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Valley Proteins Adopts FlashStack Converged Infrastructure From Cisco and Pure Storage

For SAP applications

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that Valley Proteins, Inc., a Winchester, VA-based recycler of food-service waste, has adopted a FlashStack converged infrastructure from Cisco Systems, Inc. and Pure Storage to host its business-critical SAP applications.

Valley Proteins transports hundreds of millions of gallons of used cooking oil and other byproducts every year, which enables the materials to be re-used instead of ending up in landfills. The company uses SAP as the cornerstone of its business, tracking materials, inventory, and vehicle location and maintenance in real time to maximize the efficiency of its 40 processing and transfer facilities and private trucking fleet, one of the largest in North America. It depends on SAP for a holistic view of customer profitability, supplier pricing, and individual factory performance, helping to guide and expedite business decision-making.

To achieve the benefits of a Cisco and Pure Storage converged infrastructure (CI), Valley Proteins decided to deploy FlashStack, which combines Pure Storage FlashArrays with Cisco UCS servers and VMware software into a single, integrated architecture. A tested and validated reference architecture for SAP on FlashStack ensures rapid deployment, with no storage tier planning or tuning required. Components reduce power, cooling, and data center costs.

FlashStack gives us the ability to plan for the next five-to-seven years, which fundamentally enables our ability to pivot and grow,” said Brad Wilton, director of IT, Valley Proteins. “It’s an incredible value proposition. By helping us be more efficient with our logistics, FlashStack directly contributes to our bottom line and improves customer experience.

As the company pursued a growth strategy through acquisitions, storage had become a bottleneck to consistent performance for SAP applications. The company’s legacy storage arrays were three years old and had become overloaded.

It got to the point where our storage required so much hands-on maintenance that it was difficult for engineers to get out to our remote sites and solve business problems,” Wilton said.

Instead of another forklift storage upgrade and a lengthy, expensive professional services engagement, Valley Proteins began looking at all-flash storage solutions. It wanted enterprise storage as well as a converged infrastructure that would be easy to deploy, maintain and scale as the business grew.

For years, Valley Proteins has standardized on Cisco UCS servers, networking and security solutions for its data center and DR environments for a reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure. All-flash arrays were paired with UCS servers and, in a test environment, some production workloads were moved onto the Pure arrays.

We were impressed with the performance gains that we saw. With Cisco UCS and all-flash storage behind SAP, we returned results at nearly the speed of an in-memory database,” Wilton said. “Our engineer moved our entire 60TB production environment to FlashStack in less than three days, with zero downtime to the business, and without professional services assistance. The efficiencies gained were incredible. Now, we run faster and simpler.

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