SUCCESS STORY: Textile Rubber & Chemical Company
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Brocade VDX 6740 Switches
- Brocade ICX 6610 Switches
- Brocade ICX 6450 Switches
- Brocade Network Advisor
Tech Stack
- VMware
- SAP HANA
- Nimble flash storage systems
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Industries
- Chemicals
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Textile Rubber & Chemical Company (TRCC) is a multinational chemical and technology company with operations on five continents. The company provides products to the flooring industry, including coatings, adhesives, flooring finishing equipment, polyurethane backing, latex compounds, thermoplastic backing systems, specialty chemicals, and polymer modifiers for asphalt. TRCC is an early adopter of SAP HANA, which converges database and application platform capabilities in memory to transform transactions, analytics, text analysis, and predictive and spatial processing for real-time business. TRCC began its SAP HANA deployment in 2014 and continues to implement it across the company. TRCC also relies on a VMware environment with 300 Virtual Machines (VMs) and a Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with VMware Horizon View to automate functions and simplify desktop management. Supporting the company’s 22 divisions and 500 users are three IT staff members that support every aspect of IT. Just three. And they are busy.
The Challenge
Textile Rubber & Chemical Company (TRCC) is a multinational chemical and technology company with operations on five continents. The company provides products to the flooring industry, including coatings, adhesives, flooring finishing equipment, polyurethane backing, latex compounds, thermoplastic backing systems, specialty chemicals, and polymer modifiers for asphalt. TRCC is an early adopter of SAP HANA, which converges database and application platform capabilities in memory to transform transactions, analytics, text analysis, and predictive and spatial processing for real-time business. TRCC began its SAP HANA deployment in 2014 and continues to implement it across the company. TRCC also relies on a VMware environment with 300 Virtual Machines (VMs) and a Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with VMware Horizon View to automate functions and simplify desktop management. Supporting the company’s 22 divisions and 500 users are three IT staff members that support every aspect of IT. Just three. And they are busy. In the preceding decade, the network had been expanded in an ad hoc fashion, and the underlying network had not kept up with the new demands. The switches performed poorly, frequently rebroadcasting packets between network segments (packet storms) and resulting in significant latency. In fact, users’ keyboards in the VDI environment slowed so much that it affected their productivity. TRCC also experienced network outages with the old network switches. Although several business divisions could tolerate a rare, brief outage without adverse effects, downtime completely disrupted the SAP HANA application and the productivity of numerous TRCC employees.
The Solution
TRCC now uses Brocade VDX® 6740 Switches with Brocade VCS Fabric technology for the network core. These are Ethernet fabric Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches that support the company’s demanding data center environment. The Brocade VDX 6740T Switch offers 48 10GBASE-T ports and four 40 GbE QSFP+ ports. Each 40 GbE port can be broken out into four independent 10 GbE SFP+ ports, providing an additional 16 10 GbE SFP+ ports. Brocade VDX 6740 Switches also form the core in the iSCSI storage environment. In the data center, the Brocade VDX Switches are connected to stacked Brocade ICX® 6610 Switches using 120 Gbps links. The Brocade ICX 6610 Switches deliver wire-speed, nonblocking performance across all ports and up to 320 Gbps of stacking bandwidth. For TRCC, the Brocade ICX 6610 Switches provide campus aggregation for Brocade ICX 6450 Switches deployed at the campus edges. All locations are connected point to point using dark fiber. In each location, the Brocade ICX 6450 Switches power the VoIP phones and the Aruba wireless network using Power over Ethernet (PoE). The data center and iSCSI storage Brocade VDX Switches are connected using 120 Gbps links. In the iSCSI storage environment, the Brocade VDX 6740 Switch is connected to a Dell Blade chassis, 32 TBs of Nimble flash storage, and the SAP HANA appliances.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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