OMP is a software and consulting company that provides advanced supply chain planning solutions to customers around the world.

OMP's data volume grows by as much as 40% every year. As an expert in supply chain planning solutions, the company has many international customers. To provide these customers with the right professional services and solutions, the software company offers an extensive range of consulting, implementation, development, and customer service. On every front, they have specific requirements when it comes to data management. Two of the most critical factors are data confidentiality and disaster recovery.

OMP's office in Wommelgem houses the main data center and a separate disaster room with all company data. The data center at the US office also plays a key role in business continuity and disaster recovery. These two key offices provide data access to all other locations (for security and infrastructure reasons). That's why data transfer always has to run smoothly and securely. So reviewing the storage and backup strategy wasn't something we could take lightly.

We implemented Nimble as the new storage solution. A high degree of scalability was a top priority for OMP. With Nimble, the company can easily process extra data at a high performance level. They can even add extra storage space whenever needed. Since 500 to 600 colleagues use the storage environment at the same time, that's an option that was very well received. Nimble's own proactive support system sends out incident alerts before anything goes wrong. A big advantage, if you ask us.

Of course, a storage solution is only as powerful as its backup system. Previously, OMP's backup and synchronization processes were handled by two separate solutions. That occasionally caused unnecessary data transfer between the data centers in Belgium and the US. If there's one thing offices don't need, it's superfluous data transfers. When synchronization volumes got too large and transfer times too long, the transfer ate up bandwidth between the offices. With the previous solution, the synchronization software automatically synced the entire backup whenever a document was backed up. That's why we helped OMP set up Cohesity. This software handles both the backup process and the synchronization.

Another useful feature of Cohesity is deduplication. Cohesity deduplicates data per system rather than per document. It automatically removes duplicate copies of data. The result? Up to 10 times more storage space. With 1,000 TB of backup data, that translates into 900 TB of saved storage space.

Users who generate data, like OMP's customers, will always need more storage space. Creating room for data is fine, but cleaning up the data is just as important. Fortunately, both we and the customer agree on the importance of further analyzing data retention periods, and on the need to back up files on the file systems.

Marc Scherens, ICT Director at OMP, enjoyed working with us. "In the past, we used to set up all our storage and backup solutions ourselves. Because these implementations take up a lot of valuable time, we decided to entrust this project to a partner. Thanks to their expertise, Xylos got everything up and running in under a month. Our collaboration went very smoothly and Xylos provided excellent follow-up. They also introduced us to HPE InfoSight, a tool that gives insight into the entire storage environment. They also planned internal training sessions to teach our IT staff how to use the advanced features," says Marc. As for us, we couldn't be happier with how smoothly the collaboration went.