Case Study: Food Retailer centralizes and virtualizes storage with Razor Technology

How Razor Technology Centralized and Virtualized a Leading Food Retailer’s Storage Architecture

Food Retailer, a Mid-Atlantic grocery chain with more than 18,000 associates, hundreds of stores, and multiple distribution centers and offices, needed to support rapid growth with an IT infrastructure that could keep up. Its existing storage environment was fragmented and underpowered: NFS ran largely on physical servers, virtual machine usage was low, and each new store required separate storage, making consolidation difficult. Food Retailer turned to Razor Technology for help modernizing its storage and virtualization architecture.

Razor Technology centralized and virtualized the environment by increasing VMs from 30 to 200, doubling storage capacity from 25 TB to 50 TB, and deploying a four-node C-Mode NetApp cluster to improve management and stability. As a result, Food Retailer centralized 95% of files and data, with about 85% hosted on VMs, and significantly improved operations—scaling storage without disruption, adding nodes for new stores and backups, and cutting distribution center re-orgs from three to four hours down to about one hour.