Brewing Success: New Belgium Brewing Journey with VMware vSAN

In the dynamic world of craft brewing, technology plays a crucial role in ensuring the production of high-quality beer. Based in Fort Collins, Colorado, the New Belgium Brewing Company is a widely distributed brewery across the United States. Their product lineup includes popular offerings such as Fat Tire Ale, Voodoo Ranger IPA, Mural Agua Fresca Cerveza, and La Folie Sour Brown Ale, along with a range of regular and seasonal beer options.

New Belgium Brewing’s Enterprise Security and Compliance Manager, Adam Little, shares the brewery’s journey in optimizing its IT environment with VMware vSAN. We’ll explore how the transition to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) powered by VMware vSAN has empowered New Belgium Brewing to streamline operations, enhance performance, and align with its core values of sustainability.

Consolidating IT Infrastructure with VMware

When Adam joined New Belgium, the IT environment was a mix of various hypervisors. He recognized the need to consolidate and streamline their infrastructure, leading the brewery to choose VMware as its trusted partner. By standardizing on VMware, the company ensured a unified and scalable platform.

Adopting Hyperconverged Infrastructure for the Edge

With multiple production sites across the United States, New Belgium Brewing needed a solution for easy remote management. After evaluating various options, the decision to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was driven by the need for a reliable, remotely manageable solution that could scale quickly and provide ease of lifecycle management.

Addressing Unique Challenges at Production Sites

The acquisition of new production sites posed unique challenges, requiring rapid deployment and technology updates. VMware vSAN is instrumental in addressing these challenges, showcasing flexibility, ensuring reliability and performance required for critical manufacturing processes. The brewery’s ability to quickly set up, test, and swap over production processes showcased the flexibility and efficiency of their HCI solution powered by vSAN.

The Latest Site Running vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA)

Staying current with VMware technologies, the latest New Belgium Brewing site is equipped with vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA). Initial testing of VMware vSAN ESA, yielded impressive results in terms of performance and reduced latency, especially crucial for their database-intensive workloads.

The site manages two full canning lines, showcasing the versatility of vSAN ESA in handling diverse production requirement. New Belgium Brewing found immediate benefits of the new vSAN ESA in terms of improved performance, response time, and the ability to extract valuable insights from unstructured data in databases. New Belgium Brewing deployment of a SQL database on vSAN ESA has yielded “extremely impressive” performance, further solidifying the advantages of vSAN in data-intensive tasks.

Impact of vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA)

VMware vSAN ESA improved response times, reduced latency, enhanced the ability to extract valuable insights from data, particularly in data-intensive tasks and databases. The performance gains from upgrading to the latest vSAN ESA were particularly notable in databases logging site-specific data. The faster turnaround of data allowed for quicker decision-making, positively influencing the manufacturing processes at New Belgium Brewing.

Future and Upgrades with VMware vSAN

Looking ahead, New Belgium Brewing to extend its use of VMware vSAN by upgrading existing sites and refreshing clusters with the latest vSAN ESA technology. The introduction of VMware vSAN’s ESA demonstrated tangible improvements in performance, particularly benefiting data-intensive tasks and databases. The brewery anticipates continued success and efficiency gains as it leverages vSAN’s capabilities in future upgrades.

New Belgium Brewery’s success story with VMware vSAN showcases the transformative power of technology in the craft brewing industry. By adopting HCI and leveraging the capabilities of VMware vSAN, the brewery has not only streamlined its IT operations but also aligned with its core values of sustainability and accessibility. As New Belgium Brewing continues to grow, its partnership with VMware by Broadcom ensures a scalable, efficient, and environmentally conscious IT infrastructure that drives the brewery’s success.