Ferrellgas is the largest provider of propane by portable tank exchange in the nation through their Blue Rhino brand and the second largest overall distributor of propane in the United States. In a recent briefing to the financial community, the company described itself as an industry consolidator with a disciplined acquisition strategy.

At about that same time, there were challenges in the Ferrellgas data center. The lease on their legacy EMC storage array was expiring. The technology was aging. Support and maintenance costs were expected to rise dramatically. With a significant cost hit on the horizon, it seemed like a good time to explore options.

It was a tiered solution with a thin layer of flash storage to store data for performance driven, 'tier zero' applications on top of a layer of Fiber channel HDDs, on top of 'cheap and deep' SATA storage.

This 'bag-on-the-side-of-the-box' approach was complex and cumbersome. It required dedicated, third party data management staff to ensure today's 'hot data' was moved to the flash layer, then moved out so tomorrow's 'hot data' would have space. It seemed like a good time to look for a more robust solution that would be easier to manage.

The company runs a routing application daily to optimize driver, truck and inventory utilization across its network of 46,000 portable tank exchange locations nationwide. Bill Evans, VP of IT described it as one of their 'lifeblood applications'.

Even with constant hand holding, the legacy storage platform only just met performance requirements, squeezing into the eight-hour overnight production window with zero time to react to problems. It seemed like a good time to find an alternative that would improve application performance, decrease run times and take pressure off the IT staff.

The desire for better initial and operating costs, simplified data management and faster performance were all immediate, tactical reasons for Ferrellgas to look at alternatives. In addition, their data protection strategy with their older storage platform was based on a cumbersome log shipping process that left windows of vulnerability. It seemed like the right time to look for a better data protection scheme as well.

I share all this with you now because you may be feeling some of the same pressures. You may be facing some of the same challenges. I share this with you now because the Ferrellgas experience may save you some time and headache.

Choosing Violin FSP allowed Ferrellgas to move to a single data center floor tile of all flash storage, increase application performance, simplify storage management dramatically with all software services integrated into the Concerto OS 7 operating system on an FSP platform designed for mixed and multiple workloads.

If you would like to learn more please come back often. We will update the Ferrellgas story with factors they considered important while looking at vendors and products and what the IT and business results were of the decisions they made.

To Be Continued…

Violin Memory Inc. issued this content on 17 February 2016 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 19 February 2016 01:58:10 UTC

Original Document: http://www.violin-memory.com/blog/why-flash-now-part-1/