Ferrellgas Partners L.P., a diversified energy company serving all 50 US states and Puerto Rico, has deployed Violin’s Flash Storage Platform™ (FSP) 7300. Adoption of the Violin FSP 7300 came as Ferrellgas was nearing the end of its support contract with its current storage vendor. Faced with lagging storage performance due to its outdated HDD-based storage solution, and the prospect of steep increases in support and maintenance costs, the company selected Violin over other all flash storage solutions. $1 million saved
Shortly after the Ferrellgas IT team brought the Violin FSP 7300 units online, Ferrellgas leadership finalised a deal to buy another company. The acquired company’s entire IT operations had been outsourced. By working in concert, Ferrellgas and Violin were able to ensure sufficient capacity to migrate applications and data to Ferrellgas’ in house data centre and wind down the outsourcing commitment. Operating savings achieved are estimated by Ferrellgas at almost $1 million annually.
“Lifeblood” delivery vehicle routing application runs four times faster
The company’s delivery vehicle routing application optimises driver, truck and inventory utilisation across 2,300 trucks and more than 30,000 stops per day, for the company’s retail delivery and service operations. Bill Evans, VP of IT for Ferrellgas, described it as one of the company’s “lifeblood” applications.
Even with constant hand holding, the legacy storage platform only just met performance requirements. The eight hour overnight batch processing left very little time to react to problems in the production window. When problems occurred overnight, they could lead to delays in delivering routes to the drivers, causing lost productivity and extra overtime expense. After deployment of the Violin FSP 7300, the routing application now runs four times faster, completing in just two hours.
“The FSP performance has been better than expected,” said Bill Evans, VP of IT at Ferrellgas. “You can analyse IOPS and latency as you compare products to make your selection, because they are great indicators of performance. Then you ‘do the math’ to estimate what the improvements would be in your environment. But what matters most is when flash delivers great performance for your applications and data. That is what our users see, and that is what makes all the difference. Today, we don’t have performance issues. However, if we have a report of application performance issues in the future, the last component we will investigate is storage.”
Two-way replication between data centre
The Ferrellgas data protection strategy with their older storage platform was based on a cumbersome log shipping process that left windows of vulnerability. Now with the FSP 7300, Ferrellgas’ plans include replication as required between the two sites. They expect to greatly reduce risk through a simplified data protection scheme.
“The migration to an all flash data centre is accelerating across organisations and industries as compelling performance and OPEX gains prove themselves in one use case after another,” said Kevin DeNuccio, CEO of Violin Memory. “The data centre migration Ferrellgas has completed is a case in point. While achieving major new operational efficiencies, the move also has set the stage for Ferrellgas to roll out a disaster recovery architecture, all within its existing budget.”
Violin Flash Storage Platforms combine comprehensive enterprise class data services that encompass data protection, storage efficiency, and business continuity with performance and high density in a highly resilient Flash Fabric Architecture™. Propane gas and energy suppliers, such as Ferrellgas Partners, L.P., can move to integrated all flash storage technologies at the cost of enterprise disk storage, while lowering total cost of ownership and increasing return on investment.
