PÖTTINGER Landtechnik Lifts Precision Farming Sales with a Fast, Efficient Data Platform

Overview

Challenge

• Strengthen data security and resiliency to support increasing sales of smart farming solutions.

Solution

• Consolidate data storage and reduce complexity of mission-critical high-availability data platform.

Outcome

• Increase storage efficiency with deduplication and compression rate of 1:2.32.
• Simplify storage management and provisioning.
• Reduce IT complexity while increasing business resiliency.

Challenge

Planting the Seeds for Business Growth

Headquartered in Austria, PÖTTINGER Landtechnik GmbH is a leading international manufacturer of grassland and arable farming machines as well as digital agricultural technology. The family-owned company employs almost 2,000 people worldwide and generates annual revenues of approximately €400 million.

To feed a growing global population, sustainability and efficiency are becoming increasingly important in the agricultural sector. For many years, PÖTTINGER has focused on digitalization and delivering intelligent precision farming with smart tools. By monitoring what happens in their fields, farmers can better tailor their activities to individual soil conditions — saving money and boosting yields.

With food prices and demand for local produce increasing, PÖTTINGER is growing in many markets around the world. “Our sales teams rely on large digital assets such as high-quality videos to demonstrate our capabilities to customers, and our storage requirements are increasing exponentially,” explains Head of IT at PÖTTINGER, Gerhard Wagner. “We wanted to future-proof our data services, as well as bolstering data security and resiliency.”

Planning ahead, PÖTTINGER also wanted to be ready to streamline its manufacturing processes with industrial internet of things (IIoT) solutions and data-driven automation. To gain new insights into its production lines and optimize its operations, the company needed additional data storage resources.

Solution

Nurturing Efficiency by Simplifying Data Storage

PÖTTINGER analyzed the market to find the fastest and most cost-efficient storage solution. “An outstanding offer from our trusted advisor and Hitachi Vantara partner Kapsch BusinessCom made the decision easy,” recalls Head of IT Managed Services at PÖTTINGER, Benedikt Hartl.

Together with Kapsch BusinessCom and Hitachi Vantara, PÖTTINGER implemented a storage cluster based on two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990 arrays. The all-NVMe flash solutions take advantage of Hitachi Global-Active Device technology to provide fast, highly reliable data storage. The company runs 350 virtual servers with VMware vSphere, including crucial SAP applications for procurement, materials management, financials and data analytics. “It was essential for our operations that the Hitachi VSP E990 is certified for SAP HANA,” confirms Hartl. “Thanks to the excellent Hitachi engineering, our business processes run very smoothly.”

The team also modernized and centralized storage management by deploying Hitachi Ops Center Administrator and Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer. As a result, PÖTTINGER can monitor its storage performance continuously and use integrated machine learning features to optimize performance and identify potential bottlenecks.

Outcome

Harvesting Increasing Returns in Efficiency and Reliability

“The speed, efficiency and availability of the Hitachi solution makes it a perfect fit for our requirements,” says Wagner. “We’ve also reduced the complexity of our IT, saving space and energy in the data center. And the deduplication and compression rate of 1:2.32 gives us space to grow in the future.”

Hartl adds: “The easy usability of Hitachi Ops Center means we can manage and provision storage much faster and gain a rapid overview of the most important performance data. We rely less on external support and can respond quicker to changing business needs.”

PÖTTINGER also values the support it receives from its technology partners. “Hitachi Remote Ops automatically mitigates technical issues: for example, proactively delivering replacement parts to ensure that hardware failures don’t impact our business,” says Hartl. “And Kapsch Care Services keep us fully covered for technical support.”

Wagner concludes: “With the Hitachi VSP E990 solution, we’ve planted the seed for an even stronger IT architecture. The configuration minimizes our business risk, and we’re now moving our systems into physically separate data centers to boost business resiliency and data security to new levels.”