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Kaminario, the leading all-flash array storage provider for midrange enterprises, today announced that Dot Foods, the nation’s largest food redistributor, has selected Kaminario’s K2 all-flash array to store data for the company’s expansive ERP system. Kaminario supplemented Dot Foods’ previous disk-based array to provide the fast-growing company with exceptional scalability, resiliency and consistent performance.

“We’re in an era of rapid business growth, and with that expansion comes significantly more data that businesses must store safely, cost-effectively and at-scale. This is a key challenge faced by all businesses, and exactly what Kaminario has set out to solve,” said Ritu Jyoti, chief product officer at Kaminario. “Dot Foods has an extremely dynamic environment, one that requires a storage solution which is adaptable and will grow with their business.”

With over nine locations nationwide, the family-owned and operated business offers over 105,000 products from 650 manufacturers with a mission to promote shared growth among its vast food supply chain. To run its complex operations, Dot Foods moved to a highly virtualized environment, the core of which is its ERP system that serves 4,200 users for order-entry, picking and putaway, routing and dispatch, and back office. Previously, Dot Foods used an HP 3PAR array with HDDs for its ERP system that holds data in a Microsoft SQL Server database. But as the business grew, the array ran out of capacity and its increased footprint raised power and cooling requirements. To meet the growing needs of its expanding business, Dot Foods was in search of a storage solution that featured easy scalability, seamless integration into its VMWare environment and 100% uptime. It also required a storage system that could accelerate performance of critical production workloads in a highly cost-efficient way.

“We selected Kaminario K2 based on its exceptional scalability, resiliency and performance offered at an attractive price–even when compared with legacy arrays,” said Eric Ellerman, network manager at Dot Foods. “We operate in a high-volume, low-margin business, and needed storage that was cost-efficient. In addition, our dynamic environment makes it difficult to predict performance and capacity requirements year-over-year. K2 provides a storage solution that can grow with our business.”

When evaluating the all-flash market, Dot Foods surveyed arrays from HP and Pure Storage but none matched the company’s requirements for consistent performance, 100% uptime, scalability and seamless integration into the existing data center. Dot Foods’ Kaminario implementation includes one K2 array deployed into production and another on a disaster recovery (DR) site, for a total of 90TB of guaranteed/180TB of effective capacity. Zerto Virtual Replication software was used to replicate application and database VMs to the second K2 array, supporting warehouse and transportation functions with a sub-60 second RPO.

Since its K2 deployment, Dot Foods has reduced storage cost/GB and lowered its footprint, power and cooling due to a 5:1 data compression rate. Additionally, as a result of a 30% reduction in runtime of batch processes, the company has gained the equivalent of one business operations employee. With K2, Dot Foods is confident that it can reliably meet the commitments to their customers as the business continues to grow.

“Dot Foods has taken a common, and highly problematic IT data storage and disaster recovery challenge and overcome it by combining Zerto’s software with Kaminario to create a flexible and scalable infrastructure that is easy to install and manage, while increasing efficiency and lowering total cost of ownership,” said Zerto’s Director of Global Product Marketing, Jennifer Gill. “By deploying K2 all-flash array storage and Zerto Virtual Replication we are arming Dot Foods with an infrastructure-agnostic solution that will simplify virtual machine management, while also exceeding IT service levels.”