Pella Implemented Four Violin Memory 6000 Flash Arrays

Violin
Memory, Inc. has been selected
by Pella Corporation, a specialist in
creating windows and doors for homes and businesses, to
accelerate enterprise resource planning (ERP), online quote management,
payroll, and other business-critical applications by up to five times.

The Violin flash memory arrays provide Pella with the advantage needed to stay ahead of the competition by sustaining
continual process improvement, increasing productivity, decreasing operational
expenses by $150,000 annually, and delivering a better user experience.

Improving business agility, strengthening technology leadership to maintain its
85-year history of innovation, Pella is committed to incorporating new
technologies, increasing productivity, and practicing environmental
stewardship.

When it comes to storage, Pella’s existing high-end, disk-based
environment provided adequate performance, but the IT department needed to look
at new and alternative technologies to support the company’s growing IOPs. Existing SAN could not support its growth strategy, and the IT team
wanted a solution that that would grow linearly but transparently, without
increasing the cost of management.

"The
Violin technology really caught our attention when we realized we could use it
to do more for a lower price, while potentially taking I/O bottlenecks out of
our future roadmap," said Jim Thomas, director of IT operations at
Pella.

Accelerated results and cost savings with
the confidence to bypass a proof of concept, Pella implemented four Violin 6000
flash memory arrays as its primary storage solution for several business-critical
systems. The memory-based storage systems are used to run Pella’s Oracle ERP
instance, Oracle data warehousing, online quote management and PeopleSoft to
process weekly payroll for several thousand employees.

The benefits of deploying Violin memory arrays
as tier-1 storage were immediate. Pella streamlined its nightly mass data load
by cutting completion time in half and tripling batch throughput; cutting MRP
job runs by 38% and end assemblies by 57%. The solution has also
produced instant results for Pella’s payroll system, reducing a 3-hour process
down to less than 30 minutes. Beyond Pella’s critical application
storage needs, Thomas plans to leverage the arrays as he expands the
company’s VDI environment to cover 25% of the corporation’s
workforce.

Thomas expects the Violin solution will
save Pella $150,000 annually in depreciation costs compared to the SAN the
company used previously.

"Add on to that; space savings in
the datacenter, reduced power consumption, and increased capabilities that
we’re going to be able to deliver by having much, much more IO than we’ve
historically had, it’s one more step forward in helping drive our costs down
while delivering a better user experience," he explained.

Making storage a strategic asset, Pella views
the solution as a long-term asset that will help the company
maintain its technology and industry leadership.

According to Thomas: "Picking Violin
was about looking to the future and choosing the best possible technology to
help us continue to stay one step ahead with our IT infrastructure."