Automating Distribution Centers with All-Flash

Carozzi is one of the most respected mass consumption companies in Latin America, supplying standard food products to many customers. The company uses two Pure Storage FlashStack® systems and Purity ActiveCluster™ to provide business continuity between sites. The solution’s sustained low RPO, RTO, and latency gave Carozzi confidence to extend its use to other mission critical applications.

Empresas Carozzi S.A. (Carozzi) is one of the most respected mass consumption companies in Latin America. Chilean-based, the 120-year-old food processing company has production plants in Chile and Peru, and offices in the United States, Ecuador and Paraguay.

Carozzi’s strategic objectives are based on its competitive advantages that include its capacity for innovation, leadership of its brands in categories in which it participates, and strong organizational culture.

The company’s Optimus project, designed to automate its distribution center using automated guided vehicles to transport pallets, will require a total investment of €37 million. The first two phases were completed, with the construction of a high-density automatic warehouse, a daring process that will deliver one of the most modern distribution centers in the country. This digital innovation seeks to optimize processes to be ready for future challenges, improving productivity and customer service.

When Carozzi selected a robotics application for automating guided vehicles, they needed an infrastructure solution that provided maximum availability and real-time service. The IT team evaluated several infrastructure technologies. They looked for Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) values as near-zero as possible but expected that having zero RPO and RTO would be unaffordable. Carozzi was then introduced to Pure Storage through the local team in Chile.

After a presentation of FlashStack—the converged infrastructure solution from Pure Storage and Cisco—the IT team decided to test it in a Proof of Concept (POC). “All the commercial and technical processes moved forward smoothly. Within a couple of days, we had a FlashArray array running in our data center. It was fantastic,” says Erwin Fiebig, Information Technology Assistant Manager.

During the POC, Carozzi’s IT team was able to test the solution’s ease of use and simplicity. “We were very impressed by the compression capabilities and how fast we were able to deploy it. We carried out migration through a direct connection and without disruptions,” says Renato Muñoz, Projects Chief and Microsoft Systems Manager.

Pure Storage and Cisco also demonstrated higher throughput performance compared to other vendors and had a better integration with third-party solutions. “No other vendor was offering us what Pure Storage and Cisco did. That’s why we didn’t want to do trials of other solutions. We knew we were dealing with a leading technology,” Fiebig adds.

The IT team presented a strong business case to the board, in which the team compared different technologies. Pure Storage and Cisco had the lowest total cost over a five-year period. Most appealing was that FlashStack was able to deliver zero RPO and RTO at no additional cost, unlike the other vendors evaluated.

Carozzi purchased two FlashStack systems with Pure Storage FlashArray, Cisco UCS servers and Nexus networking. The company was the first in Latin America to implement Pure Storage Purity™ ActiveCluster, a synchronous replication and stretched cluster solution that enables live migration between the two FlashStack systems to provide business continuity across metro distances, without requiring extra hardware, licenses, or fees. “That is a great added value, it relieved us from having to seek an additional backup solution,” Fiebig mentions. “Pure Storage and Cisco components grant us the confidence that the infrastructure will be highly available.”

When Carozzi evaluated ActiveCluster, it performed a methodological test, during which the IT team cut the power at one data center and successfully proved there was no disruption in the robotics application. A year and a half after Pure Storage’s implementation, the infrastructure has had 100% availability.

“Before, we didn’t have a similar infrastructure, so the main difference our users have noticed is that we no longer need a maintenance window. Now we can make configurations and adjustments at any given moment without interruptions. We can sleep peacefully,” says Muñoz.

Both arrays are currently in production at both data centers with workloads shared between them. Having a consistently low latency solution has given Carozzi the confidence to extend FlashStack use to other mission critical applications. The company used to have an external electronic invoicing process; however, it presented several issues and as it interacted with other systems, including SAP and government systems, any service interruptions had a big effect on productivity. Muñoz decided to relocate it to run on the FlashStack. The migration process was very simple thanks to ActiveCluster, and ever since, it has successfully mitigated service interruptions and avoided rework.

Carozzi has also been able to witness the value in Pure Storage’s predictive support when it experienced an outage in its data center network connection. The Pure1® app sent an alert that allowed the IT team to react quickly.

“Storage management has become very simple. There’s not much to do in terms of provisioning and configuration. It has a dashboard that allows us to know the status of every item at any time,” Muñoz adds.

Another differential for Carozzi was the unique Pure Evergreen Storage subscription model, which no other vendor offered. It will allow the company to continually keep its storage modern by delivering continuous software and hardware updates.