Burris Logistics | Cohesity

Distribution company simplifies and speeds operations, reduces data center footprint with Cohesity.

At a Glance

After reducing backup windows and improving operations, Burris builds test-dev environment on the same Cohesity platform.

Challenges

Complex and expensive primary and secondary storage infrastructure led Burris to seek a more cost-effective, simpler, and cloud integrated solution.

Solution

Burris deployed the software-defined Cohesity solution at both its primary and disaster recovery sites, easily archiving data, quickly locating archived data, and instantly restoring data by request.

Results

Burris has seen an 80% reduction in the time it takes to perform backups, a 25% CapEx savings and on-going OpEx savings while simplifying its operations with Cohesity.

Overview

As one of the nation’s largest and most sophisticated controlled-temperature food distribution companies, Burris Logistics offers over 60 million cubic feet of freezer warehousing space in 15 strategic locations along the East Coast.

For over 90 years, Burris has been a family-owned, family-run business that employs over 1500 people. Burris has built a solid reputation through strong culture, people and commitment to its customers—all reasons why national leading retailers turn to the company for custom supply chain solutions.

Challenges

The Burris IT Team manages two data centers, one primary and another disaster recovery (DR) site that supports multiple remote locations up and down the East Coast. As a long time Dell EMC customer, Burris deployed the Dell EMC stack for its primary and secondary storage.

With Dell EMC lease renewal on the horizon, the IT Infrastructure Team wanted to take a good hard look at all available storage options. Renewing the lease with Dell EMC would have been an easy choice, but it was expensive and did not simplify IT operations; hence, the decision was made to adopt Pure Storage FlashArray for primary storage. The team was very impressed with Pure’s performance, simplicity, scalability and savings, and wanted to expand the experience to its secondary storage environment.

While considering its next secondary storage solution, Burris wanted the new solution to

Simplify the secondary storage environment
Lower TCO
Integrate with Pure and offer Pure like benefits
Support cloud integration

Solution

The team looked at multiple secondary storage options, including Rubrik. After much deliberation and investigation, Burris decided to deploy Cohesity, a hyperconverged secondary storage solution. Cohesity offered a complete end-to-end data management solution rather than just simple backup. The team deployed Cohesity at both its primary and DR sites. The easy management interface of Cohesity, combined with its instant Google-like wild-card search of virtual machines meant that the team could

Easily archive data on Cohesity
Quickly locate archived data
Instantly restore data to address internal and external requests

Because of Cohesity’s SnapTree® technology, the Burris IT Infrastructure Team experienced a dramatic improvement in backup windows. Additionally, the team started using Cohesity as its main platform for test/dev environments. With zero-cost cloning, the Burris Applications Team could spin up data copies on Cohesity.

Cohesity helped us reduce our backup windows from around 14 hours to under 2.5 hours. This meant that our backup jobs would no longer bleed into regular work hours. The entire team is totally blown away with how easy it is to use and manage Cohesity.

—Jesse Bontrager, Systems Engineer, Burris Logistics

Results

Burris started realizing numerous immediate and long-term benefits from Cohesity

Over 80% reduction in backup windows – The Burris IT infrastructure team saw a huge reduction in the amount of time it took to perform backup jobs. What previously took around 14 hours now completes in under 2.5 hours. With Cohesity, backing up 25x servers takes under 30 minutes
25% CapEx savings – As a hyperconverged unified platform, Cohesity helped Burris lower its CapEx by 25%.
On-going OpEx savings – Cohesity helped Burris reduce its data center footprint, which resulted in power and cooling savings. Additionally, the team was not required to undergo any long and expensive training to get familiar with the new platform, which saved time and money.
Simplified operations – A simple to use and manage UI allowed the team to manage all of its secondary storage from a single point.