Mascot Meets Demand for 24-Hour Support and Reliability

Mascot has demanding IT and supply chain requirements as Europe’s largest provider of workwear (three million products and counting). When its existing storage systems started to fail the company looked for a new solution. With Pure Storage, the company turned unreliable systems into bullet-proof business boosters.

Mascot is a family-owned Danish company that designs, produces, procures and sells workwear around the world. Established in 1982, it has a yearly turnover of around €100 million. Its main markets are Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and the UK, with a supply chain reaching as far as Laos and Vietnam, where the company operates two factories. 

Mascot has one of Europe’s largest stocks of workwear, with three million products divided over 17,000 line items. For a relatively small organisation, this means its processes are centered on smart IT, including a comprehensive suite of SAP platforms, which are often heavily customised by the in-house team. Mascot only turned to consultants three times in the last decade.

“Our business is very demanding when it comes to data storage,” says Lars Kjeldsen, Director of IT and Logistics at Mascot. “We also have about 100 virtual servers running on three physical machines, not only for day-to-day systems but also for applications. We run SAP applications in-house, customising and developing them ourselves. We have 10 people in our IT team, including tech support, developers, and internal consultants.”

Mascot’s use of SAP is more demanding than most, with a higher volume of tables and processes compared to standard deployments. For ERP, including the running of its supply chain, logistics, forecasting, and reporting, Mascot uses a heavily customised SAP suite working in tandem with an IBM Cognos business intelligence platform.

The workwear company previously used solid-state storage arrays from a young vendor. When that company was acquired, Mascot stopped getting the service it needed.

“Suddenly, systems started to fail,” says Kjeldsen. “The vendor claimed we couldn’t maintain the system correctly—that the server environment was wrong, there was too much moisture, or the air in our data centers contained too many particles.”

However, Mascot could prove this wasn’t the case. “The system was going down, and we didn’t know what to do,” explains Kjeldsen. “We were paying a lot of support money and felt this was the last straw. So, our systems integrator Cloudiio A/S, which sold us the previous system, recommended Pure Storage.”

What immediately appealed to Mascot was the level of capacity and the redundancy available in the Pure Storage offering. “With two arrays, we could ensure that should something happen to one array, the other could keep supporting the business. After a number of conversations, we installed it,” says Kjeldsen.

Flash storage provides faster access times and lower-latency I/O transactions per second than a hard disk drive and is a major reason Mascot uses it for business-critical systems. The company had flash storage in place and understood the performance benefit. So, in this case, the primary reason for choosing Pure Storage was improved reliability and resilience.

“We like the idea of having our storage on flash drives,” says Kjeldsen. “Pure Storage is known for offering the best capacity options and the best brains in its development.”

Mascot bought two 22-terabyte Pure Storage FlashArray™ systems. It kept the desired performance, and in addition got stand-out resilience, management, and service which it had lost with its previous storage system. It only took a couple of days to get the FlashArray systems up and running, and with the Pure Storage Evergreen™ Storage program, it will be regularly modernised at no extra charge.

“We are a family-owned business, and there is no doubt the previous system was simply outdated,” says Kjeldsen. “We’re a very IT-heavy business and wanted something that just worked. We made the decision based on my recommendation.”

Pure Storage has some of the best support reviews in the industry, taking a proactive approach in monitoring customers at every stage. “Our storage should have safeguards for failure and excellent support, which we hadn’t been getting,” says Kjeldsen. “Pure had 24-hour support—if there was even the indication of a failure, we would be supported.

“Most of the maintenance time we had to set aside in the past for the previous system is now allocated to further development, which we like very much” says Kjeldsen. “It’s also reassuring to see that Pure invests money in making its product better.”

With its complex SAP solution, Mascot hasn’t had any breakdowns or runtime errors. “There is no doubt the system needed updating, because the previous system simply couldn’t handle the number of transactions we were making,” Kjeldsen explains.

Pure Storage FlashArrays are modular, allowing Mascot to grow its storage depending on the capacity and performance needed. Having already upgraded one of the arrays with an extra shelf, it proved to be a simple, immediate job.

“The great thing, from our perspective, was that the Pure Storage stuff just works,” Kjeldsen adds. “There was little in the way of an integration challenge, and our IT manager needed very few hours to get it up and running–it just runs. It’s not that complex, and I like that a lot.”