Indinvest LT Delivers 100% Uptime for Stable Production

A European leader in the production and extrusion of aluminum profiles, Indinvest LT needed to ensure uninterrupted operations on its shop floor. By switching to Pure Storage, it increased resilience and performance for critical data environments.

Indinvest LT has been a leader in aluminum alloy billet production and profile extrusion industry and architecture for more than 40 years. The foundry operates around the clock, 365 days a year, with no downtime outside of mandatory scheduled maintenance windows. Demands on operations have only grown after the company doubled production capacity several years ago.

Three data centers serve as the heart of operations. They host several VMware virtual machines for domain controllers, file servers, and application service providers. A SQL Server running in always-on mode forms the core of the company’s Industry 4.0 plan, collecting data and connecting systems across the foundry. To eliminate unexpected downtime, Indinvest needs to keep these systems—and the data behind them—available at all times. 

Storage is critical to data availability, but legacy storage systems were notoriously difficult to manage and required planned downtime for upgrades or maintenance, disrupting operations and productivity. It also suffered from poor latency of up to 60 milliseconds. These issues impacted the entire supply chain up to the final user experience. Indinvest needed a new storage solution.

“Our IT infrastructure must support uninterrupted manufacturing operations with minimal downtime,” says Andrea Consalvi, IT Infrastructure Manager at Indinvest LT. “As our company is still growing, we also needed a system that could flexibly and continuously adapt to our needs without interruptions.”

After carefully evaluating several alternatives, Indinvest LT introduced Pure Storage FlashArray//X —the powerhouse of the Pure Storage platform—for its data centers. The results were transformative, with performance improving dramatically and latency dropping to below one millisecond. Encouraged by this success, the company migrated its entire storage environment to Pure Storage.

With a Pure Storage Evergreen subscription, Indinvest LT ensures its storage environment is always improving, enabling non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades to stay modern without any downtime.

To minimize interruptions, Indinvest LT invests in data protection features aimed at boosting business continuity with fast data recovery. Immutable snapshots help to protect corporate data against ransomware and restore essential operations quickly. Indinvest LT also uses ActiveCluster™ in asynchronous replication to replicate data to a third site and strengthen data protection.

“To minimize impact on manufacturing operations, we need to be able to restore quickly, while also rolling back to the closest point in time,” says Consalvi. “Pure Storage hits both of these requirements, but more importantly, it improves availability to the point where we rarely need to worry about backups. It gives us peace of mind that we can minimize data and production loss.”

Pure Storage has had a positive impact on Indinvest LT by improving application performance, business productivity, and user experience. The ease of management has reduced the workload for the IT team, as the deployment, use, and maintenance of the Pure Storage solution are much more streamlined than traditional storage.

The significant performance improvements did not go unnoticed within the company. “Pure Storage provided a big leap in performance that many colleagues called to ask what had changed,” Consalvi recalls. “Pure Storage gives us confidence that we can deliver the performance we need to continue growing our business.”