Rice Producer Riso Gallo Implements NetApp

Gourmets
with a passion for rice and risotto will know that one of Europe’s largest rice
producers is based in Italy:
Riso Gallo.

A synonym for quality products, dedication to consumers’
preferences, and with a history of more than 150 years, the company is still
growing with product sales in more than 74 countries. Riso Gallo values IT as a
driver to transform market opportunities into business.

At its core is a
virtualized infrastructure based on NetApp storage to benefit from flexible and
simplified workflows to maintain product quality.

The company
with the green rooster in its logo was under pressure to solve performance,
flexibility, and reliability issues to meet business continuity for
mission-critical applications. Its server-attached storage infrastructure had
seen its best days. A technical refresh, designed and deployed together with
the NetApp partner ServerLab, was undertaken to meet the growing demands of its
customers and to secure the market introduction of new products such
as instant rice meals or the new healthy product line.

"The need to move to a virtualized
environment was pretty clear. After an extensive market evaluation we chose a
NetApp FAS2000 series system as the storage foundation for our new IT
infrastructure", says Silvana Bortolin, head of software projects at
Riso Gallo. "NetApp’s unified
storage approach was as compelling as its software portfolio, offering us the
flexibility and simplicity we missed previously. Furthermore, we are able to
manage our infrastructure without the need for technicians or expert help."

The result
of the IT consolidation at Riso Gallo is a virtualized environment
running VMware vSphere with NetApp unified storage enabling 24×7 business
continuity for mission critical applications such as order collection
and processing from about 70 sales managers, harvest management and purchase,
sales automation and business intelligence. Compared to the former solution
with HP storage directly-attached to a Windows server, Riso Gallo experienced
an increase in quality in terms of performance, reliability, ease of management
and flexibility.