Valley Proteins Adopts FlashStack™ Converged Infrastructure for its Business-Critical SAP Applications

Valley Proteins, a Winchester, Virginia-based rendering company, transports hundreds of millions of gallons of used cooking oil and other byproducts every year, which enables the materials to be re-used instead of ending up in landfills. The company uses SAP as the cornerstone of its business, tracking materials, inventory, and vehicle location and maintenance in real time to maximize the efficiency of its 40 processing and transfer facilities and private trucking fleet, one of the largest in North America. It depends on SAP for a holistic view of customer profitability, supplier pricing, and individual factory performance, helping to guide and expedite business decision-making.

To achieve all the benefits of a Cisco and Pure Storage converged infrastructure (CI), Valley Proteins decided to deploy FlashStack, which combines Pure Storage FlashArrays with Cisco UCS servers and VMware software into a single, integrated architecture. A fully tested and validated reference architecture for SAP on FlashStack ensures rapid deployment, with no storage tier planning or tuning required. Highly efficient components reduce power, cooling, and data center costs.

"FlashStack gives us the ability to plan for the next five-to-seven years, which fundamentally enables our ability to pivot and grow," said Brad Wilton, Director of Information Technology for Valley Proteins. "It's an incredible value proposition. By helping us be more efficient with our logistics, FlashStack directly contributes to our bottom line and improves customer experience."

As the company pursued an aggressive growth strategy through acquisitions, it became clear that storage had become a bottleneck to consistent performance for SAP applications. The company's legacy storage arrays were three years old and had become overloaded.

"It got to the point where our storage required so much hands-on maintenance that it was difficult for engineers to get out to our remote sites and solve business problems," Wilton said.

Instead of another forklift storage upgrade and a lengthy, expensive professional services engagement, Valley Proteins began looking at all-flash storage solutions. It wanted enterprise storage as well as a converged infrastructure that would be easy to deploy, maintain and scale as the business grew.

For years, Valley Proteins has standardized on Cisco UCS servers, networking and security solutions for its data center and disaster recovery (DR) environments for a reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure. Pure Storage all-flash arrays were paired with Cisco UCS servers and, in a test environment, some production workloads were moved onto the Pure arrays.

"We were impressed with the performance gains that we saw. With Cisco UCS and all-flash storage behind SAP, we returned results at nearly the speed of an in-memory database," Wilton said. "Our engineer moved our entire 60TB production environment to FlashStack in less than three days, with zero downtime to the business, and without professional services assistance. The efficiencies gained were incredible. Now, we run faster and simpler."

About Valley Proteins
For three generations, Valley Proteins, Inc. traces its roots to 1949 has been a leader in providing an invaluable service to global economies and the environment. Through our core competencies in the recovery, rendering and recycling of animal processing, supermarket and foodservice waste streams, Valley Proteins sets the standard in creating renewable resources for the development of quality animal and pet feed ingredients.
At Valley Proteins, our business is based on the collection and recycling of animal processing waste from the food industry that would otherwise lead to environmental contamination. We provide prompt disposal services to restaurants, supermarkets, slaughterhouses and poultry processing facilities throughout the mid-Atlantic, eastern and southwestern United States. Our clean and efficient conversion plants recycle these waste streams (fat and bone trimmings; waste cooking oils; meat/poultry waste) into safe, high-energy feed fat and protein-rich meal products. These value-added sustainable ingredients provide the nutrients feed producers need to create high-quality animal feeds.

About Pure Storage
Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG) helps companies push the boundaries of what's possible. Pure's end-to-end data platform - including FlashArray, FlashBlade and our converged offering with Cisco, FlashStack – is powered by innovative software that's cloud-connected for management from anywhere on a mobile device and supported by the Evergreen business model. The company's all-flash based technology, combined with its customer-friendly business model, drives business and IT transformation with solutions that are effortless, efficient and evergreen. With Pure's industry leading Satmetrix-certified NPS score of 83.7, Pure customers are some of the happiest in the world, and include organizations of all sizes, across an ever-expanding range of industries.

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