FEATURE : STORAGE
IN UNDER FOUR HOURS , ALL THE DATA , SOFTWARE AND APPLICATIONS NEEDED FOR THE POC WERE BROUGHT ONLINE .
Skyline of downtown Caracas , capital city of Venezuela very complex and rife with issues caused by cabling , configurations and compatibilities . This made it very challenging to ensure that company-critical tasks , like order processing and Business Continuity processes , could be efficiently and consistently executed .”
Delivering on the promise
The retailer began its search for a new storage solution by researching several of the industry ’ s more traditional suppliers . Mindful of Farmatodo ’ s desire to aggressively improve performance and scalability , a trusted local IT advisor – Suministros Obras y Sistemas ( SOS ) – recommended adding Pure Storage to the company ’ s vendor evaluation .
At first , the Farmatodo team was hesitant to believe that the Pure Storage pledge of effortless migrations , reliability and performance was achievable . Pérez admitted : “ Everything sounded so good that at first we thought it was just marketing hype .”
Enthusiastic to demonstrate the compelling benefits , SOS co-ordinated a collaboration between Pure
Storage and Cisco Systems Venezuela to create a converged infrastructure proof-of-concept ( POC ).
The POC set up a direct comparison between FlashStack the joint Cisco and Pure Storage converged infrastructure solution – which enables the benefits of all-flash storage to be uniquely leveraged in environments like Farmatodo ’ s Cisco UCS-based data centers – and Farmatodo ’ s legacy system against a selection of the company ’ s production workloads . In parallel to testing performance and functionality , a total cost of ownership ( TCO ) assessment was also performed .
The initial evaluation quickly proved that the claimed simplicity of migration and administering the Pure Storage and Cisco FlashStack was a reality ; In under four hours , all the data , software and applications needed for the POC were brought online . The results were equally dramatic : The solid-state Pure Storage FlashStack Mini reduced latency in the environment from 10ms down to 0.5ms – a drop of 95 %.
Rapid return-on-investment
The partnership between Pure Storage and Cisco also enabled use of the Cisco Validated Design ( CVD ) methodology . A CVD removes the traditional burden of predicting the long-term compatibility of multi-vendor environments by verifying those diverse solutions that need to interoperate are correctly architected and implemented from the very beginning .
Farmatodo has a hybrid infrastructure with two local data centers and subscriptions to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud . While the cloud environment is primarily
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