Belgian Fashion retailer Modemakers modernized its storage by replacing the old system with VMware vSAN 6.7 and a vSAN Remote Office Branch Office license. The new system offers more capacity in a stable environment and, at the same time, is easy to manage. It just proves that this solution can also be interesting and affordable even for small and medium businesses (SMB).
With 11 boutiques in Flanders, Modemakers is a Belgian fashion retailer who focuses on a unique shopping experience with personalized advice in a homelike atmosphere and vintage style. An experience that is superior to online shopping. Therefore, Modemakers invests in its own photography that highlights the experience in their stores – rather than using the usual stock photographs offered by the clothing brands. This has an impact on IT, and storage capacity became a problem. “Our photo storage has grown exponentially in recent years. Even beyond the capabilities of the existing system”, says IT-manager Giovanni Govaerts.
New storage with affordable simplicity
Because of the team’s limited size, the new solution must be easy to manage systems while still being stable. As Modemakers wasn’t willing to sacrifice capabilities in the name of ease-of-use, the solution had still to deliver class-leading performance that enables the business to keep up with market demands.
Giovanni Govaerts: “Today, technology is becoming more and more complex. But as an IT-manager of an SMB, I need to work with a limited team. We can no longer spend too much time on the day-to-day management of servers. So, we were looking for a user-friendly solution that is easy to manage. That’s why we choose VMware vSAN.”
It was integrator ePact, trusted IT-partner of Modemakers, that gave the advice to replace the old VMware vSphere 5.5 solution by a more recent version of vSphere (6.7) and supplemented with vSAN 6.7 and a vSAN Remote Office Branch Office license (ROBO 25 VM pack). With the new solution, Modemakers almost doubled storage capacity.
Future-proof and cloud-ready
With a VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution on Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, Modemakers can simplify how they manage infrastructure. And they have flexibility to easily make changes to support future business needs. The new solution also makes the systems more efficient with faster workloads.
Giovanni concludes: “The software defined infrastructure solution that offers us more flexibility and enables a trajectory to the cloud. With the upgraded on-prem data center we can run everything in the cloud. If there is a problem tomorrow, Modemakers will be back up and running in the cloud in just one day.”
