Supporting Ambitious Growth Plans with Scalable, Secure and Sustainable Hitachi VSP One Block

Overview

Challenge

• Support product innovation and expansion into new markets with flexible, scalable and secure storage.

Solution

• Virtual Storage Platform One Block increase's reliability, performance and native integration with backup tools to manage and protect growing data volumes, while significantly reducing energy costs and physical space requirements.

Outcome

• It has delivered a 2.5x improvement in storage performance, strengthened ransomware protection, enhanced sustainability and helped contain overall infrastructure costs.

Challenge

La Molisana has been bringing the finest pasta products to customers in Italy and beyond since 1912. Based in the Molise region, which is famed for growing the finest durum wheat, the company is one of the largest pasta producers in Italy. With more than 250 employees and annual revenues exceeding €300 million, La Molisana already exports its products to 100 countries worldwide and has ambitious growth plans for the next five years.

La Molisana CIO, Maurizio Maio, explains, “We are looking to expand our market share abroad, including in emerging countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas, by forging new partnerships with leading local distributors. At the same time, we will continue to develop new products made with 100% Italian wheat. In addition, we are focusing on improving sustainability across our operations to reduce our impact on the environment."

To manage daily activities and inform strategic decision-making, La Molisana relies on many applications, such as ERP, Supply Chain and CPM systems. For more than five years, the company has been using these business-critical solutions on Hitachi Vantara storage.

“We simply cannot afford performance or stability issues in our storage environment,” says Maio. “For example, downtime could cause delays to production and distribution processes, impacting our sales and customer satisfaction.  A prolonged outage could hinder our ability to make electronic payments while data loss would compromise business planning and analysis”

To support its growth journey, La Molisana knew that modernizing its infrastructure was essential. “Moving into new markets and launching new products will generate huge volumes of additional data, so we looked for a more robust, scalable, high-performance storage system. We were also conscious of emerging cyber threats, so we wanted to strengthen our security and data protection strategy,” Maio notes.

Solution

To plan and manage its storage modernization initiative, La Molisana engaged its trusted technology partner Eosys. Initially, they helped the company analyze its current application workloads, map out detailed data growth projections, and develop security, performance and capacity requirements for the new storage environment. Based on these requirements, La Molisana selected a powerful, flexible solution: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One Block.

CIO Maurizio Maio explained, “After evaluating several options, the VSP One Block solution stood out for its advanced data managment, security and integration functionalities. Hitachi and Eosys have always been very committed, responsive providers to La Molisana, so we were confident working with them again.”

La Molisana collaborated closely with Eosys and Hitachi Vantara to implement the new storage and backup and recovery architecture. “Working with Hitachi was a very positive experience,” adds Maio. “They offered deep technical expertise to help us plan and optimize our new infrastructure and were very professional throughout. With their support, we transitioned to the new setup with no disruption to our users.”

Today, La Molisana uses the VSP One Block solution, equipped with NVMe flash drives to maximize performance, to support their ERP, logistics and financial planning applications. To optimize cost efficiency, the company moved its older Hitachi storage to a second data center to serve as a backup target. La Molisana also harnesses native integration between the VSP One Block system and its Veeam backup solution to streamline data protection tasks.

“Sustainability was an important factor in our selection of VSP One Block,” adds La Molisana’s Maurizio Maio. “Although the energy consumption of our data center is relatively low compared to our manufacturing operations, we are keen to implement eco-friendly IT solutions. The energy-efficient VSP One Block aligns perfectly with our vision.”

Outcome

With the VSP One Block solution, the company has the rock-solid infrastructure needed to support their ambitious international expansion plans. “VSP One Block provides La Molisana with the headroom to manage their fast-growing data volumes seamlessly,” said Salvatore Turchetti, Country Manager & GM, Hitachi Vantara Italy. “VSP One Block provides La Molisana with everything modern business demands from storage: performance, reliability, and data protection, both through the storage’s capabilities and its native integration with backup software, along with reduced energy consumption and a drastic minimization of downtime risk. This will be critical for enabling La Molisana’s expansion into new markets and launch new products.”

La Molisana has also significantly increased storage performance with VSP One Block, helping users to work more productively. The upgrade to NVMe drives has led to a 2.5x improvement in storage response times, enabling users to access data faster, and boosting the efficiency of production, logistics and finance processes.

VSP One’s adaptive data reduction (ADR) capabilities have also proved valuable; CIO Maio explained. “We have achieved a 5:1 data compression ratio with the new Hitachi solution. Along with the deduplication functionality, this will enable us to store growing data volumes in a more compact footprint, helping to contain costs and reduce our energy consumption and environmental impact.”

In addition, La Molisana has stepped up its data protection strategy with Hitachi. While the integration with Veeam helps to improve backup and restore speeds, the company also harnesses VSP One’s built-in immutable snapshot functionality to protect against emerging cyberthreats. “The VSP One Block solution gives us peace of mind, as we know that we have robust protection against ransomware and other bad actors. Our shift to VSP One Block has given us a modern, powerful storage platform that improves our agility on a day-to-day level and will ultimately help us to increase our share of new markets. Hitachi has been a great partner to La Molisana, enabling us to become a more competitive player in our sector.” Maio added.

Salvatore Turchetti, local Hitachi Vantara Country Manager concludes,  “La Molisana's choice to adopt our One Block VSP solution represents a significant step toward greater digitization and optimization of its data infrastructure. Thanks to our technology, the company will be able to face market challenges more nimbly, ensuring high performance, security and sustainability. The more than 30 percent reduction in energy consumption is a clear example of how our solutions not only improve operational efficiency but also contribute to our customers' sustainability goals.”