Acindar Enjoys Benefits of All-Flash Storage

Acindar delivers products and services to civil construction, agriculture, and industrial sectors as part of ArcelorMittal Group, the number one steel producer worldwide. Pure Storage FlashArray™ supports Acindar’s critical business processes, accelerating access to business insights, simplifying storage management, and achieving a 3.5:1 compression rate. The IT department continues to evaluate its infrastructure capacity with an eye to acquiring additional all-flash storage for desktop virtualisation.

Acindar, a steel producer and service provider founded in 1942 in Argentina, provides its products and services to civil construction, agriculture, and industry sectors. Currently, Acindar is part of the ArcelorMittal Group, the number one steel producer in the world. It owns eight production plants across five cities within the country, as well as offices and several distribution centers.

In keeping with its market-leading position, Acindar has set very clear business objectives: market share leadership within the construction and agricultural sectors, along with transparent business management; innovation; long-term development-awareness; and a commitment to the environment, the community, and its stakeholders. To meet these goals, as well as to accelerate production of the long-steel and wire of its plant located in Villa Constitución, Acindar’s production processes required major technological improvements to improve efficiencies.

As part of these improvements, Acindar’s IT department decided to replace its storage infrastructure. “Legacy platform management was complicated and non-practical. It took the IT staff a lot of time,” says Juan Pablo Mollo, IT Infrastructure Manager.

Each year, the IT department develops a capacity plan with which it analyses — through a control panel—all the infrastructure that the company owns. Through different comparison matrices, the staff evaluates the obsolescence, usage, and capacity of each solution. In the case of the storage platform, it verifies IOPs, warranty, life cycle stage, and scaling possibilities.

When it conducted the plan for 2017, the IT department determined that the storage platform was not capable of supporting additional solid-state disks to expand capacity and obtain maximum speed, plus it was nearing the end of its life cycle. “Based on the capacity plan, we concluded that we had to completely renovate our storage; that’s when we began to evaluate different technology options,” adds Pablo Rufach, Head of IT Support

Since Acindar’s IT department was looking to improve application response times, reduce latency, increase IOPs—all while simplifying management—its priority was to evaluate alternatives for solid-state disk storage platforms.

The IT staff focused on comparing different vendor features and prices. It learned about Pure Storage through its peers at ArcelorMittal Brazil, which acquired a storage array with those same characteristics. Locally, Logicalis, vendor of information and communication technologies solutions and integrated services, presented the solution’s specifications.

From this comparison it chose Pure Storage FlashArray, largely due to the platform’s innovation, compression and deduplication capacity, and the number of IOPs. “When we compared the Pure Storage compression rate with other solutions, we couldn’t believe it was feasible,” observes Mollo.

The installation and deployments processes were very simple for Acindar’s staff, using only manuals and technical brochures, and completed the process with the support of a Pure Storage technician.

“It was very easy to place it in the rack, connect it and migrating information on the fly. We made the whole process without stoppage,” Mollo explains. “Fundamentally, what we aimed for with Pure Storage was to have a solid array with state-of-the-art features, which would also be simple to manage and use so that it frees us time and allows us to perform value-added tasks.”

After completing the deployment, Acindar realized immediate benefits. The departmental system that provides support for steel production issues a series of reports which, with the legacy system, took more than 20 minutes to complete. Once Acindar implemented the FlashArray from Pure Storage, this time was reduced to just one minute. “We managed to lower completion times just by deploying Pure Storage, without making any additional changes in the applications or database,” says Mollo.

Pure Storage allowed the IT department to consolidate not only their Windows Server system hosted on VMware vSphere 6.5, but also SQL Server, databases, Internet Information Services Servers, and production apps, as well as infrastructure tools.

“End users indicate that there has been an improvement in applications performance, mainly with those providing crucial business information,” explains Mollo.

Also, Acindar reported substantial space savings in its data centre. The legacy storage platform took a complete rack, while the new Pure Storage platform takes up only four rack units. This also resulted in a significant reduction in electric power consumption.

Acindar’s Pure Storage FlashArray is configured with a raw capacity of 10 TB; it shows a compression rate of 3.5:1 to deliver an effective capacity of 35 TB. Additionally, it offers a 0.36 millisecond latency and 8,500 IOPs.

Today, storage management is no longer a time-consuming task for Acindar. It is done by the IT staff with a few clicks through the Pure1® mobile app, enabling the company’s IT department to take on new challenges.

While the Pure Storage FlashArray currently is entirely devoted to critical business processes, Acindar’s IT department continues to evaluate the capacity of its infrastructure with an eye to acquiring additional all-flash storage array for a new desktop virtualisation project.