Burt’s Bees Deploys NetApp

NetApp announced that Burt’s Bees Inc., in keeping in line with its goal of sustainable computing, has dramatically enhanced its IT infrastructure with the recent deployment of NetApp® storage solutions. Thanks to NetApp, Burt’s Bees has been able to streamline its storage environment with the use of several power efficiency and space-saving storage technologies such as deduplication and virtualization.

Burt’s Bees, incorporated in 1991, has grown from its humble beginnings selling honey and homemade candles into the number-one brand in natural personal care products. As the company continued to expand with double-digit growth annually, so too did the demands on IT. Prior to NetApp, Burt’s Bees addressed its data growth by installing additional servers with direct-attached storage. Unfortunately, this setup was unable to provide the company with the scalability needed as it increased in size and continued to consume large amounts of energy. As a result, Burt’s Bees decided a more sustainable approach to technical infrastructure that was in line with the company’s Greater Good philosophy was necessary. To accomplish this, Burt’s Bees began to move most of its core applications into a virtual server environment based on VMware. With sustainability one of the most important decision-making factors, Burt’s Bees enlisted the help of NWN Corporation www.NWNIT.com, a storage reseller and NetApp partner, in order to identify a storage vendor that was a fit with both VMware and the company’s culture.

“Based on the recommendation from NWN, we looked very hard at NetApp as the potential storage provider for Burt’s Bees,” said Tres Vance, manager of Technical Infrastructure, Burt’s Bees Inc. “The closer we looked, the more apparent the fit was. Sustainability is a very important factor for Burt’s Bees all throughout the organization, including IT. Since NetApp is a storage vendor that is sustainable in its own right and provides a technology that puts the environment first, it was the clear choice.”

After conducting several test drives of the products, Burt’s Bees deployed three NetApp storage systems. Two FAS3020 clustered systems were deployed at the primary site to support core production applications, which included over 25 virtual machines balanced across three VMware ESX servers. Thanks to the fact that NetApp supports deduplication of primary VMware data, Burt’s Bees estimates that it has reclaimed more than 50% of available storage capacity when allocating new or current virtual machines. Burt’s Bees also estimates that in the process of moving its file server onto the NetApp system, deduplication will enable the company to reclaim roughly 300GB to 400GB for every terabyte of storage found on the original server. Burt’s Bees also leveraged NetApp FlexVol, which provided more effective storage provisioning and brought additional storage capacity savings.

The third system deployed was a NetApp FAS2020, which was responsible for data recovery and protection. To assure data protection, Burt’s Bees incorporated not only SnapMirror but also NetApp SnapManager for Microsoft Exchange, along with NetApp SnapVault® for faster backup to primary and secondary storage. In fact, SnapManager for Exchange helped Burt’s Bees dramatically reduce the time it took to create backups from four hours to just two minutes.

“NetApp deduplication and flexible volumes gave us unprecedented storage savings for our virtualized environments, providing us with exactly what we were looking for,” said Vance. “We anticipate virtualizing all of our physical servers within the next year to help us grow sustainably, and that wouldn’t be possible with another storage platform. And with the ability of NetApp Snapshot™ technology to easily mesh with VMware, it provides us with peace of mind and a much better recovery point than with some of the other data protection solutions out there.”

“Customers like Burt’s Bees that experience tremendous growth year over year need a storage platform that not only addresses their critical storage needs today but also has the ability to scale with their growth,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing for NetApp. “NetApp does just that, providing Burt’s Bees with a storage solution that addresses its expanding storage and data protection needs but without a constant requirement to add storage expansion and its associated power and cooling requirements. NetApp allows Burt’s Bees to focus on sustainable business and environmental practices.”