Customer Background
English Biscuit Manufacturers (EBM) is the leading biscuit manufacturer in Pakistan, accounting for almost half of the domestic market. The Karachi-based company has an annual production capacity of over 180,000 tonnes, the largest in the country and one of the largest in the region. Founded as Peek Freans Pakistan Limited in 1966, EBM has been dedicated to over half a century of innovation and quality standards, delighting consumers every day with over 16 well-loved brands.
Source: ebm.com.pk
Customer Challenges
The customer has a variety of critical workloads running in their environment, including many in-house (self-built) and third-party applications, databases, ERP, domain controllers, SharePoint, and Exchange. These were running on traditional (3-tier) architecture using Microsoft Hyper-V Hypervisor with IBM and NetApp storage. The above architecture created the following pain points and challenges for the customer:
- Old Hardware: Old hardware led to consistent performance issues and hardware failures. Maintaining the warranties of these hardware components led to very high maintenance costs.
- Legacy Infrastructure: Separate servers, switches, storage, SAN switches, and firewalls, which increased the operational costs of the datacenter.
- Complex Management: The customer had to manage every tier in the datacenter separately using complex management consoles that require a high level of expertise.
- Hardware Lock-In: When scaling up and scaling out the environment, the customer could only go back to OEMs from which they previously purchased their products.
- Third-Party Backup and DR: The customer was using third-party backup and replication products for data backup and offsite replication.
- Inefficient Support: Using products from different OEMs resulted in plenty of finger-pointing or blaming rather than getting issues resolved quickly.
Sangfor Solution
The customer purchased a total of 10 sockets HCI licenses in the first deployment phase: 6 on the primary site and 4 on the DR site. Sangfor provided the customer with a full HCI software suite including aSV, aSAN, aNET (hypervisor, virtual storage, network virtualization), and aDR licenses. For the hardware, the customer purchased several units of Sangfor aServer 2305 for the production site and aServer 2205 for the DR Site.
Key Values & Outcomes
- Unified Management: Sangfor provides simplified multi-site management by consolidating compute, storage, network, security, backup, and DR operations into a single pane of glass.
- Reduced Datacenter Footprint: By leveraging virtualization technology for every tier, Sangfor converged compute, storage, network, security, backup, and replication in a single box solution, which vastly improved resource utilization in the datacenter.
- Flexible Scaling: Sangfor delivered a true SDDC architecture that is totally hardware-agnostic. The customer is free to use any x86 platform hardware in future scaling, mitigating the hardware lock-in scenario the customer previously faced.
- Built-In Backup and DR: Sangfor provided built-in backup and DR solutions, so the customer did not need to purchase or renew any third-party solutions or deploy any separate appliances.
- Full Stack HCI without Hidden Costs: Sangfor provided the customer with a single enterprise-grade license model for all the purchased components, including the hypervisor, storage virtualization, and network virtualization, with no hidden feature locking or extra charges.
- Single Vendor Support: By opting for Sangfor SDDC, the customer receives support for every tier and warranty services directly from Sangfor. This helps the customer resolve issues fast instead of facing the finger-pointing and blaming of multiple OEMs.
About Sangfor Technologies
Sangfor Technologies is an APAC-based, global leading vendor of IT infrastructure and security solutions specializing in Network Security and Cloud Computing.
To learn more about Sangfor Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) product capabilities, use cases, videos, and success stories, please visit the Sangfor HCI webpage at https://www.sangfor.com/cloud-and-infrastructure/products/hci-hyper-converged-infrastructure.
