The customer | OMP
OMP is a software and consulting company that delivers advanced supply chain planning solutions to customers around the world.
The challenge | Improving data confidentiality and disaster recovery
OMP‘s annual data growth is a whopping 40%. As an expert in supply chain planning solutions, the company has many international customers. In order to provide the right professional services and solutions to these customers, the software company has extensive consulting, 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 houses the main data center as well as a separate disaster room containing all corporate data. The data center in the US office also plays a key role in business continuity and disaster recovery. These two important offices grant data access to all other locations (for security and infrastructure reasons). As a result, data transfers must be smooth and secure at all times. Obviously, revising the storage and backup strategy is not something to be taken lightly.
The process | The power of scalability, proactivity and backup
We implemented Nimble as the 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. They can even add extra storage space as needed. With 500 to 600 colleagues using the storage environment at the same time, this is a very welcome option. Nimble’s own proactive support system sends out incident notifications before anything goes wrong. A huge advantage, if you ask us..
However, a storage solution is only as powerful as its backup system. Previously, OMP’s backup and synchronization processes were handled by two separate solutions. That occasionally caused unnecessary data transfers between the data centers in Belgium and the US. If there’s one thing these offices don’t need, it’s excessive data transfer. When the synchronization volumes were too large and transfer times grew too long, the transfers would eat up bandwidth between offices. With the previous solution, when a single document was backed up, the synchronization software automatically synchronized the entire backup. That’s why we helped OMP set up Cohesity. This software takes care of both the backup process and the synchronization.
Another useful feature of Cohesity is deduplication. Cohesity deduplicates data per system rather than per document. It automatically deletes duplicate copies of data. The result? Up to 10 times more storage space. With 1,000 TB of backup data, that translates to 900 TB of storage saved.
Data generating users, like OMP’s customers, will always need more storage space. Creating space for data is all well and good, but cleaning up the data is at least as important. That’s why we and OMP strongly agree on the importance of further analyzing the data retention period and the need to back up files on the file systems.
The result | Smooth collaboration and follow-up
Marc Scherens, ICT Director at OMP, enjoyed working with us. “We used to set up all our storage and backup solutions by ourselves. As these implementations take up a lot of valuable time, we decided to entrust this project to a partner. Thanks to their expertise, Xylos had everything up and running in less than a month. Our collaboration was very smooth and Xylos provided excellent follow-up. They’ve 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,” says Marc. As for us, we couldn’t be happier either with the smooth collaboration.
