VIRTUALISED ENVIRONMENTS AND PRIVATE CLOUDS POWERED BY FLASH

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1 VIRTUALISED ENVIRONMENTS AND PRIVATE CLOUDS POWERED BY FLASH FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS PROFILE: KINCROME, VICTORIA AUSTRALIA

2 Contents 3 How does a virtualised environment help? 3 What prompted you to upgrade your virtualised environment? 4 Given you have an internal private cloud, why not use external private cloud? 4 How does data and analysis drive IT demand in warehousing & distribution? 5 What did you do to solve this for Kincrome? 5 What does that mean day to day for your distribution centre? Virtualised Environments and Private Clouds: why the right environment makes information access faster for distributors Selling to retailers requires robust order systems, efficient distribution and increasingly requires sophisticated business-to-business interaction between enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. How does a national brand warehouse and distribution centre cope with that burgeoning data demand and unpredictable demand spikes? We asked Michael Hayes how Kincrome has responded to these challenges Michael Hayes, IT Operations Manager at Kincrome, streamlined information access and reduced daily report processing time by 75% in a national distribution centre Kincrome is one of the largest suppliers of tools and equipment in Australia for trade and retail markets, with brands including Triton, Supatool, Finakal, Lisle, Gorilla and Kincrome. 6 What technology did you select and why? 6 Where to from here for Kincrome s IT infrastructure? Our distribution centre relies on fast and reliable information access for order processing, pick, pack & dispatch, business intelligence and general ledger updates. Reporting now takes one quarter of the time. Michael Hayes, IT Operations Manager Kincrome Australia

3 How does a virtualised environment help? It makes sense to spread storage and processing capacity across all of your servers to avoid silos. By virtualising you avoid having one server working at capacity and another sitting with idle capacity. That is inefficient. Business should be driven by what data you need to access when, not where that data is physically stored. What prompted you to upgrade your virtualised environment? We moved to a virtualised environment gradually over the years but we ve grown rapidly since then. Increasing business-to-business data links with our retailers and our growing use of business intelligence were straining performance. We needed faster access. Our existing hardware was coming out of manufacturer maintenance contract so it was time to renew. 3

4 Given you have an internal private cloud, why not use external private cloud? We considered it. We really did. There are attractions to letting other people provide the storage out on the cloud not least the reduced capital costs. For us though, the reality is we are located in a business park with pretty ordinary broadband connections. We just cannot access external cloud fast enough. We looked at upgrading to dedicated telecommunications links but the costs were prohibitive. So then we switched back to making our internal IT infrastructure better able to deliver for the business. How does data and analysis drive IT demand in warehousing & distribution? 4 Increasing interaction with retailers through our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and greater use of business intelligence tools means fast and reliable information access is everything. If our ERP system goes down, the business grinds to a halt. Orders don t get processed, trucks don t get dispatched. So robust, reliable infrastructure is critical. At the same time we need to contain costs and wanted to avoid over-investing in redundant infrastructure just to cope with peaks and troughs. We knew there had to be a better way.

5 What did you do to solve this for Kincrome? We worked with Intellect IT to design a new infrastructure that combined the latest robust servers for the bulk of our virtualised storage and processing. What is exciting though is that we have combined that with superfast data access on Flash storage devices. What does that mean day to day for your distribution centre? We are now much better equipped to accommodate the dynamic changes in system loads (spikes). Our network is now self-optimising. That s jargon I know, but it means the data that we access frequently is automatically moved to super fast flash storage devices, while lessfrequently-accessed data is moved to more costeffective storage and processing tiers. It all happens automatically. Users don t need to consider where the data is, they just know they can access it so much faster than they used to be able to. 5

6 What technology did you select and why? To be honest, for us it was all about the solution, not the brand, but the EMC solution has really delivered for us. We looked to Intellect IT for advice on the best way to achieve the business outcome we needed. Intellect IT recommended VSPEX for Private Cloud from EMC, which provided a modular architecture for our new virtualised environment. We have combined that with EMC s VNX to give us a virtualised application layer and Flash Disk acceleration and optimisation. The transition has been seamless. The results we see daily. Where to from here for Kincrome s IT infrastructure? End of day processes that used to take hours now take a quarter of the time. So the benefits are immediate. We think the long-term benefits will also be significant. This new architecture is designed to support our growth projections for the next five years and we will start reassessing in four years. Now that we have a robust platform, our focus is shifting to growing the depth of use of our B2B systems, richer reporting and future integration points