Infotech Lead America: HP announced that HoneyBaked Ham Company of Georgia selected HP Converged Storage to increase data center capacity and performance and improve real-time decision making that is critical to meeting seasonal business demands.
By selecting HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HoneyBaked was able to eliminate delays of mission-critical data, even during peak sales times. Real-time visibility into sales and inventory data has improved HoneyBaked’s forecasting and fulfillment capabilities, enabling it to more precisely meet customer demand.
HoneyBaked’s legacy infrastructure lacked the capacity and performance needed to deliver real-time point-of-sale (POS) and inventory data imperative for managing seasonal demand. Daily results were delayed up to 12 hours, limiting the ability to control production, inventory and sales, which jeopardized profitability during the retailer’s most lucrative times of year.
Centralizing data collection via HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage also improved productivity, eliminating data center performance bottlenecks by distributing workloads across system resources. The resulting tenfold increase in system performance also has accelerated transaction processing, further improving customer service.
“We couldn’t make it through another holiday season experiencing mission-critical data delays caused by our legacy infrastructure,” said Kevin Madsen, senior infrastructure director, HoneyBaked Ham of Georgia. “HP Converged Storage centralized and improved the reliability of our data while eliminating performance delays to help stores maximize the customer experience by offering the right product mix and availability.”
HoneyBaked uses HP 3PAR Dynamic Optimization Software and HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage to non-disruptively add and rebalance capacity and system resources to handle changes in business demand on the fly without compromising performance. It helps enhance real-time visibility into inventory and sales information, even during periods where transaction volume spikes dramatically.
The retailer also implemented HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software, which improves storage efficiency and asset utilization. Now HoneyBaked saves approximately 50 percent in storage capacity, which minimizes future hardware investments as the company scales its data storage infrastructure. This hardware reduction also lowers data center power and cooling costs.
“Retailers can’t afford to lose customers or fail to capitalize on sales trends because IT issues are forcing stores to make inventory and pricing decisions based on old data,” said Chris Riley, vice president, U.S., Storage, HP. “HP Converged Storage ensures that HoneyBaked Ham executives can accurately inventory and price products based on real-time data to both maximize sales and customer satisfaction.”
As part of the data center upgrade, HoneyBaked also selected multilayer HP 7500 Switch Series, HP ProLiant DL360 Servers, HP Deployment Services and HP 24/7 Support.
