Mellano & Company
Leading California Flower Grower Virtualizes Entire Environment
Customer Overview
Mellano & Company has been a family-owned flower grower and wholesaler in southern California for three generations. From simple immigrant beginnings under its founder, Giovanni Mellano, the firm has grown to include both domestic and international suppliers and provides over 7 million bunches of flowers per year. It now has over 400 acres under cultivation and 150,000 visitors each year. Jim Mellano says, “We strive to stay technologically advanced, vertically integrated, and unafraid of making crop mix changes—all of this adds to our success.”
The Challenge
Mellano & Company used Great Plains financial software for its accounting needs and had implemented a multi-site network to access this application using Citrix and desktop client terminals. User sessions hung frequently, resulting in slowdowns for everyone connected to the hung servers and reduced productivity across company.
Other desktop applications like Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange also depended on individual file and application servers, which meant that a single aging Dell server became the bottleneck for 60 remote users. Without an efficient way to share resources, performance slowed to a crawl.
The Solution
The Covell Group is a family-owned firm as well. It specializes in IT consulting for small- and medium-sized businesses and handles IT for Mellano & Company. Daniel Covell (MCP and CCNA) has experience managing large corporate networks and implementing desktop management solutions, which makes him highly skilled at re-working small and medium-sized business datacenters with affordable technology.
Daniel was interested in VMware as a solution for both application servers and remote clients. He was seeking a scalable, reliable storage device that could handle both file and application storage for the right price. He investigated products from NetApp’s FAS line, as well as EMC and Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server. The StoreVault solution offered the most robust features for the right price, and the included NetApp technology gave him confidence.
The StoreVault S500, configured with eight 500GB drives and RAID DP for high reliability, is the storage centerpiece in Covell Group’s desktop virtualization project for Mellano & Company. Daniel set up a StoreVault as an iSCSI SAN, hosting 60 VMware virtual desktops (one for each end user). A second network accesses NAS volumes on the StoreVault for file sharing between VMs.
Desktop management is no longer an issue, since each desktop is totally portable. If one virtual machine is brought down, it does not impact the other virtual machines and allows normal operations to continue unabated. Of course, VMware also eliminates the need for a Citrix Server, clients, and licenses.
Mellano & Company sees two main benefits. First, NAS data is instantly backed up and restored via Snapshots on the StoreVault, Secondly, the virtualization project has been so successful that Danny plans to consolidate the remaining eight application servers into VMs, without buying more storage.Customer Experience
Once the new infrastructure was implemented, Daniel tested Mellano & Company’s network capabilities. He bought a Dell Gigabit switch for approximately $2000 and measured his throughput at 430MBps on the iSCSI SAN. That was more than he saw in his old environment, and proved to him that iSCSI was a very smart decision. Company manager Phil Kenney noted, “In a multi-location company like Mellano & Co., communication and access to information is essential.” Daniel said, “Our StoreVault holds more data and is faster than our old servers, even when gathering small amounts of data from multiple locations—a typical task in a VMware environment.”
Mellano & Company’s IT infrastructure has really blossomed, thanks to the Covell Group and the StoreVault S500.
Technical Environment
- Operating systems in use: Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP
- Critical software deployed: VMware ESX, Quickbooks, Great Plains
- Backup Software: Backup Exec with tape media
Mellano & Company
766 Wall Street
Los Angeles, CA 90014
Phone 213.622.0796
Fax 213.622.4942
www.mellano.com
