German Hearing Aid Company Kind Selects Violin Memory Replacing NetApp

Violin Memory, Inc. announced that the largest hearing aid company in Germany, KIND Hörgeräte GmbH & Co. KG, has selected the Violin Flash Storage Platform 7300 for its mission-critical systems – replacing an incumbent NetApp system.

Kind, headquartered in Hannover, has more than 500 retail outlets across Germany and an additional 100 outlets across the rest of Europe. The company’s storage environment needed to support its Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system, mail archive, testing systems and thousands of VMs across the European continent.

The previous storage solution deployed by the Kind was making it increasingly difficult for retail stores across Europe to access systems because of low performance and high latency. For corporate security and efficiency reasons, in store administrative tasks utilize the corporate IT infrastructure, which relies upon VMs. As Kind has grown, the number of VMs they are running to perform tasks such as stock checking and accounting had increased to the point of causing the admin function to slow down, impacting employee usability.

The company’s priorities for storage, therefore, were to replace the HDD legacy storage system with a low latency solution to enable the IT team to manage thousands of VMs across Europe, and to enable dispersed Kind employees to access information. Their decision was to choose Violin’s Flash Storage Platform.

Staff at Kind HQ are seeing radical acceleration of backend processes. VMs boot up after five seconds, rather than five minutes, which is having a positive impact on staff satisfaction. The change is also impacting customer satisfaction because of the speed with which they can service their clients at their retail outlets.

Christian Emmrich, IT administrator, Kind, said: “We selected Violin Memory because we knew their flash technology is second to none, having been a happy customer of its 6000 series a few years ago. We therefore opted to replace our existing NetApp system, which came to the end of its life, with an all-Violin solution.

“For us to operate as a European-wide business, we need robust IT – and Violin has helped us to become more efficient and agile with a flash storage infrastructure that we can rely on. Violin’s support throughout the project so far has been excellent, and we’re confident we have made the right choice with our flash partner. The benefits we have received more than justify the cost of flash storage.“

Violin also helped Kind to reduce the amount of physical storage capacity needed, cutting 45TB of data down to 7TB – a huge data reduction ratio of nearly 7:1 – to minimise the cost of flash.

Carlo Wolf, EMEA VP at Violin Memory, added: “Since high performance and latency were high priorities for Kind, we wanted to ensure that Kind could achieve their performance SLAs within an investment envelope that made the decision to move to flash an easy one. Our deduplication and compression technology enabled Kind to reduce the amount of overall storage the company required, which also resulted in further OPEX savings.“

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