KB Food accelerates ERP with hyperconverged infrastructure

Taps virtual SAN software, Lenovo servers for infrastructure refresh

KB Food Group, Australia’s largest handler of fresh seafood, has replaced its ageing IT infrastructure with hyperconverged infrastructure built with DataCore’s Virtual SAN software and Lenovo x3650 servers, reducing its hardware footprint by 70 per cent and improving the performance of key processes by up to 14 times.

DataCore’s Virtual SAN software creates a virtual storage area network using the disk storage built into standard servers, and separate storage if required.

This, DataCore says, creates a degree of redundancy and improves performance because physical storage is located in close proximity to the applications using it, while still providing the full range of functions available in dedicated storage array network systems.

KB Food was formed in 2016 as a joint venture between 90 year old Australian seafood company Kailis Bros and China’s Legend Holdings. KB Food’s IT manager Justin Piper said the negotiations had created a hiatus in IT system procurement and the company’s existing systems were showing their age.

“We have been using Microsoft Dynamics NAV, formerly known as Navision, for our ERP system for several years and users were starting to experience issues in day-to-day usage,” he said.

“We had four physical servers, three hosting VMware and an SQL server for NAV, all connected to a storage area network. This was mirrored at our disaster recovery site.

“We looked at several solutions with separate servers and storage, and we had a long discussion with Lenovo. Their recommendation was that we go with DataCore, and the fact that we are VMware house made the DataCore option attractive.”

Lenovo provided systems for a trial. “We did a proof of concept with DataCore using a Lenovo HPC solution. We transferred some of our NAV to the equipment they loaned us, ran our own benchmarking and saw four to 14 times improvements in particular processes,” Piper said.

“Those are process we run on a daily basis so they impact a lot of our users we were blown away by the improvements we got.”

“The Lenovo and DataCore solution was a winner, because we were able to reduce the number of servers and reduce our footprint by 70 percent.”

This configuration as been mirrored in KB Food’s disaster recovery centre with a single Lenovo x3650 and DataCore Virtual SAN software.

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Tags data centresserversERPvirtualisationstorageData CenterCase StudyDatacoreCase studieshyperconnectedhyperconverged infrastructure

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