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.