Saphety improves customer service levels and infrastructure consolidation

Violin Memory®, Inc. was selected by Saphety as the company’s storage of choice in a virtualised, data-intensive environment, through Violin channel partner Fujitsu Technology Solutions Portugal S.A. The Saphety portfolio of purchase-to-pay solutions, process optimisation, and data and media synchronisation allows for the exchange of electronic and automated business processes between organisations and clients.

Part of the Sonae Group, Saphety provides value to more than 6,800 customers and 50,000 users in 20 countries by offering electronic-based business solutions at competitive service levels that deliver 99.999 availability. However, immense business and clientele growth became a challenge for Saphety’s existing hard disk drive-based subsystems. Customer service levels were impacted and infrastructure consolidation and the rollout of new services were delayed.

“Further impacting our IT processes, and the ability of our database team to meet business SLAs, was that our database administrators were continually spending time managing and tuning applications due to the poor performance of our existing storage rather than focusing on their critical tasks at hand,” said João Sousa, IT Manager at Saphety. “The storage bottleneck was affecting all aspects of our business and operations.”

Saphety’s infrastructure utilises a number of different database technologies, including Oracle, Microsoft SQL and MySQL. In an effort to improve manageability and drive consolidation, Saphety planned to move the database servers and other physical servers to a VMware virtualised environment. Migration was delayed due to constraints in the existing storage and Saphety could not add more servers or services.

“We had experienced first-hand the benefits of Violin with companies facing similar issues and we knew that Saphety’s challenges would be addressed with Violin all-flash arrays,” said Pedro Pinto, Storage Business Development manager at Fujitsu.

Saphety saw drastic improvements using the Violin solution. Processes, such as reporting, that had taken 24 hours to complete, now finish 12X faster in fewer than two hours. With the legacy hard disk drive-based subsystems, Saphety experienced latencies ranging from 15 to 40 milliseconds. With the Violin® 6264 all-flash array, average latency was dramatically reduced to only 0.2 to 0.3 milliseconds.

With its storage performance challenges resolved, Saphety was able to proceed with the planned migration to a VMware environment. In addition to solving the performance and scalability challenges that had prevented the migration to VMware, Saphety was also able to consolidate its physical server farm by more than 2X, lowering physical server count from 21 servers down to 9 physical servers. Commensurate with this reduction in physical server infrastructure, Saphety achieved significant cost savings in power, cooling, and floor space, as well as application licensing, on-going maintenance, and IT server management savings.

“At Violin, our customers have continually demonstrated the business value of Violin all-flash solutions and how we help our customers transform the economics of their data centre,” said Eric Herzog, CMO and SVP of Alliances at Violin Memory. “Saphety is another clear case illustrating both the business advantage, technical benefits, and return on investment that Violin flash arrays deliver.”