South African Agri-Business Senwes Has Chosen Storwize

Storwize Inc. announced that Senwes has chosen the company’s STN-6000 appliance to significantly reduce its backup window and dramatically reduce costs associated with data replication as part of its overall disaster recovery strategy.

Senwes, a diversified agri-business that provides agricultural production inputs, market access to agricultural products and value-added services to its customers, sought out a solution that could reduce the cost of replicating data  between its primary data center in Klerksdorp and its disaster recovery site in Midrand, more than 100 miles away.

Storwize’s STN-6000 was implemented and provided an immediate impact on Senwes’ data footprint, reducing their backup data set by 83% resulting in a corresponding reduction in bandwidth and replication costs. Furthermore, the company’s normal backup window was reduced from 19 hours to just over three hours, allowing Senwes to do a full backup everyday as opposed to every weekend.

“We’re very pleased with the dramatic impact Storwize has had on our storage costs and performance. Leveraging our existing infrastructure we were able to reduce our replication costs, enhance our backup process, and improve performance,” said Martin Van Zyl, CIO of Senwes. “Because we’re compressing primary storage, we’re not only  reducing the amount of data required to transmit to our offsite location for disaster recovery purposes but we’re also seeing dramatic  performance improvements in our SAP batch and transaction performance.”

African Legend Indigo, part of the Datatec Group, the second largest South African IT Company, was instrumental in delivering the Storwize solution to Senwes. “African Legend Indigo is focused on the delivery of cost-effective enterprise systems solutions that make a real bottom-line difference to its customers’ operations,” said Rod Guinot at African Legend Indigo. “This is why the Storwize solution was such a perfect fit for Senwes.”  

“With Senwes, not only were we able to  reduce the amount of primary data needed to be replicated, which saved them the time and expense typically associated with protecting such large-scale data production environments, but we also provided significant performance enhancements to their SAP production environment,” said Peter Smails, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Storwize. “Because of our ability to reduce the primary data footprint, we were able to reduce the total cost of ownership of  Senwes’  business-critical information.”