Founded in 1934 as a direct marketer of personalised Christmas cards, Silver Star Brands has become one of America’s largest direct marketers of gifts and household products. Popular catalogues such as Miles Kimball and Walter Drake help drive the company’s sales, which peak during the holiday season.
By refreshing its infrastructure with VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) on Pure Storage, Silver Star Brands simplified management to keep systems running reliably, especially during the holidays.
Impact on Silver Star Brands
Silver Star Brands processes around 5 million orders every year. With a new holiday shopping season approaching, the company saw an opportunity to refresh its IT infrastructure to handle the increased load and capture critical revenue.
High-maintenance storage can’t keep up with holiday orders
Silver Star Brands runs its business-critical ERP system on VMware virtual machines (VMs). The aging infrastructure struggled to keep up with high order volumes during the holidays. High disk latencies led to performance issues, and capacity was nearly maxed out. The company’s three infrastructure engineers were constantly modifying LUNs to ensure each VM had enough capacity and bandwidth. This took valuable time away from other projects. Plus, recovering lost or corrupted VMs from nightly backups could take days, depending on how much data needed to be restored. To maximise holiday revenue and avoid disruption, Silver Star Brands needed new hardware and a new approach to storage management.
Upgrade to Flash keeps the catalogue business going strong
Silver Star Brands adopted VMware vVols on Pure Storage to breathe new life into its ERP system. Each VM gets its own high-performance flash storage volume, with greater operational efficiency behind the scenes. The team can take zero-impact snapshots at the level of VMs, arrays, and SAN protection groups-and recovering VMs is easier and faster as vVols does not require an additional file system layer. “Our previous storage did not support VMware vVols. Moving to Pure Storage aligns us with VMware’s future direction, and it’s so simple and easy to configure,” says Bill Van Aacken, senior IT infrastructure engineer at Silver Star Brands. “For us, there’s no going back.” Performance improvements from moving to Pure made a big difference for the catalogue business, removing holiday bottlenecks. It also enabled the IT team to conduct a critical database upgrade without interrupting the business, even as orders began to rise.
The team is ready for continued growth
With holiday sales expected to climb, the IT team can breathe easy, knowing it can fulfil customer orders rapidly. Silver Star Brands plans to use Pure Storage and VMware vVols as the standard foundation for new applications to support its growing operations. Van Aacken concludes: “We’re not sweating next holiday season at all, but if we hadn’t moved to Pure Storage and VMware vVols, we’d be in a world of hurt.”
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