Legrand selects Violin Memory all flash array

Violin Memory®, Inc. was chosen by Legrand, the global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures, to ensure the reliable and smooth running of all critical applications which include: SQL Server, Microsoft BI, SAP ECC, MS Dynamics AX, vSphere Operation Manager, Microsoft Sharepoint, , Microsoft ActiveDirectory, Legrand’s corporate public website and internal Intranet, Antivirus, iSeries scheduler, Nagios, and Citrix XenApp.

Legrand implemented a Violin 6264 All Flash Array with 70TB raw capacity at its Equinix data centre near Paris, France to support its VMware clusters (LAN/DMZ/DBs) and to give its mission-critical applications, from test to production, the storage performance required in order to run effortlessly and trouble-free. As a result of installing the Violin all-flash array, batch jobs are now 3 to 12 times faster, depending upon the impact of storage performance on the batch job. More importantly, multiple batch jobs can now be run simultaneously without the performance of one batch job impacting the performance of another. Whether the batch jobs are executing at the same time or not, their execution time is unchanged.

Application performance was key. With a fully-virtualised VMware environment spread across 500 virtual machines, Legrand required approximately 80TB of storage to host its critical applications in its two data centres. Ensuring that these critical applications ran smoothly, and that the workload generated by other applications didn’t affect the overall performance of the system had become impossible with the legacy HDD-based SAN. This performance issue had also made the batch processes take far too long, with data warehouse queries taking unpredictable lengths of times to complete. In addition, Legrand’s IT team wanted to drastically reduce the volume of troubleshooting queries related to storage performance and was looking for a compact system that would fit the new, very small, data centre footprint.

“With Violin Memory latency on the storage side, regardless of the load, has been reduced considerably and now takes an average of only 130 microseconds (.13 milliseconds). The Violin 6264 All Flash Array has made the process ten times faster than our previous generation HDD SAN, and that is an amazing result we could not have hoped to achieve," said Alessandro Volonteri, Group Architecture and Project Manager at Legrand.

“After considering all the main all-flash enterprise vendors, we chose Violin Memory because of its unique combination of high performance and very small footprint, at a cost comparable to that of an old-style spinning disk SAN,” Volonteri concluded.

Based on the success of its original implementation, Legrand now plans to make Violin Memory its enterprise all-flash vendor of choice, with the aim to replace its traditional HDD SANs in all its data centres over the coming two years.

“When speed is pivotal an all-flash storage solution is the only way forward. Now that the technology has reached the level of maturity that has brought its total cost of ownership (TCO) in line with that of spinning disk, we have eliminated the last hurdle. Legrand had the vision to go down the all-flash route and it has already reaped massive benefits such as enhanced application performance and reliability. We are thrilled Alessandro’s team is now planning to make Violin its flash provider of choice,” said Mick Bradley, Managing Director EMEA at Violin Memory.