Swiss-based FarmaMondo supplies unlicensed medicines (ULMs) to healthcare facilities, workers, and patients under special circumstances. Specifically, doctors can prescribe ULMs in markets where essential medications are not commercially available or where licensed alternatives do not exist. Founded in 1915, the company stepped up its global expansion in 2013, building international distribution centers. Today, FarmaMondo has a presence in 13 regions and is active in more than 20 countries.
Supporting Rapid Growth
The international expansion led to explosive growth of 30-40 percent annually, which was taxing FarmaMondo’s IT and data management infrastructure, hindering performance and pushing capacity limits. The legacy storage solutions and rising energy costs stymied operational efficiency and sustainability initiatives.
FarmaMondo’s general productivity applications are hosted in the cloud, but critical business applications run at the company’s primary data centers in Switzerland. Employees depend on these private data centers to run SAP, VMware, and other applications that support day-to-day business operations globally so FarmaMondo can’t afford downtime.
FarmaMondo wanted to modernize and transform its IT infrastructure to support the expanding business demands. The company sought a high-performance, scalable hybrid cloud solution with advanced data protection and continuous availability, which would ensure global users had access at all times. Ideally, the solution would require less energy, improving efficiency and sustainability.
Fast Processing, Small Footprint
FarmaMondo worked with Swiss technology partner Netability and Hitachi Vantara to install the Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) block storage platform, which met all the necessary requirements. Led by Netability, the team deployed the VSP One Block array and migrated the VMware and SAP applications and databases using a Fibre Channel connection between the new VSP One Block array and the legacy Hitachi Vantara VSP G200 storage system. The migration was smooth, quick, and had zero downtime.
The modernize data infrastructure replaced four legacy servers with just two powerful servers. Together with the VSP One’s high-speed NVMe drives, the new solution has drastically improved performance for batch processing and interactive application workloads, completing tasks three times faster than before.
The ENERGY STAR®-certified VSP One platform reduces both data center space and energy consumption by an impressive one-third, providing bottom line savings and supporting green initiatives for FarmaMondo. The VSP One platform creates immutable snapshots of data to protect against cyberattacks and offers seamless scalability through the use of Dynamic Drive Protection (DDP) groups, easing upgrades as FarmaMondo continues to grow.
Already an established Hitachi Vantara customer, FarmaMondo continues that relationship with the migration to the VSP One block storage. The pharmaceutical provider has already seen vast performance improvements and is confident that Hitachi Vantara and the VSP One will support FarmaMondo’s future growth.
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Image credit: Hitachi Vantara, FarmaMondo, Netability