Admitting that they were a bit late in upgrading their storage infrastructure, Rogelio Tayamora, IT director at Pepsi-Cola Products Philippines Inc., said that they waited for the right time when they would "really need it."
"The time came early this year when I hit 99 percent of my Oracle utilization," he said, referring to the Oracle Corp. applications that the company is running that includes Oracle Financials, Oracle Data Mining (ODM), and Oracle's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution.
"We felt the impact on our monthly closing process so we made a decision to augment our existing storage system," Tayamora said. Prior to migration to the Sun StorageTek 6140, Pepsi was using Sun Fire v880 and Sun Fire v440 servers.
According to Tayamora, the acquisition of a new storage server was already in the company's plans since last year. It was only in the second quarter of this year, however, when the company's IT department seriously began talking about upgrading storage when the company was on the heels of another Oracle implementation.
The department's storage utilization monitoring system identified a need to upgrade because of the growing distribution and number of users.
Several storage vendors also were considered as well but Pepsi decided to choose Sun StorageTek because Sun provided the "end-to-end support" that the company needs. The deal was finalized through Sun Microsystems' local elite partner, InfoStorage, which was the local distributor of Storagetek before the latter was acquired by Sun last year.
"Infostorage complements Sun a lot, that's why they are our only elite partner in the country," said Anthony Agustin Jr., storage manager for Sun Microsystems' sales and pre-sales division.
According to Agustin, the Sun StorageTek 6140 scales up to 16 disk drives per tray with up to six expansion trays, and supports up to 112 disks and 56 terabytes, offers four or eight 4Gigabit Fibre Channel ports, allowing companies to start small and add storage 'non-disruptively and only when they need it."
"One feature we like is the ability to take out the disk and take it to another location with minimum downtime," said Tayamora.
"Pepsi will (most likely) use StorageTek to connect to all servers directly or via SAN (storage area network) and, eventually, buy another system and do DR (disaster recovery) by way of replication," said Agustin.
Pepsi-Cola Philippines currently has 11 production plants and 13 business units all over the country. Its biggest is located in Muntinlupa City and runs 24/7.