Proact facilitates information management at Alfa Laval
Archive and storage specialists Proact have supplied a new storage and backup platform for industrial company Alfa Laval. This new solution will allow Alfa Laval to free up storage capacity and enhance performance in its virtualised server environment. The total order is valued at more than SEK 3 million.
“We needed to upgrade our existing solution to ensure that we had a more secure, more efficient storage environment. We have worked together with Proact to assess the situation and identify the most appropriate strategy for our infrastructure work, and now we have made enormous progress,” says Marcus Nelson, the man responsible for IT infrastructure at Alfa Laval and also for implementation of the solution. Alfa Laval wanted to connect its existing virtualised servers - which are based on VMware - to the storage environment so as streamline backup procedures. The old backup solution was too slow and sluggish to manage. Restoring old or lost files was also far too time-consuming a task. The solution supplied by Proact is based on an extension of Alfa Laval’s existing disk-based storage system from NetApp. Backups are created in no time at all time, and the restore time is extremely short. IT personnel are also finding it a lot easier to manage the environment. This upgrade of the storage environment is also providing an opportunity to utilise what is known as snapshot technology, instantaneous shots or backups of the information. This means that Alfa Laval’s staff can recover “lost” documents themselves by simply retrieving the most recent snapshot. “The migration to the new environment went fabulously well. We only had minimum downtime. The result is that our entire storage environment is more secure now, and our lead times are kept to a minimum. We will be continuing to consolidate our existing systems, and we plan on running more or less all new systems virtually. We estimate that this work will be completed in late 2010,” says Marcus Nelson. Alfa Laval is a global supplier of special products and technical process solutions in the fields of heat transfer, separation and flow management. The company has a presence in almost 100 countries and is listed on the Nasdaq OMX Nordic. The company employs a total of 12 000 staff, of whom 1 900 work in Sweden. Its turnover last year amounted to around SEK 28 billion.
Tags: