Clabber Girl Saves $50,000 With Scale Computing

Scale Computing announced that Clabber Girl Corporation, manufacturers of the No. 1 baking powder sold to consumers, has deployed Scale's intelligent, scale-out storage to complete the company's virtualization project, saving the company over $50,000.

The Clabber brand of baking powder was introduced in 1899 and was eventually renamed to the Clabber Girl brand in 1923. Through expansion, Clabber Girl Corporation has developed new commercial and wholesale markets in over 40 countries for a line of baking ingredients and mixes that include corn starches, cookie mixes, gelatins, puddings, flans and gourmet coffees. A family-owned business, Clabber Girl's parent company, Hulman & Company, also owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. 

As the company expanded, Clabber Girl transitioned from a paper-based business to ccomputerized operations, making the business dependent on keeping complex computer systems up and running. Eventually, the fear of downtime and inefficient data recovery was impacting the manageability of the IT environment.

To address maintenance costs and application availability, Clabber Girl's IT department decided to move forward with a virtualization project. As part of that project, Clabber Girl would need to implement a shared storage system to enable the availability features of the virtualization platform. Most challenging, the storage would need to be highly available itself, while fitting within the budget.

Clabber Girl selected VMware vSphere 4 as their virtualization platform, yet the company found their choices for a storage system less straightforward. After receiving an estimate from EMC at close to $100,000, Clabber Girl spoke with IT partner reseller LightBound about scale-out storage from Scale Computing. 

Every Scale Computing storage cluster is powered by Scale's Intelligent Clustered Operating System (ICOS) technology, which enables the ability to scale performance alongside capacity for Clabber Girl's planned virtual environment. 

Clabber Girl purchased a VMware Ready a storage cluster consisting of three M-Series storage nodes, each with 4 terabytes of raw capacity for a total of 6 usable terabytes on the cluster. The M-Series storage nodes offered additional processing power and caching for performance  environments.

"We evaluated EMC storage and while we didn't need an extremely large amount of storage, after adding all of the options we wanted, the total cost was approaching $100,000," said Jamey Kirsch, executive director of IT, Clabber Girl. "The Scale Computing solution that was chosen delivered all of the features that we required and immediately saved $50,000 in the Clabber Girl 2011 capital budget." 

Since implementing Scale's storage and VMware's vSphere 4, Clabber Girl has experienced notable streamlining of their IT support services tasks, as well as cost savings in IT. Power consumption by the IT department was reduced by 50 percent. Provisioning a new virtual server and the storage it needs is now a process that takes minutes instead of days or weeks.

"Scale's management GUI is one of the easiest management tools I've ever used," said Jason Morrison, Clabber Girl system administrator. "Creating LUNs is very easy. Provisioning new storage used to require downtime for me to add disks to the physical server. Now I just pop into the Scale GUI, and in five minutes I'm done."

The most tangible evidence for Clabber Girl, is that the company's new infrastructure is aligning IT to business goals. When the IT team was asked to evaluate the feasibility of implementing an inventory management system, the decision to implement a new system was no longer heavily influenced by IT concerns of capital investments and the related impacts to power consumption and heating and cooling.

"Our analysis for bringing a new business system into the company was much simpler. The necessary computing and storage infrastructure was already in place. A big barrier to adopting new technologies is gone," said Kirsch. 

Thanks to Clabber Girl's new infrastructure, the company plans to transition to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The project could be started as early as this year, due in part to the cost savings from their Scale Computing purchase.