Case Study: Liberty Wines Drives New Innovations in Wine Production Supply Chain IT with OSNexus QuantaStor

Company Overview

Starting with a team of just four, David Gleave MW founded Liberty Wines in 1997 with the support of some top wine producers from Italy and Australia. His aim was simple and hasn't changed to this day: “I started this business determined to work with exceptional producers, whatever their size or location, with the belief that with hard work and by being stubbornly quality focused we would deliver the finest wines to our customers.” Now with a staff of over 160 and a portfolio of over 330 of the most exciting producers in the wine world, importer and wholesaler Liberty Wines continues to offer exceptional value and quality at every level, selling to the on-trade, independent off-trade and the high street.

The Challenge

Due to the age of their existing virtualisation environment, Liberty Wines was looking to refresh it all, including their current legacy storage infrastructure. The main issues they had been facing on their existing storage solution was that the SSDs were growing in age, and it was not known how much life was left, and as a result, performance and reliability was becoming a concern.

Liberty Wines had been managing and maintaining this legacy storage infrastructure, and they preferred the ZFS technology for its versatility, resiliency and performance. Liberty Wines was also focusing on their backup plans and needed a new storage solution that supported native replication and could scale and grow with their needs.

“We can now worry less about the storage and take advantage of all of the great features that QuantaStor provides, which ultimately delivers the essential performance and reliability we want,” said Liberty Wines.

The Solution

With the help of their trusted VAR, Liberty Wines found QuantaStor, a platform that offered them the similar functionality to what they had currently but could natively support their current ZFS-based storage for their virtualisation environment refresh. Liberty Wines were amazed at QuantaStor’s hardware agnostic approach, and that they could if they wanted to reuse the legacy hardware from their existing ZFS-based storage solution. The team liked how easy QuantaStor’s user interface was to use, and that the grid management could be used to manage current and future QuantaStor storage appliances. QuantaStor’s features, such as snapshots, replication and SSD lifecycle management were exactly what Liberty Wines were looking for in a new storage solution. After testing the solution they found the performance to exceed their existing solution. Liberty Wines chose QuantaStor as their new storage solution, and this allowed them to focus on their virtualisation refresh and scale and grow with their needs. Liberty Wines states, “We can now worry less about the storage and take advantage of all of the great features that QuantaStor provides, which ultimately delivers the essential performance and reliability we want.”

The Result

This diagram describes Liberty Wines IT environment for it's QuantaStor-based data storage.

Liberty Wines uses QuantaStor in their headquarters in London, United Kingdom. The solution delivers storage to their virtualisation hypervisor, with two appliances configured in high-availability connected via SAS to two JBODs. Liberty Wines states that they benefit the most from QuantaStor’s performance using new SSDs and are now able to monitor how much life they have left. QuantaStor allows Liberty Wines to save time, money, plus provide them with total flexibility in how and where they utilise their hardware as well as meet their performance requirements for their virtualisation environment.