La Perla

La Perla is a world-class brand that offers a range of lines from underwear to nightwear, from beachwear to ready-to-wear to hosiery and perfumes.
Founding La Perla, was Ada Masotti who, in 1954, started a small corsetry workshop in Bologna. From the very beginning, La Perla products were designed to celebrate the timeless femininity of Italian women, maintaining the ideals of sensuality and refinement that still today make the company unique.

The company today includes the brands “La Perla Villa Toscana,” “Studio La Perla,” “Nero Perla,” and “Grigio Perla,” in addition to the license for La Perla and Grigioperla perfumes, granted to Selected Beauty.

Internationally, La Perla relies on a commercial structure based on subsidiaries (Germany, France, Spain, and the U.S.A.) and exclusive importers. In addition to being present with its brands in the best specialty stores and department stores, La Perla has created a chain of owned and franchised boutiques located in the world’s major capitals.

The Challeng

Consolidating the infrastructure and improving performance

Present in the Bologna area with four different locations and already a NetApp client since 2004, in December 2010 La Perla began a consolidation process into a single company headquarters, leading to the need to review and adapt the existing infrastructure to the new business needs. A strongly felt issue within the company was unifying available storage space, migrating from two pre-existing FAS270 systems to a single solution capable of handling the growing amount of data and improving performance for data warehouse, business intelligence, and email applications.
Furthermore, it was crucial for La Perla to have a solution that could increase the storage space available to the system to support the emerging virtualization project for clients and servers based on VMware technology.

“We therefore decided to continue using NetApp technology, which has always satisfied us over the years, and switch to a more powerful model,” explains Mauro Ruscelli, Head of Infrastructure and Security at La Perla.

The Solution

With NetApp FAS3140, data access is even faster

“One of the reasons we chose to stay with NetApp,” continues Ruscelli, “is the extreme flexibility it offers: the various elements of different solutions are absolutely interchangeable from one model to another, like Lego bricks.”

This allowed the company to transfer large volumes of data simply by moving the disk trays from the old unit to the new one, maintaining existing permissions and configurations.

A key factor in choosing to rely on NetApp was the role of partner VEM Sistemi, which was able to recommend the ideal solution to La Perla and install the system quickly and without any service interruptions, delivering results in line with business expectations.

Thanks to the features of NetApp FAS3140, La Perla significantly improved the performance of the infrastructure—especially for data warehouse and business intelligence applications—thanks to a noticeable increase in the speed of access to data stored in the database compared to the previous FAS270s.

“We chose to maintain NetApp technology,” explains Ruscelli, “for its ease of management and simplicity, especially regarding file sharing and data snapshots. With NetApp, we updated the infrastructure and adapted it to our ongoing virtualization projects in a single working day while recovering all the disks.”

The flexibility of the solution was particularly appreciated both in terms of hardware—with the ability to flexibly assign disks to machines—and in space management, a feature frequently used by the company especially for virtualization.

Benefits

Greater flexibility in a short time and with no additional costs

One of the major benefits experienced by La Perla in upgrading its IT infrastructure was the flexibility offered by NetApp technology. The company was able to migrate to NetApp FAS3140 quickly and easily, without copying or moving large amounts of data, but simply by reconnecting already existing components differently—like fully interchangeable building blocks.

“In a short time,” continues Ruscelli, “we managed to adapt the IT infrastructure to the new business needs and enhance performance in a simple, transparent way and without purchasing new disks. Everything we had was reused in the new solution, allowing us to reduce costs and activation times.”

In addition, storage consolidation allowed the company to achieve significant advantages in terms of available space, ease of management, and system-supported functionalities.

Compared to the previous FAS270, the NetApp FAS3140 solution supports deduplication, which the company uses both for managing file sharing of user-stored data and for VMware—reducing storage volume usage by 50% with the same physical storage size, currently 10TB.

Another NetApp technology considered extremely useful and convenient is Snapshot, which allows the company to take multiple daily copies of file systems, company data, and individual user files—offering a complete and reliable disaster recovery solution that has now replaced traditional backup within the company.

“The decision to turn to NetApp,” concludes Ruscelli, “has also proven to be a winning one from a business perspective. Switching to FAS3140 technology and implementing advanced NetApp functionalities for storage and disaster recovery management allowed us to carry out our virtualization projects and greatly simplify system management.”