Coop Group is a prominent cooperative with supermarkets throughout Switzerland and wholesale and food production operations across Europe. The cooperative operates 2,637 sales outlets and stores, employs 95,826 people, and earned CHF 34.7 billion (US$41 billion) in total sales in 2023.
Every day Coop brings high-quality fresh bread, fruit, and vegetables from its 14 distribution centers to its retail and online stores. Managing the coop’s complex, fast-paced supply chain requires advanced logistics, data analytics, and quick thinking. Data analysis and an intricate forecasting system, which take into account factors such as local weather conditions, enable Coop to maintain product freshness and optimize distribution as it delivers the right products and quantities to the right locations. A glitch in the system can cause delays, food waste—and disappointed shoppers.
Coop watched its data volumes escalate and, with it, the risk of a system or process failure. To thwart this concern, Coop partnered with Hitachi Vantara to standardize and expand its data storage infrastructure using a single-vendor strategy.
Seeking Reliability and Simplification
Coop sought a powerful, reliable data infrastructure and chose the Hitachi Vantara VSP 5500 for a 1.5 petabyte, all-flash, block storage capacity to support the company’s 30 mission-critical SAP applications, which run on IGM Power System servers. The VSP 5500 also supports 3,000 virtual machines through a large-scale VMware vSphere environment. Coop uses Hitachi Universal Replicator software to mirror data to a secondary data center site to ensure high availability and business continuity.
Coop migrated its data to the new storage infrastructure during standard business hours, with the help of Hitachi Vantara professional services. The Hitachi Global-Active Device technology allowed for a gradual transfer of data with minimal impact to users.
In addition, Coop Group installed Hitachi Vantara VSP Unified Storage for NAS G600 and G400 platforms with all-flash to expedite file access and shared drives. To fully standardize the infrastructure, reduce complexity, and improve reliability, Coop deployed Hitachi Vantara VSP G350 arrays in each of its 14 distribution centers.
Three-Tier Architecture to Protect Data
Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) enables audit-proof archiving and allows storage of high-resolution product and marketing photos. HCP, along with VSP G900, are part of Coop’s three-tier backup architecture to protect against ransomware attacks. The initial backup to disk on the VSP G900 ensures short recovery times. Next, data is migrated to HCP to guard against attackers attempting to overwrite or encrypt data. Finally, the business data is transferred to tapes for an additional level of data resiliency.
The standardized, single-vendor solution has reduced Coop’s network complexity and strengthened its business continuity position. The system minimizes business risk by enabling faster system recovery in the event of a system failure or ransomware attack. If necessary, Coop can restart SAP HANA within 30 minutes, limiting the disruption for staff and customers.
Trusted Data Infrastructure Delivers Rapid Supply Chain Insights
The high reliability and performance of the VSP-based infrastructure ensures the availability of Coop’s critical applications. The low latency expedites reporting and forecasting, so analysts can manage supply chain logistics more effectively. The fast execution of complex analytical tasks enables Coop to optimize deliveries, minimize food waste, improve customer service and increase sales.
peaq Helps Coop Get the Most Out of Its Storage
Coop Group relies on IOportal, a cloud-based capacity and performance monitoring service from peaq GmbH, a Hitachi Vantara partner. IOportal also enables Coop Group to quickly perform root cause analysis and provides health checks that mitigate creeping performance degradations. peaq’s consultants also provide ongoing reviews and analysis to help Coop Group plan its storage strategy cost-effectively.
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