Blue Label is a prominent distributor of virtual and physical pre-paid electricity, airtime and telephony products to emerging markets in South Africa. With a local footprint that extends to retailers, wholesalers and petroleum forecourts, the company required a fully virtualised infrastructure that was reliable and cost effective to replace its ineffective legacy SAN environment.
Due to the nature of its transactional-based business model, Blue Label was struggling with the capacity of its previous SAN solution and turned to partner EOH for an alternative. Since deploying Tintri, Blue Label has simplified its IT infrastructure, removing the need to hire storage specialists and bridging the technology skills gap in the region. The company has also reduced its data centre footprint, enabling Blue Label to free up capacity for disaster recovery.
As a result, Blue Label is now running all of its database transactional workloads on its six Tintri systems.
“Having a solution that’s as simple as Tintri is very important for the South African market,” Jonathan Trope, Blue Label’s CIO for SA Distribution, commented. “With a team of six multidisciplinary engineers, our company requires employees who are proficient in multiple areas rather than just storage. By moving to Tintri, we went from having to work on the SAN solution daily, to almost forgetting about our storage systems. Tintri just works flawlessly in the background.”
David Griffiths, VP EMEA at Tintri, said: “As one of the first companies in South Africa to adopt Tintri’s enterprise cloud platform, Blue Label is benefitting from reduced management overhead and improved agility. The Tintri solution was crafted to support multiple workloads, spin up new projects and simplify operations—and that allows companies like Blue Label to offer new services to their customers.”
