C A S E S T U D Y: T E C O
Nimble Storage Solution Drives
Performance Improvements At TECO
Storage Profile: TECO
Customer Challenges
Scheduled hardware refresh
provided opportunity to update,
For more than 40 years Taiwan-headquartered TECO Electric and Machinery Company
has been supplying precision electric motors and drives to governments and industries
throughout the South-East Asian region. The organisation’s Singapore business
oversees the operation of subsidiary manufacturing facilities and offices in Thailand,
Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India.
TECO Singapore’s complex business operations and manufacturing environment are
supported by a number of essential applications and information systems including SAP,
MS-SQL, Lotus Notes and file services. Keeping the systems running is the responsibility
of Cheong Yew Nam, head of the company’s IT department.
Consolidation for Ease of Management
In late 2013, a scheduled hardware refresh presented Cheong with an opportunity to
update, consolidate and simplify the company’s IT infrastructure. Recognising the
potential for cost and efficiency gains, he decided to replace the company’s physical
servers with a virtual platform and to deploy a new storage area network (SAN) to support
the new environment.
“I went to the market and looked at each and every brand available, from IBM and EMC
to HP, Hitachi, NetApp, and Nimble,” Cheong notes. “All had their own advantages and
disadvantages.”
In the end, the Nimble appliance ease of management helped to convince Cheong. He
selected a solution based on replication between Nimble CS220G and CS210 arrays
because, he says, “I wanted to keep our IT purchases simple and Nimble was easiest to
maintain, with performance to match all the other big players.”
consolidate and simplify the
company’s IT infrastructure
Solution
Nimble CS220G and CS210 arrays
Business Benefits
Reduction in time required to conduct
backups and replication from almost
13 hours to complete the daily
backup to less than two hours
Boost in ability to quickly recover
from a disaster through replicating
the whole infrastructure on the
secondary Nimble device
Significant improvement in
performance. Response times for
the SAP database reduced by 60
percent, to just 150 milliseconds
DDIO latency reduced from between
three and five milliseconds to below
one millisecond
More space for future equipment
expansion
Backups Reduced from 13 Hours to 2 Hours
On the day of deployment, Cheong was heavily involved in the company’s annual stock
check. He says, “I had to leave the systems engineers in the office for half a day and by
the time I came back, they had almost finished deploying the devices. It happened in
quite a short period.”
One of the first benefits to emerge from the new SAN was the reduction in time required
to conduct backups and replication. “We used to have software from two different parties
for our backups. Now we purely rely on the Nimble snapshots. We’ve gone from almost
13 hours to complete the daily backup to less than two hours and in a sense, we have
less points of failure,” Cheong states.
TECO Singapore’s ability to quickly recover from a disaster has also been boosted.
“We used to have one server for disaster recovery and it was only used for our most
critical SAP data. Now we replicate the whole infrastructure on the secondary Nimble
device. It’s a much greater improvement compared to before,” he adds.
Latency Improved to Sub-Milliseconds
“Previously there was a lot of
storage to maintain. Now we only
have one system to manage and
we actually don’t really need to
monitor it because Nimble’s
service team do it for us through
the InfoSight portal. I think we
made a very good choice. For
our budget, our needs and for the
The other big change has been a significant improvement in performance. Response
times for the SAP database used to be approximately 400 milliseconds. Since the
introduction of Nimble, this has reduced by 60 percent, to just 150 milliseconds.
ease of use, Nimble has done a
Similarly, DDIO latency, which used to sit between three and five milliseconds, is now
below one millisecond.
Cheong Yew Nam
Head of IT Department
TECO Electric and Machinery Co
“This is what Nimble promised us would happen,” Cheong happily points out.
great job.”
A System that Monitors Itself
The move to virtualisation and the small footprint of the Nimble devices have also
helped to usher in physical changes within the data centre. With only three servers to
manage and with all storage consolidated, there’s far more space for future equipment
expansion, and for Cheong and his team to work in.
“Previously there was a lot of storage to maintain. Now we only have one system to
manage and we actually don’t really need to monitor it because Nimble’s service team
do it for us through the InfoSight portal. The service staff are very good at
giving support.
Cheong pauses for a moment before summing up, “I think we made a very good choice.
For our budget, our needs and for the ease of use, Nimble has done a great job.”
Nimble Storage Singapore
Phone: +65 9768 1116
Email: [email protected]
www.nimblestorage.com
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trade names are the property of their respective owners. CS-TECO-0414