Budget Mart
Sangfor HCI Drives Budget Mart's Digital Transformation & Constructs Future-Proof Datacenter
Customer Overview
Budget Mart is the one-stop shop for all grocery and convenience store needs, strategically located at the heart of Boracay's bustling commercial center, D'Mall. It's the first modern supermarket operating on the island and, to this day, is still currently recognized as Boracay's Best Supermarket. Budget Mart aims to introduce something new and unique to the public and at the same time elevate the standard of convenience stores around the country through exceptional product selection, delicious food items, modern design and excellent service.
Executive Summary
• Customer: Budget Mart
• Industry: Retail
• Location: Boracay, Philippines
Challenges
• Hard to manage plenty of servers
with limited manpower
• Legacy data center lack of
business continuity
• Lifetime ending of servers causing
bottleneck of resources.
Sangfor Solutions
• Sangfor HCI with server and storage virtualization
“Thanks to Sangfor HCI, we have been gradually receiving some good words and compliments from our branch offices and staffs. Facing digital transformation, Sangfor HCI offers a high-performance platform to hold my business.”- Gio Gonzales, IT Head Budget Mart
Challenges
As a big supermarket, they are still suffering from traditional architecture with 3-tier infrastructure. The existing servers handling core ERP system have been running for a couple of years and were due for an upgrade, these aging servers couldn't suffice the needs of the rapidly-increasing business of Budget Mart, which is a drag-down in terms of productivity, causing the ability of data center being questioned by internal staffs.
Business of Budget Mart is moving forward with branches and remote offices, they expect having a new, powerful data center to bring them faster speed and easier management driven by digital transformation.
The challenges that Budget Mart Faces:
Hard to Manage Lots of Servers with Limited Manpower
Most of the time, enterprises will be having diversified applications and workloads for different purposes. More and more servers are being deployed to answer the needs of growing business. Consequently, more manpower is required for operation and maintenance. As the biggest supermarket in Boracay Islands, Budget Mart is on the way to gain more transactions and deals. The requirements of sufficient IT resources to serve the growing business data is increasing as well. Several dozens of servers have been purchased and deployed within the data center. Every single time when it comes to preventive maintenance, IT team has no choice but to check these servers one by one. The management and control of these servers with limited manpower has been one of the biggest nightmare for Budget Mart.
Legacy Data Center Lack of Business Continuity
Most of the organizations are still using traditional 3-tier architecture which means that one server only serves one application. Each of the server basically has no connection with one another.
Any possible problems like power outage, disk issue and so on could impact the status of server and cause disruption of system services. It also requires a lot of time to fix the problem. Meanwhile, due to server silos, it is very hard to manage multiple machines at the same time under such DC complexities.
There was a time when an unexpected accident happened to server power module, and caused a few hours downtime. Transactions and deals were on hold for some time, which brought a huge loss to Budget Mart.
Outdated Servers Causing Resource Bottleneck
Due to development of electronic business and digital transformation, uninterruptible business supply is urgently required. Especially for retail and other transaction-intensive industry, plenty of end users requires a stable business continuity. However, organizations still place their core systems on aging physical servers so that the above mentioned requirements cannot be satisfied.
Budget Mart has counted on a traditional bare metal server to handle core business systems and database for many years. ERP system needs to be accessed from ROBO without interruption. Deal, transaction and stock records need to be synchronized without any loss. However, those existing aging servers cannot meet the requirement. ERP system is always running with an unsatisfied speed.
Solutions
In order to solve the aforementioned challenges, Budget Mart must innovate what is happening in the data center with the infrastructure that empowers business with better transaction speed and redundancy.
Through the following highlighted features, Sangfor HCI brings a future-proof solution to Budget Mart as the carrier of mission-critical applications.
Redundant Setup Starting with 2 Nodes
Budget Mart made the decision to purchase and go for Sangfor HCI appliances starting with only 2 nodes together with the supportability of compute and storage virtualization. Sangfor HCI appliances offers a redundant setup to ensure the system running on top of it is highly available, the workloads failure will be eliminated through nodes redundancy to take over in time.
“The concept of Sangfor impressed me, where we didn't have to schedule separate maintenance windows for our system patch or hardware health check. What amazed me more was that Sangfor could virtualization all elements of data center, like compute and storage, even security. This is the shortage of other HCI player.”- Gio Gonzales | IT Head | Budget Mart
Built-In Data Tiering Bringing Faster Speed
Storage Tiering is one of the highlighted features to bring faster performance. This approach makes it possible for Budget Mart to cut down the cost of procuring expensive high-end product, without compromising the performance. The frequently-used data will be staying in flash drive to accelerate business transactions. With these cost-effective but performance-intensive features, inflexibility of storage system could be cut down as well.
During the implementation, time consumption of generating sales report was reduced from hours to minutes, as hitting hot data in flash drive has made a giant leap of work efficiency. Data acceleration is utilized for all elements, including production workloads, load balancer VM, Active Directory, Reports Generating, MSSQL and other numerous modules and systems. Now the IT team of Budget Mart only need to migrate the workloads gradually as their business grows, all app performances have been promoted extraordinarily.
Planned Maintenance for Servers and Other Devices
Whenever IT team make plans for server maintenance, they can simply adjust the location of VM with no downtime and perform 1-click health check. The processes can run unattended.
Currently, with the implementation of Sangfor HCI, systems and infrastructures are orchestrated organically. All the old servers have been merged and consolidated with hyper-converged technologies, reducing server quantity from 15 to 2. Data center infrastructure can change accordingly to workloads flexibly.
Business Benefits
Eventually, Budget Mart don't need to spend hours to generating sales report or doing data inquiry anymore.
Now they could go home earlier after getting data or results they want within just a few mins.
