Chemical Manufacturer and Distributor Hawkins Opts for Tegile

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that chemical manufacturer and distributor Hawkins Inc. has replaced its Dell Compellent system with its hybrid arrays to solve storage performance issues it was suffering in its enterprise resource planning environment.

Thousands of water treatment facilities, manufacturers, food and dairy producers, research labs and many other organizations depend on Hawkins for the chemical products they need. The company’s Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne enterprise resource planning system provides a diverse set of business processes used for customer service, purchasing, warehousing and is used to hold the recipes for its line of chemicals. With many of its 350 employees using the system at the same time to do their jobs, Hawkins needed storage that could handle the volume placed upon it.

After experiencing almost-immediate issues after its Compellent system was put in place, Hawkins needed a solution that could help it overcome the performance limitations that would slow production. A demonstration of Tegile arrays showed how effective the hybrid system could be.

“I said: ‘Hey, if you guys think this stuff is so great, let’s do a proof of concept and get one in here and start playing around with it and using it and see what it can do,’” said Jeff Buelt, IT director, Hawkins. “Two weeks into the proof of concept, I called back and said: ‘You’re not taking it back. Let me know what my cost is and what I need to do to purchase this.’“

Buelt began putting applications and servers on the Tegile arrays. While the maximum IO/s on the Compellent system would peak around 6,000, the Tegile system was delivering 35,000 IO/s. Tegile also provided him with the ability to understand what was happening within the storage system from a performance perspective – what the actual load was, where bottlenecks were occurring, how many IO/s it was achieving – something that Compellent didn’t have to tools to allow.

Tegile’s hybrid storage arrays balance performance, high capacity, features and price making them the solution for a range of industries and applications. They are faster than HDD drive-based arrays and less expensive than solid state disk-based arrays. Data reduction technology gives them a usable capacity that’s greater than their raw capacity.

“We are pleased to have been able to provide Hawkins with the IO/s they required to overcome storage performance issues they were facing within their ERP system from the Dell Compellent system,” said Rob Commins, VP marketing, Tegile. “We continue to see a large number of companies making the switch from Compellent to Tegile for any number of reasons – whether it is performance, lack of functionality, price or maintenance concerns. In all of these cases, we have been able to provide significant savings from a storage utilization, performance to dollar ration and maintenance perspective.“