A common challenge many growing organizations face is storage capacity becoming a bottleneck for IT operations, and this rang especially true for Belgian fashion retailer, Modemakers. Modemakers’ mission is to provide customers with a personalized, unique in-store shopping experience. This means much of their creative strategies rely on brand-specific output like in-house photography that requires a lot of storage space. To meet their growing customer demands while staying true to their desired creative output, Modemakers turned to VMware vSAN for future-proof and simple storage management.
Storage Capacity as a Bottleneck – So Last Season
Before implementing vSAN, storage capacity and management were becoming a pressing issue for Modemakers. To preserve the integrity of their marketing strategy, Modemakers relied on in-house photography, rather than stock imagery provided by clothing brands, to display their products on their website; in return, both archive and day-to-day photo storage needs grew outside of their existing capabilities. As their storage needs evolved, so did their business needs, and their small IT team required significant results to remain competitive. Because of the team’s size, their new storage solution needed to simplify storage management while providing future-proof stability and leading-class performance to keep up with market demands.
Simple Storage Management with vSAN, the Best Accessory
In search of their new IT storage solution, Modemakers turned towards their IT partner, ePact, for advice. ePact advised the fashion retailer to take vSphere and supplement with vSAN and vSAN ROBO (Remote Office / Branch Office) license. Their new technology was then installed on Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, fully redundant with a stretched vSAN setup. This ensured that if a server were to fail due to a power outage or other unexpected event, there would be no effect on this business. In tandem, Modemakers almost doubled their storage capacity. With their new Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution on Dell Technologies hardware, Modemakers were able to simplify their storage management operations and gain the flexibility to support future business needs.
“The simplicity of management that we are familiar with from VMware vSphere is now reflected in VMware vSAN solution. This allows us to manage our storage very easily and centrally from the familiar vCenter Server management tool”
Giovanni Govaerts, IT Manager, Modemakers
Looking Ahead to the Future of Fashion IT
The implementation of the vSAN software-defined infrastructure solution ensures more flexibility and business continuity assured as exemplified by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the short-term, Modemakers is looking to develop a webshop. In the long-term, vSAN sets a solid foundation for migrating to the cloud.
“It is the software defined infrastructure solution from vSAN that offers Modemakers more flexibility and enables a trajectory to the cloud.”
Christof Ugau, managing partner of ePact, Modemakers IT partner
Hear more customer success stories here and view the full Modemakers case study here.
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