With 140 breweries in more than 70 countries creating 200 million hector liters of beer and cider a year, including a large export business to the United States from the three breweries of its base in Holland, Heineken Netherlands is one of the largest, worldwide brewery operations in the world. Its IT environment is demanding. It requires a 24/7 IT operation because brewing is a 24/7 operation. Shutting down a packaging line, for instance, costs the company 12,000€ an hour. 

Heineken Netherlands had been running on Hewlett-Packard blade servers and storage with 12 server rooms it wanted to combine into a single data center. It had virtualized its test environment with VMware but was constrained in its plans to  upgrade to Windows Server 2008 and to the then latest VMware to support virtualizing its production environments.

As a result, it migrated from HP storage to Compellent, both to gain support for all operating systems and to better support its virtualization. Interviewed on SiliconAngle.TV from VMworld2010 in San Francisco, Heineken Netherlands Lucien de Konink said the company picked Compellent specifically because it supported all operating systems and was designed to work with VMware to create a fully virtualized server and storage architecture. They also needed a high performance solution.

“We were told that the conversion would go flawlessly, and that is what happened,” Heineken Netherlands Mike Robers said. the entire migration took six weeks, compared to an average of six months to migrate a single array as reported by users to analyst firm Wikibon.org.

Under the HP system, Heineken Netherlands had no direct access to any information on how its data was used internally. The Compellent system, in contrast, provided precise information. Heineken Netherlands was able to recover 30%-40% of its disk space immediately because of Compellent’s thin provisioning architecture and decreased the number of physical disks it needed by 60% overall, cutting both power and cooling consumption. Heineken Netherlands has a three-tier architecture with solid-state storage for its highest demand data. Compellent’s reporting and fluid data tiering sytem allow it to optimize use of that expensive resource. Now, Robers said, the company is planning to expand its lower-cost SATA disk tier rather than growing the top tier.

Since then Heineken Netherlands’ virtualization plan has proceeded smoothly, and it now has its production environment 61% virtualized, with a target of reaching 90% in 2012. Besides increasing utilization and thereby decreasing the number of boxes on the floor, the virtualized architecture has increased reliability and facilitated data backup and recovery by making it easy to copy data between locations. Overall, the Compellent/VMware combination has saved the company significant money while allowing it to upgrade it infrastructure and improve service.