Italian bottle maker deploys 88TB of Syneto hyper-converged storage

Italy-based plastic drinks bottle maker Serioplast has deployed 88TB of hyper-converged storage from Romanian startup Syneto, with deployments at 20 sites in Italy and worldwide.

The move has seen the Milan-based company replace 65 physical servers with 22 hyper-converged boxes.

This replaced a NetApp-based infrastructure that lacked effective disaster recovery with comprehensive protection across sites in Europe from Spain to Russia, as well as between north Africa and Pakistan and in South Africa.

The company has around 500 users and uses SAP for key manufacturing and financial applications.

Previously, it had NetApp FAS filers at its headquarters, while remote offices were equipped with one or two servers and a VPN connection to head office. This effectively meant the company lacked reliable disaster recovery provision.

This setup also created a lot of management overhead, said IT manager Giancarlo Andreoli.

“Before, we had servers at each factory with different software, Windows, Linux and different versions, and in each place we had a firewall, a switch and UPS that all needed to be maintained,” he said.

Serioplast has replaced this with Syneto hyper-converged hardware at each site. It has two Ultra Series 220s with 8TB on each at the headquarter locations in Italy. It has replaced existing servers with an Ultra Series 205 with 4TB at each remote factory site.

Each Syneto array provides storage and server capacity, while existing server platforms have been replaced by VMware virtualisation.

Hyper-converged products combine compute and storage in one box with virtualisation capability. They have emerged in recent years as competition to discrete server and storage products, with key suppliers including Nutanix, Scale Computing, Simplivity and VMware’s EVO:Rail.

The key advantage for Serioplast has been that the hyper-converged infrastructure has brought uniform disaster recovery provision across all its sites. It has also simplified maintenance.

“We now only have one device to maintain at each site. We don’t need another device. It’s all in one box,” said Andreoli.

“We can seamlessly move data every night between sites, so that if, for example, something happens at a factory, all data from there will be backed up.”

Andreoli said the move to hyper-converged had cut IT licensing spending by 25% and reduced datacentre administration times by 35%. ... ... ... ... ...