DataCore Software
today announced that Europe's largest branded consumer garden and lawn products
company, Evergreen Garden Care Ltd has adopted DataCore's SANsymphony platform
as their infrastructure enablement platform to allow for flexible growth and
digital change. As a new international business entity devolving from their US
based parent company, Scotts MiracleGro, Evergreen faced several pressing
challenges. Their IT management team needed to install an infrastructure that
would cover eight countries from UK to Australia, to allow for constant trading
without negative impact for millions of transactions of their household brand
name products such as MiracleGro, RoundUp and Weedol.
Evergreen's Interim CIO Steve Williams reflects. "With
the impending move away from the US corporate infrastructure, we had the chance
to create a highly performant environment engineered from the ground up. In
total, we had 76 business systems to consider and due to criticality and
process enhancement, we prioritised delivery of the new SAP ERP system first."
Evergreen consulted DataCore Gold Partner Waterstons,
to submit recommendations on deployment of a new infrastructure that could act
as the cornerstone of digital agility, serviced by a flexible storage layer
that would perform highly and without interruption to the global supply chain
but at a more reasonable cost than prohibitively expensive hardware solutions.
Waterstons submitted a tiered reference architecture delivered through
DataCore's SANsymphony platform.
SAP HANA TDI Integration and Optimisation Key:
Simon Birbeck, Principal Consultant and DataCore
Master Certified Engineer at Waterstons, details more. "The Evergreen
infrastructure needed to be flexible for future growth. They also wanted SAP
HANA Tailored Data Centre Integration (TDI) - an alternative approach of
deploying SAP HANA giving flexibility in the selection of the hardware
components for server and storage virtualisation. DataCore's software-defined
stance matched their flexibility needs and offered a hybrid approach whilst
boosting performance. It was proven, certified for SAP HANA and effortlessly
capable of synchronously mirroring within the hosted data centre, and
asynchronously replicating to Evergreen's Disaster Recovery site in France."
With SAP HANA TDI centre stage in the install and a
tight deployment schedule, SANsymphony had to quickly prove in testing that it
could support the storage requirements of the VMware virtualised server farm
and SAP HANA HWCCT KPIs, straight off the bat. It did, and more beside.
Critical, as even though HANA is an in-memory database, it still relies on the
performance of underlying storage for all database write operations. The
solution was deployed as a three tiered, continuously available solution with
DataCore's SANsymphony automatically allocating data blocks to the most
appropriate and latest generation hardware, Tier 1 NVMe read intensive, ultra
fast response, enterprise class SSDs. Followed by Tier 2, Generously served
Flash and lastly, Tier 3 SAS drives for the less frequently accessed data.
Simon contemplated, "Operating internationally from
Australia to Europe, Evergreen are constantly trading and processing using
their SAP ERP system so 24x7 fast access is required. Latest technologies were
included in the Evergreen rollout, including NVMe (non-volatile memory express)
and SSDs equipped to boost bandwidth and reduce latency. We complement
DataCore's software with NVMe to auto assign the hottest, most valued data
blocks to this prized storage while increasing performance further still
through Parallel I/O."
Steve Williams, Interim CIO comments, "We were
committed to developing an in-memory system to increase our performance
capabilities, but we knew that we needed an equally highly performant
underlying solution to apportion the data to these technology advances. To
achieve that, we relied on the power of the software to auto migrate data to
the most appropriate storage and boost it through parallel caching."
Just 12 months after the sale from the parent company
and faced with an aggressive transition and enablement plan, Evergreen boast a
fully functioning, optimised always-on infrastructure that worked from the
get-go to support SAP HANA, ingested data from Scotts Miracle Grow and other
business critical applications. Evergreen management firmly believe that
processes can only be improved if decisions are made in real-time, accessing
data and applications without delay. This constant state of high availability
has made Evergreen systems and data secure and durable in this vital transition
time. Planning for a disaster scenario is also enabled with an asynchronously
connected DR site in Lyon, France.
Steve concludes, "With divestment timescales as tight
as we faced, we needed a tried and tested system that would work first time and
would gain the necessary SAP accreditations. We found that in DataCore. Given
our change success, we escalated the role of IT from being a supporting partner
to a fundamental business enabler that exceeded timescales, performance and
availability needs and using software as the key, we future-proofed the journey
for future growth."
The full Evergreen story can be accessed here: https://www.datacore.com/document/evergreen-garden-care-case-study/