80% Reduction in Backup Windows for Burris Logistics 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 them for custom supply chain solutions.

Challenges

Burris Logistics IT Team manages two data centers, one primary and another DR site that supports multiple remote locations up and down the East Coast. As a long time Dell EMC customer, Burris deployed Dell EMC stack for their 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 their IT operations; hence, the decision was made to adopt Pure Storage FlashArray for their primary storage. The team was very impressed with Pure’s performance, simplicity, scalability and savings, and wanted to expand the experience to their secondary storage environment.

While considering their 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, and
• 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 a simple backup. The team deployed Cohesity at both their primary and DR sites. Easy management interface of Cohesity, combined with its instant Google-like wild-card search of virtual machines meant that the team could,

1. easily archive data on Cohesity
2. quickly locate archived data, and
3. instantly restore it to address internal and external requests.

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

Results

Burris Logistics started realizing numerous immediate and long term benefits from Cohesity.

• 25% CapEx savings: As a hyperconverged unified platform, Cohesity helped Burris Logistics lower their CapEx by 25%.
• Ongoing 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 their secondary storage from a single point.