As one of the largest independent food distributors in the United States, Porky Products distributes over one million pounds of meat and seafood per day. Privately held, Porky Products is headquartered in New Jersey, with an office in California, and employs approximately 200 people.

The IT department that supports this operation runs lean. With just 6 full-time employees, standardization and simplicity are paramount. To that end, the team has standardized on two Cisco UCS blade chassis, and IBM V7000 storage with tiers of SSD, 10K, and NL-SAS drives. The environment and vSphere cluster span both of their locations, with the New Jersey location serving as the primary datacenter and the California site as the disaster recovery location.

Several systems keep the team at Porky Products productive. Common back office applications such as Microsoft Exchange and business intelligence platform Pentaho are critical, as are various other Microsoft- and Linux-based applications.

An ERP system with high I/O demands

The one technology that was keeping the team at Porky Products from being 100% virtualized was the mission-critical ERP system, SAP running on DB2. This system, responsible for inventory, order management, pric-ing, and other critical functions, was running on a standalone IBM server.

According to Patrick Donnelly, Senior Network Engineer, almost imme-diately after implementing this ERP system, the high I/O requirements became apparent. Not only was it impossible to virtualize the system due to the I/O requirements, but local flash (in the form of Fusion I/O PCIe cards) was required to provide sufficient I/O.

“To get the performance we needed,” said Donnelly, “the whole database had to be on flash. This was going to be cost-prohibitive as the database grew.” He investigated the cost of more server-side flash and other all-flash solutions, and started looking for alternatives. The first server-side caching solution he found didn’t provide the performance he needed, and was quite expensive.

Porky Products meets beefy I/O requirementsVirtualizes SAP on DB2 on VMware and avoids more flash investment

COMPANY NAME Porky Products

INDUSTRYFood Distribution

BENEFITS

• Achieved 100% virtualization for aplications, including SAP and DB2

• Avoided further investment in PCIe flash devices

• Offloaded I/O from centralized sotrage, increasing overall IOPS capacity

“To get the performance we needed,” said Donnelly, “the whole database had to be on flash. This was going to be cost-prohibitive as the database grew.”

PATRICK DONNELLY

SENIOR NETWORK ENGINEER

222 Third Street Suite 3300 | Cambridge, MA 02142 | 671.374.6500 | info@infinio.com | www.infinio.com © 2015 Infinio Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Testing with Infinio

Fortunately, Donnelly found Infinio and decided to see if it would allay his performance concerns. Porky Products’ evaluation of Infinio was swift and successful. After spinning up a copy of the ERP database within the VMware environment, Donnelly installed Infinio. “I really liked the evaluation – that it was fully functioning and I could really prove out whether it worked,” said Donnelly. His plan was to benchmark between the production (physical and all-flash) configuration and the test (virtualized and hybrid RAM and flash) configuration. Using iostat, he was able to validate that the performance was there. He followed up with tests using zabbix, which monitored disk I/O from the Linux kernel, and ST04, a native SAP tool for monitoring database response time from the SAP kernel. All the tests looked good.

“But the real test was users running reports and seeing if they noticed a difference,” Donnelly commented. “At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what the benchmarks say, it matters what the users think.” The users reported that there was equivalent performance between the two, and Donnelly knew he had solved a big problem.

By using Infinio, Porky Products was able to achieve sev-eral goals. First, they could virtualize SAP on DB2, which was not possible before. Donnelly commented, “It simplified things to put SAP on VMware. Once we installed Infinio, we didn’t have to deal with separate backups for virtual and physical servers, or any other unique treatment for a single standalone system.” This also enabled them to move off of legacy hardware and entirely onto their Cisco UCS blade system. Finally, by leveraging Infinio’s RAM-centric architecture, they were able to replace 3TB of expensive Fusion I/O PCIe flash cards in favor a pair of mirrored 800GB SAS SSD drives.

Rolling out Infinio in production

After a successful pilot, the team at Porky Products rolled out Infinio into production. In addition to the newly-virtualized ERP system, Donnelly and the team took advantage of Infinio’s VM-level acceleration to target some additional applications. In particular, with further testing, Donnelly noticed that Microsoft Exchange got a “nice boost” from Infinio. Other applications were also able to benefit from Infinio’s server-side architecture.

As IT operations have continued at Porky Products, the functionality of Infinio has been simple. Retiring a host and replacing it with a new one was “seamless.” A version upgrade was executed with no issues. Said Donnelly, “I could have run it during the workday – there was no impact whatsoever.”

The first few weeks saw Donnelly monitoring performance via the UI often. He would look at the analytics and ensure the product was working as expected. Over time, however, he came to trust the performance. “I don’t think I’ve logged into it for the past month. I think that’s a good thing, it basically runs itself,” said Donnelly.

Future plans

With their storage performance stabilized and enterprise applications entirely virtualized, the team at Porky Products can move on to their next big initiative: virtual desktops. They began a pilot of VDI, and as they’ve increased the number of users, they’ve noticed that the high-end resources on IBM V7000 storage are being taken up by these virtual desktops. As such, they are interested in using Infino’s RAM-based caching to offload I/O from the IBM storage.

“It simplified things to put SAP on VMware. Once we installed

Infinio, we didn’t have to deal with separate backups for virtual and

physical servers, or any other unique treatment for

a single standalone system. ”

PATRICK DONNELLY SENIOR NETWORK ENGINEER

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With a cache response time of 80 microseconds, Porky Products’ application response time reduced significantly.