Application-aware technology for Colorcon’s virtualised environment

Colorcon, a global pharmaceutical supplier, is using Tintri’s solution to underpin its entire virtualisation environment. The new solution has improved administration times and cut VM deployment times by 10 X.

As a world leader in the development, supply and support of formulated products for the pharmaceutical industry, Colorcon has built a reputation for superior product quality. Maintaining a high ‘speed-to-market’ is key to its competitiveness and reputation, and it relies on a fully optimised, high performing IT infrastructure to meet its tight timeframes.

The company’s legacy SAN was struggling to support the company’s VMware and Windows environments across its growing global operations. With no dedicated SAN administrator and ongoing need to create more disk space, Colorcon’s IT team faced the time-consuming and inefficient trouble-shooting processes on a day-to-day basis. When UK partner Teneo recommended Tintri, Colorcon made the decision to change.

Paul Newman, manager of global network architecture at Colorcon, said: “We had already come across Tintri at IP Expo in London so it made sense to find out more. With Tintri’s application-aware storage, we have eliminated the need to hire a dedicated SAN admin. Its simplicity has eliminated over an hour per week for routine maintenance, including software upgrades and configuring new LUNs. Tintri really is a ‘set it and forget it’ platform.”

Colorcon has installed four Tintri VMstore T540 storage arrays. Two are at the company’s UK data centre and the other two are at Colorcon’s US facility. The solution also allows Colorcon to replicate critical VMs from the US to the UK for disaster recovery purposes.

Newman concluded: “Tintri’s intuitive user interface enables us to quickly identify problem virtual machines. This is essential for the fast-paced pharmaceutical sector. I can immediately see if one VM is bringing down performance across the entire stack. Tintri’svisibility into individual VM performance is unparalleled.”

Doug Rich, EMEA VP, Tintri said: “The Colorcon project allowed us to put Tintri’s performance capabilities and cost effectiveness up against those of a legacy SAN product. The resulting deployment has exactly matched Colorcon’s needs – providing a solution that requires very little attention from the IT team, whilst improving the performance of the company’s IT systems and making VM deployment times 10 X faster.”