1. IBM XIV Storage Systems Consumer products
Case Study
Coca-Cola Bottling Co.
Consolidated quenches
thirst for performance
200 - 300% performance boost at a tier-two price
with the IBM XIV Storage System
Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) is the largest independ-
Overview ent Coca-Cola bottler in the United States. The company is a leader in
manufacturing, selling, and distributing soft drinks. With corporate
The need
offices in Charlotte, North Carolina, the company does business in
Virtualizing 500 Windows servers tripled eleven states, primarily in the southeast. CCBCC’s product offerings
CCBCC’s storage requirements.
Expanding its tier-one storage systems include carbonated soft drinks, bottled water, teas, juices, isotonics, and
would have been too costly, but its tier- energy drinks.
two systems could not provide enough
performance.
In the fiercely competitive beverage industry, controlling operating costs
The solution is a sink-or-swim issue. Tom DeJuneas, IT Manager at CCBCC, explains:
Deployed an IBM XIV® Storage System “In our industry, there’s not a lot of room to raise prices, so instead we
for VMware servers, with an have to keep our expenses down. IT has a major role to play: we can cut
IBM System Storage® N6040 NAS our own operating costs, but also we can help the whole business by
Gateway for file serving; moved
SAP systems to a second XIV, accelerating their business processes and improving the availability and
soon to be asynchronously performance of key systems. A lot of that depends on fast, reliable,
mirrored to a third. low-cost storage: I’m always trying to get the price per gigabyte down
The benefit as I add storage and manage it.”
A single enterprise-proven platform for
all storage, seamlessly integrated with Aiming to act faster and smarter, CCBCC decided to migrate approxi-
VMware, giving a 200 to 300 percent per- mately 500 Microsoft Windows Servers into a VMware ESX Server envi-
formance boost over existing tier-two ronment. This virtualization program caused explosive growth in storage
storage, at one-third of the tier-one price.
volumes on the SAN which, in turn, produced rising costs and falling
performance. In two years, the SAN storage requirements grew from
25 TB to 70 TB, and were predicted to grow to 90 TB or more within
the following 12 months.
“We had four different requirements—tier-one, tier-two, NAS and DR—
but we didn’t want four different solutions,” explains DeJuneas. “We
wanted to keep things simple and standardize our storage landscape as
much as possible; the IBM XIV Storage System really ticked all the boxes.

2. IBM XIV Storage Systems Consumer products
Case Study
We were also very impressed with the agility of the IBM team: they
pulled together a contract in less than a day and a half, which enabled
“The primary benefit of us to close the deal before the end of our financial year.”
the IBM XIV solution
is its ability to deliver Sparkling performance improvements
IBM recommended implementing the IBM XIV Storage System—a
tier-one performance at a storage solution that perfectly complements a virtualization environment
tier-two price. Compared through its use of a virtualized grid architecture. This enables the XIV
system to deliver tier-one performance at a tier-two price, with consistent
to our old tier-two stor- performance and availability as well as simplicity.
age, we are seeing
a 200 to 300 percent “For CCBCC, the primary benefit of the IBM XIV solution is its ability
to deliver tier-one performance at a tier-two price,” concludes DeJuneas.
increase in I/O perform- “Compared to our old tier-two storage, we are seeing a 200 to
ance for a similar price 300 percent increase in I/O performance for a similar price per TB.
And compared to our tier-one systems, the XIV delivers an equal level of
per TB.” performance for one third of the cost. Virtualization has delivered a great
performance improvement for our customer management system—and
—Tom DeJuneas, IT Manager at CCBCC
when you’re selling Coke, every customer is vitally important!”
Refreshing simplicity
The first step was to implement an IBM XIV Storage System with
79 TB, and to migrate existing VMware servers from the existing SAN.
The IT team also set up a large number of new VMware servers to
replace older dedicated Windows servers. So far, around 300 virtual
machines are up and running on the XIV, and this should rise to
500 within the next 12 months.
“It’s stunningly easy to provision new storage on the XIV,” says DeJuneas.
“The interface is simple and hides all the complexity from the user, so we
don’t need to think about RAID arrays or other technicalities. The XIV
system also enables thin provisioning, so even if we don’t know exactly
how large a system is going to become, we can set it up without worrying
about sizing issues. We have a relatively small team and everyone needs to
wear several hats, so it’s a huge advantage in terms of IT operational costs
that the VMware guys can manage their own storage without needing
help from a specialist storage administrator.”
The majority of the VMware virtual servers at CCBCC run applications
such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft SQL
Server databases for the company’s customer management system. For
these servers, the IBM XIV delivers tier-one performance at tier-two
2

3. IBM XIV Storage Systems Consumer products
Case Study
pricing, ensuring that all batch processes now complete within the avail-
Solution components: able windows. The solution has also eliminated the need to put VMware
servers on tier-one storage, which was previously happening as CCBCC
Hardware
ran out of capacity on its old SAN.
G IBM® XIV® Storage System
G IBM System Storage® N6040 Gateway
“We have been able to replace three of our tier-two machines with a sin-
gle XIV, which saves on space, power and cooling in the data center,” says
DeJuneas. “This should also help to keep operational costs low, as well as
IT Environment supporting our Green IT objectives. Overall, the XIV system will reduce
Operating systems our cost of storage dramatically, enabling CCBCC to continue to grow in
G IBM AIX® the face of tough competition.”
G Microsoft Windows Server
Databases Delivering huge savings
G IBM DB2® for Linux, Unix and By integrating a second XIV system with an IBM System Storage
Windows N6040 Gateway, CCBCC gained both SAN and NAS functionalities
G Microsoft SQL Server in a single footprint. The N6040 Gateway provides NAS storage for the
Applications company’s file system, and the second XIV system is also used for some
of the company’s tier-one applications, including IBM AIX®-based
G Microsoft Exchange Server
G Microsoft SharePoint systems such as SAP ERP and IBM DB2®.
G SAP ERP
“The combination of the XIV and N6040 was really compelling, because
Virtualization
it meant that we could standardize on XIV as the storage platform for
VMware ESX Server
all our business needs,” comments DeJuneas. “For VMware, we did the
G
G VMware vSphere
migration using VMotion, but for SAP we used the XIV migration tool.
We are now running our entire SAP environment on the XIV, and we
love the ability to use snapshots to create test environments quickly.
Our SAP team was really impressed when we showed them how it
works—it’s amazing how quickly you can get the system back up when
you don’t need to restore from tape!”
One of the business goals for the new solution is to improve disaster
readiness by enhancing Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives.
CCBCC will deploy a third IBM XIV Storage System at its disaster
recovery site, and use the built-in asynchronous remote mirroring capa-
bility to protect systems and data in the event of a major outage at the
main data center.
“The range of software that comes as standard with the XIV is very
impressive, and the remote mirroring capability is particularly valuable,”
says DeJuneas. “We looked at some alternatives, and remote mirroring
alone would have cost us between $100k and $300k—so getting the same
functionality at no extra cost with the XIV equates to a huge saving.”
3

4. For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner,
or visit us at: ibm.com/storage/disk/xiv/
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Produced in the United States of America
July 2011
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