In a business environment where timely market data yields a strong competitive advantage, Altra leverages the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) suite with Microsoft SQL Server on the backend. The SQL-heavy BI analytics workload requires regular builds of data cubes to use for business analysis, and poor server and storage performance limited the availability of this strategic business intelligence to only once per day.
To find a solution for these challenges, Altra’s key decision criteria included scalability and flexibility together in a platform that was profoundly simple to manage. Offering HyperConverged infrastructure (HCI) purpose built for Hyper-V, Altra was drawn to Gridstore by its ability to accelerate Microsoft workloads with a combination of all-flash performance and guaranteed storage Quality of Service (QoS). This unique combination of clarity and control ensures predictable performance for all its mission critical applications and delivers the agile environment required to support Altra’s business now and in the future.
“Many factors were considered when choosing Gridstore as a vendor to solve our problems,” said John Swanson, Global IT Infrastructure Manager, Altra Industrial Motion. “These factors included, but were not limited to, the use of proven hardware, a better way to manage virtual machines with QoS, Gridstore’s attention to detail to ensure our success, and having a flexible and scalable hyper-converged solution that would meet our needs now and in the future.”
Altra implemented the Gridstore HCI, comprised of one HyperConverged Appliance with four HyperConverged nodes and four 12TB hybrid storage nodes, reducing the overall footprint from 20U to 6U. Altra’s most impressive gains came as a result of Gridstore’s unique ability to isolate IO for each critical workload and provide guaranteed storage QoS to accelerate applications like SQL Server and the workloads they support. IBM Cognos SQL data cubes which previously took up to four hours to build are now down to 18 minutes running on Gridstore. Altra’s IT team is now able to deliver timely strategic data to its business analysts several times a day instead of just once – a key competitive advantage to stay ahead in a volatile global marketplace.
“After implementing the Gridstore solution, we have spent less time managing and more time providing valuable business services. Ultimately, there has been a vast impact with IT being able to provide more services, faster,” continued Swanson. “Our business intelligence group can now deliver updated information on a “follow-the-sun” model because it takes only minutes, not hours, for the application build. Now our business units have more current and accurate date to work from.”
