Boosting storage capacity tenfold capacity for OMP

The importance of data confidentiality and data recovery

As an expert in supply chain planning solutions, OMP has many international customers. To provide the right professional services and solutions for these customers, the software business has extensive advisory, implementation, development and customer services – and they all have specific data management requirements. Two of the most critical factors are data confidentiality and disaster recovery.

OMP’s Wommelgem office holds the main data centre and a separate disaster room which contains all corporate data. The data centre in the US office also plays a key role when it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery. These two important offices grant data access to all our other locations (for security and infrastructural reasons). As a consequence, data transfers need to happen very smoothly and securely at all times. Obviously, revising the storage and backup strategy is not something to take lightly.

The power of scalability, proactivity and backup

We set up Nimble as a new storage solution. High scalability was at the top of OMP’s priority list. With Nimble, the company can easily process additional data with high performance. When needed, they can even add extra storage space. With 500 to 600 colleagues using our storage environment simultaneously, this is a very welcome option. Nimble’s own proactive support system sends incident notifications even before something is about to go wrong. That is a powerful advantage.

However, a storage solution is only as powerful as its backup system. OMP’s backup and synchronisation processes used to be handled by two separate solutions. That occasionally caused unnecessary data transfers between the data centres in Wommelgem (Belgium) and Atlanta (US). If there’s one thing these offices don’t need, it’s excessive data transfers. When the synchronisation volumes were too large and transfer times grew too long, the transfers would eat up bandwidth between offices. When the previous backup solution backed up a single document, the synchronisation software automatically synchronised the entire backup. That’s why we helped OMP set up Cohesity. That software takes care of both the backup process and synchronisation.

Never forget to keep it clean

Another useful functionality by Cohesity is deduplication. Cohesity deduplicates data per system instead of per document. It automatically deletes duplicate copies of data. Result? Up to 10 times more storage space. With 1,000 TB of backup data, that amounts to 900 TB of storage saved.

Data-generating users, like OMP’s customers, will always tend to need more storage space. Creating space for data is well and good, but cleaning up data is at least equally important. That’s why we and OMP strongly agree on the importance further analysing the data retention period and necessity to back up files on the file systems.

Marc Scherens, Director ICT at OMP enjoyed collaborating with us. “We used to set up our complete storage and backup solutions by ourselves, but because these implementations take up a lot of valuable time, we chose to entrust this project to a partner. Thanks to their competences, Xylos’ experts had everything up and running in less than a month. Our collaboration was very smooth and Xylos provided excellent follow-up. They also introduced us to HPE InfoSight, a tool that provides insight into the entire storage environment, and they’ve scheduled in-house training to teach our IT staff how they can use the advanced functionalities”, Marc says. As for us, we couldn’t be happier either with this smooth collaboration. It turns out great minds do think alike.