Case Study: Pental

The Customer

Pental is an Australian-owned manufacturing organisation providing personal hygiene products for Australia and New Zealand since 1954. Known for household brand names such as White King, Sunlight and Softly, Pental is the largest manufacturer of soap products in Australia. Its manufacturing operations are based in Shepparton, Victoria as part of a fully integrated supply chain, to ensure the company can operate 24x7 to meet customer demands. Pental employs 134 people across its Melbourne, Shepparton, and New Zealand facilities.

The Challenges

With a 24-hour manufacturing operation committed to providing high-quality, locally developed products, it is critical for Pental’s IT operations to be running continuously to meet demand. This commitment, combined with an imminent move to a new head office location, drove demand for a reliable, high-performing data storage system that would scale to Pental’s growing IT needs and meet changing business requirements.

Pental currently operates eight physical servers and 20 virtual servers, as well as running Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange, Citrix XenApp and is looking to implement VDI in the near future.

After only two years in production, Pental’s legacy Storage Area Network (SAN) had reached its limits.

Mark Bishop, IT Manager for Pental, said, “The existing two-year-old storage system I inherited on joining Pental wasn’t meeting our needs in terms of support and capacity, which was restricting our ability to improve IT services to the business. It didn’t offer the performance we needed, the capacity for our current growth rates or the future proofing to deal with our new strategies around VDI and upgraded Exchange hardware. “On top of that, it was complex and difficult to manage, which took a lot of time away from delivering other IT projects to the business.”

The Solution

Bishop and his team looked to the market to find a better data storage solution that would meet Pental’s needs and growth. After evaluating the major storage vendors and almost settling on one, Bishop was reading a Wall St Journal article on emerging companies. The article discussed Nimble Storage as a key player to watch in the storage market, so he decided to reach out to the local Nimble team to discuss Pental’s needs.

After initial discussions and reviewing Nimble’s strategy recommendation, Bishop shelved all other storage plans for Pental and engaged with Nimble for a new direction in IT.

Bishop said, “While the other vendors provided a range of advantages over our legacy system, Nimble was the only solution that offered us everything we needed, as well as features and benefits we thought were well outside our budget when evaluating traditional storage vendors.” Pental worked with Nimble to install and implement a Nimble Storage CS220G system. The Nimble CS200 Series is designed specifically for midsize IT organisations, supporting workloads such as Microsoft applications, VDI, or virtual server consolidation.

Business Benefits

Since implementing the Nimble storage system, Pental has gained several benefits at both the departmental and business level.

From the IT department point of view, Bishop and his team have gained a new data storage solution that is simpler to manage and easily scalable to accommodate the company’s growth.

Bishop said, “The CS220G consumed just three rack units (RU), down from 8RU taken by the old system, while delivering a 270 percent improvement in throughput and staggering 3,700 percent and 1,100 percent improvement in random read and write workloads. This gives us great comfort that our VDI project will easily run on the same system without the need to add more storage space or change our strategy.

“The new Nimble system uses in-line compression on all our volumes—even our production ERP database. The compression savings we’ve generated have contributed a 51 per cent saving in disk usage. Thin provisioning is enabled on every volume and this provides an additional 2.7TB of disk savings.

Nimble’s system also provides the ability to perform array-based snapshot, which Pental is using hourly and daily. Retention on some data volumes goes back several months, which provides significantly better RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) for the business.

In the planning phases, Pental budgeted for a system that would be at 65 percent capacity on day one, using just active data. Due to Nimble’s space saving efficiencies, the Nimble solution is currently only at 35 percent capacity, even after factoring space used for 60 days of snapshots.

Bishop said, “The sophisticated software tools included with the Nimble Storage system make our job so much simpler than ever before. We generate hourly snapshots for our SQL, Exchange and VMware backup needs – something that wasn’t possible with the old system. This gives us extremely fast restore times and our data is protected in seconds, eliminating the need to wait for time-consuming backups to finish. Our RTO and RPO have improved significantly since we switched to Nimble.”

From the administration and support perspective, Pental’s IT team now has to engage with the system only on an infrequent basis. This is thanks to the stability and reliability of the system, combined with Nimble’s predictive analytics and proactive monitoring and support structure.

“Since we installed the Nimble solution, we basically haven’t had to deal with storage at all. From the administration perspective, our involvement has been close to zero. With our old system, we were always trying to coax a little more storage space or work out why functions were taking so long to complete. We have a small IT team, so any time we can save is a huge win for our department and for the business overall, because it means we can focus on bigger tasks,” said Bishop.

Pental tested the reliability of the Nimble system recently, when it moved to new premises in Melbourne. This move involved relocating the entire Melbourne datacentre consisting of six VM hosts, SAN, ERP server, fax server and all the switching and network equipment to support Pental’s users in addition to their workstations.

The system was shut down on Thursday evening and online ready to receive orders on Monday morning.

Bishop said, “The move was a true test of the agility and robustness of the Nimble system, and it didn’t fail us at all. We were up and running again as planned, within 24 hours of the shutdown which gave us plenty of time to test so we went live with no down time or issues.”

On the rare occasion there has been a potential issue with Pental’s Nimble system, Nimble’s unique proactive monitoring support system has given Bishop and his team a heads-up in advance of any issues occurring onsite.

“The support we’ve received from Nimble has been outstanding. From the original implementation, where Nimble loaned us a senior support person to have onsite for a couple of days, to receiving automatic notifications when it’s time to update firmware, and the general availability of Nimble’s people for advice and discussion. It has all been an excellent experience.”

From the overall Pental business perspective, the Nimble system has removed a major source of concern surrounding data security.

Bishop continued, “The unreliable state of our old storage system meant we were always worried that backups weren’t successful, or if our data was easily recoverable if we needed it. If we lost our SAN, we wouldn’t be able to receive orders from Coles and Woolworths, which would cause massive issues for our business. If we had a protracted outage, it would have been a business disaster.

“Our Nimble array doesn’t require the daily human intervention of our old array, plus it gives us better performance, has reduced our support costs, gives us a stable environment, and makes backups and snapshots a breeze. These factors allow us to feel secure with our data, and means my team and I can now focus our time and energy on projects that can make big, positive changes for the business. The opportunity cost we’ve gained from making the move to Nimble is significant.

“In short, it has been a joy to use.”

Next Steps

Now Pental has moved its head office to the new premises, Mark Bishop and his team are planning a VDI pilot program in the next six months with the goal of further cost savings and extending capital expenditure.

Following that, they’re planning to examine options for a second Nimble unit for replication and disaster recovery at the Shepparton manufacturing facility.

Bishop concluded, “The simplicity and flexibility of the Nimble platform means we can use any applications as we need to, we can grow our business at the pace we need to, we can make changes as required, all without having to build out a whole new storage infrastructure. That’s a benefit we’ve never been able to claim in the past and it’s something that changes the value level of IT to the Pental business. We’ve consolidated our data centre infrastructure and we have instantaneous data protection, which leaves our options wide open to any new projects and initiatives the business wants to take on.”