POSSIBIL IT IES

Everyone loves cupcakes and candy. CDW loves data storage. But what if we told you that the fate of these wonderful desserts relied on an efficient, cloud-based data center? 

With expanding product lines, direct sales and supply chains creating significant amounts of data, manufacturing plants need the right data storage solution to keep things running smoothly. 

So when this large confectionery manufacturer reached out to CDW to restructure their data center and make it more cost-effective, we were like a kid in a candy store — the possibilities were endless. A fully optimized storage infrastructure and more sweets. That’s IT Orchestration by CDW™. 

SCALABLE STORAGE

With their new infrastructure, the customer moved over 90 terabytes of data to the cloud, which ameliorated storage issues and made data easily accessible to all of their locations.  And the customer valued the ability to scale up or down, depending on demand.

IT FREEDOM

Improved storage management efficiencies enabled the customer’s IT personnel to focus on other strategic initiatives. 

LOW COSTS, MORE OPPORTUNITY

CDW orchestrated a single, simple data repository as well as a simple cost structure around backing up file data. The customer valued the scalable pricing based on storage as well as the opportunity to implement modern file collaboration solutions. 

While traditional, on-premises data centers were once the standard for storage, advanced cloud storage is opening a window of opportunity. Purchasing, provisioning and managing on-premises storage subsystems require substantial initial and ongoing capital. This confectionery manufacturer was frequently adding and replacing storage servers due to increased data growth. Their IT personnel were spending a majority of their time researching, evaluating, sourcing, deploying, supporting and refreshing their storage infrastructure — time that could be better spent focusing on core business objectives.

And, in accordance with industry-leading practices, our customer needed secure storage capacity five times the size of its existing data volume to support redundancy, overhead, disaster recovery and business continuity. On top of all that, the company’s legacy storage platforms were not compatible with contemporary collaboration techniques. 

Our customer needed a storage environment that was manageable, scalable, collaborative, secure and cost-effective. This may seem like a “have your cake and eat it too” request from the company, but with the right cloud storage infrastructure orchestrated the right way, an ideal solution was possible. 

After performing a cost model analysis, our solution came down to the cloud. CDW compared the expansion of the customer’s legacy platforms with migrating to a cloud platform, and we found that the customer would achieve significant cost and management efficiencies by switching to a cloud-integrated storage system. CDW presented a leading storage infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, Microsoft Azure^®, combined with a cloud-based network-attached storage controller, Nasuni^®, as a suitable platform for the future. 

The Microsoft Azure^® IaaS facility enables this large confectionery manufacturer to store as much data as necessary. Nasuni^® provides the customer with scalable global file sharing alongside significant backup and retention capacity. And, for the icing on the cake, the entire platform is secured by Azure Active Directory, SSL and AES 265-bit encryption.