Evolving Toward the Next Industrial Frontier

Cortizo is a leader in the Spanish market and a European benchmark in manufacturing aluminum and PVC profiles used in architecture and industry. Its nine production centers and 31 distribution and logistics centers support sales in more than 60 countries. Two Pure Storage FlashArray™ systems in two redundant data centers manage all storage needs including mission critical and virtualized workloads, plus industrial control equipment, user files, and email. This solution delivers the most suitable combination of high availability, performance, and simple administration, and positions Cortizo for even more data-intensive applications coming in the future.

Founded in 1972 in Padrón (A Coruña), Cortizo has become a leader in the Spanish market and a European benchmark in the manufacture of aluminum and PVC profiles used in architecture and industry. It has nine production centers in four countries, 31 distribution and logistics centers, and sells in more than 60 countries. In 2017, it invoiced 554 million euros and currently employs more than 2,800 workers.

One of the keys to the success of Cortizo is its commitment to the use of the most cutting-edge technology in the sector to offer a technical response to the most demanding industrial and architectural demands. To do this, Cortizo has a powerful technological platform housed in two data centers. However, the growth in the volume of data handled by the company was generating demands on capacity and performance greater than what its previous storage solution could offer.

“Our experience with the previous storage platform has been very satisfactory,” explains Ramiro Iglesias, Head of IT Systems at Cortizo, who has been working at

the company for 17 years. “However, due to the growth of the data we experienced, the storage platforms we had could not support the work either in capacity or in performance.”

In the short term, the most pressing need was to improve the speed of the company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), as well as other applications that exploit large volumes of data. This requirement was essential for Cortizo to continue advancing in its evolution towards Industry 4.0 and beyond. This model promotes the transformation of industrial production through the application of technologies based on the collection, treatment, and analysis of large volumes of data, such as Big Data or the Internet of Things.

When choosing the new storage solution to be implemented, Cortizo needed to assess three fundamental aspects. The first was the need for high availability of the company’s systems, which supported the operation of its production centers and the commercial network.

The second key aspect was that the solution had to offer adequate performance for processing large volumes of Cortizo’s data. At the same time, it needed to be capable of storing the other types of company data.

A third aspect to take into account was that Cortizo’s IT team consists of three professionals: Ramiro Iglesias himself, Head of Systems; Enrique Herranz, Systems Administrator; and Juan Manuel Fariña, Network Administrator. This required an automated solution that offered the greatest ease of administration to manage it internally.

After evaluating other suppliers, Cortizo opted for the implementation of two FlashArray systems in its two redundant data centers. It is a block storage solution based entirely on flash technology. The Pure Storage systems installed in Cortizo manage all the storage needs of the company: Informix and Oracle SQL databases; virtual servers and VMware virtualize.