Dutch Trailer Broshuis Moves to NetApp FAS2020

Broshuis B.V is
celebrating 125 years in the business of making trailers tailored for
special transports. Headquartered in Kampen, Holland, the company employs 150
people delivering around 1,000 trailers per year and operates offices and
service centres throughout Europe.

Like most mid-sized businesses, Broshuis is
concerned with keeping overheads at a minimum and reducing management
burden
and costs, whilst maintaining the quality of its products, which have
earned recognition in the industry for both innovation and stability. To
increase
overall data availability and stay in control of their IT spend,
Broshuis
decided to move to an infrastructure built on a NetApp, Inc.‘s foundation.

Prior to NetApp, Broshuis’ stored data on disparate servers, which had reached
full capacity and proved inefficient in the recently deployed virtualized
environment. Capacity bottlenecks and a lack of protection for critical data in
the case of a server breakdown pushed Broshuis to rethink the storage solution.
Data growth was also an issue. This was partly a result of a transition to
digital archiving and to the increase of custom job orders.

Today, Broshuis deploys a NetApp FAS2020, which stores their CAD files,
the heartbeat of the Broshuis manufacturing and maintenance
processes, as well as the e-mail mailboxes and virtual machines. Their 5
HP
servers were virtualized to a single VMware vSphere server. NetApp
Snapshot
provides the data backup; NetApp Single Mailbox Recovery enables the
recuperation of lost e-mails, from single to complete mailboxes.

Continuous and rapid data availability is an essential
advantage of the solution. "The
change was radical. Once the data was migrated to the NetApp system, access
time was no longer a subject for complaint for all our users. By accelerating
access to CAD data and plans, NetApp has contributed to greater efficiency in
the design cycle and ultimately impacts shorter delivery times to customers. We
also achieved that by only spending a third of what we had forecast in our
budget. That’s unbeatable", says Thierry Sollie, IT Manager at
Broshuis.