reducing the risk of disruption from infrastructure failures or other unexpected events.

InfiniBox also gives ECMD room to grow without forcing the company to overprovision storage. Its Capacity-on-Demand model allows ECMD to pay for the capacity it needs while adding storage in 10TB increments as requirements increase.

The full case study can be found here.

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