BlueScope Customer of Violin Memory

Violin Memory, Inc. was chosen by BlueScope Buildings to improve internal business service levels and provide timely productivity reports to better gauge business direction and decisions.

By accelerating its in-house Oracle E-Business Suite server-based applications using a Violin all flash array, BlueScope Buildings was able to increase overall employee productivity and reduce nightly report times by almost 3X down to 2.5 hours from a high of 7 hours, increasing overall productivity.

BlueScope is a metal buildings producer providing custom engineered building solutions to customers around the world. The organization relies heavily on the Oracle E-Business Suite Application, which serves as its resource planning and supply-chain management tool, to provide daily reports to the business division. However, the existing storage systems used by BlueScope could not handle the transaction volume. Batch jobs, triggered at midnight, ran for 6 to 7 hours and resulted in missed SLAs to the business and outdated manufacturing data to the facilities.

“Violin Memory solved our ERP performance issues at a fraction of the cost of other systems,” said Derek Cornwell, IT infrastructure services manager, BlueScope. “Not only are we exceeding our business service levels, we project a ROI of 11 months with the Violin platform.“

BlueScope was most compelled by the measurable business and positive end user impact of the all flash array. By running its e-business Suite on the flash array, BlueScope accelerated its overnight processes down to 2.5 hours overnight. The time savings mproved the company’s ability to deliver information to its manufacturing facilities in a timely manner. It also made performance and forecasting data available more quickly to enable better decision-making.

The flash array also improved the user experience for BlueScope Buildings’ E-business Suite (ERP) users. On an average day, BlueScope users run about 3,500 interactive reports. The flash array saved an average of 60 sec per report, translating into more than 15,000 hours of productivity improvement per year. It also provided a noticeably faster application experience for users, resulting in positive press for the IT organization.

“Over the years, requirements on reporting systems have changed,” said Eric Herzog, CMO, Violin. “Today, data sets are larger in volume as is the user base that generates these ad-hoc queries. Violin Memory specifically addresses the speed, scale, administration, and concurrency requirements of today’s reporting systems.“