Kaltum Mining Is Optimizing IT Infrastructure and Scaling for Growth with HPE GreenLake

When most people sit down to a meal, they don't think twice about the plate that holds their food or the glass that contains their beverage. But there's a good chance both of those items contain sodium feldspar, and a resource made possible to use in part by Katlun Mining.

Kaltun Mining is a leading supplier of sodium feldspar and quartz, the raw materials used to manufacture drinking glasses, porcelain, stoneware, and other implements used in kitchens and dining rooms around the world. A subsidiary of Kaltun Grup, we operate 56 licensed sites and employ nearly 1,000 people in Turkey, making us one of the country’s biggest mining concerns. Founded in the early 1960s, we are committed to quality and innovation, leveraging technology to grow our operations. Over the decades, we have continuously adopted new tools and processes to stay at the forefront of our industry.

Replacing inadequate legacy systems

Today, the backbone of every successful business is its IT infrastructure, and ours was not up to the task. We faced several challenges with our legacy infrastructure:

• Not enough security features to protect against modern-day threats
• Unreliable backup capabilities
• Downtime
• Lack of business continuity
• Inability to scale our resources

We had to address these critical issues and improve vendor support. Some of our aging equipment was out of warranty, and we used multiple suppliers, which added to the complexity of troubleshooting and managing our systems.

A final consideration was cost. Simply put, it often costs more to maintain aging equipment and to supplement it with additional storage and compute resources than to replace it. Although we could continue to maintain some of our infrastructure, we had to retire much of it.

A compelling portfolio of solutions

Facing a perfect storm of obsolescence, reduced performance, increased security risks, and an absence of scalability, we asked our IT partner, Egebimtes, to architect a comprehensive solution to remediate these issues. After carefully considering our options, we adopted a single-vendor approach, choosing HPE as our infrastructure supplier.

HPE offers a wide range of solutions that we can tailor to our business as it evolves. The Egebimtes team helped us establish a relationship with HPE and guided us toward appropriate solutions for an enterprise-wide digital transformation and infrastructure refresh. Together, we mapped out system inefficiencies and bottlenecks and began deploying HPE technologies to help Kaltun streamline operations, reduce capital costs, and optimize IT tools.

The move to consumption-based pricing

We started by shifting from purchasing new infrastructure outright to the HPE GreenLake hybrid cloud. This flexible model combines cloud-like scalability with on-prem hardware, allowing us to right-size our equipment, pay only for the infrastructure we need, and add capacity as we grow.

Instead of locking down capital and buying extra hardware in anticipation of future requirements, we can move our IT spend to the OpEx column and avoid upfront costs.

HPE GreenLake’s predictable monthly costs and consumption-based pricing has helped us streamline our IT budget. This allows us to align our infrastructure spending and provisioning with the company’s growth.

Rethinking our backup and recovery systems

Next, we turned to backup and recovery. Our previous solution was unreliable, inefficient, and expensive. We chose HPE StoreOnce Systems for its simple, cost-effective, and secure data protection features across the hybrid cloud. HPE StoreOnce VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) combines high-speed physical and virtual infrastructure with powerful data deduplication features that can lower storage requirements by up to 20x.

HPE StoreOnce is faster, easier to manage, and substantially lowers our storage footprint. We have plenty of headroom to grow, and we can always add more through our HPE GreenLake service agreement. We are no longer constrained by the physical limitations of our hardware and data centers and have taken control of our storage costs.

A strong foundation: HPE SimpliVity and HPE ProLiant servers

We chose HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure as the foundation of our virtual server environment. This scalable system combines storage, compute, and built-in data protection. The HPE SimpliVity built-in data protection extends to HPE StoreOnce Systems, delivering seamless, comprehensive protection that is simple and efficient. Virtual machine backups are deduped and compressed across the entire lifecycle and stored efficiently across both HPE SimpliVity and HPE StoreOnce. Policy automation and right-click actions can be used to simplify VM mobility for backup and restore operations. It streamlines deployment and automation while utilizing tools like HPE InfoSight for predictive analytics and efficient management to save time. It is also available as part of our HPE GreenLake on-demand package.

At the center of our HPE SimpliVity setup are the latest HPE ProLiant DL380 servers. We chose these servers because they are energy efficient and optimized for complex, virtualized workloads and intensive memory operations like ours. Their advanced processing capabilities, low latency, and flexible configuration options allow us to analyze vast datasets. Because they are designed for high performance, they reliably handle the significant volumes of data we depend on for strategic planning and decision-making. 

Much of this data is highly sensitive, and safeguarding this data becomes more challenging as the company grows. The servers include integrated security and data protection features that provide an additional layer of protection. They have strengthened our data security posture, supporting our growth without compromising on performance or compliance.

These servers are fueling our digital transformation. As we grow, so do our workloads, and the servers' seamless scalability enables us to adapt quickly and meet new demands as our business evolves. What's more, these servers allow us to support a broader range of applications on the HPE GreenLake platform to boost operational efficiency. 

The easiest way to optimize infrastructure

We used data gained from running a no-cost HPE CloudPhysics assessment to architect and deploy our new infrastructure. This SaaS-based rapid analysis tool accelerates IT planning and procurement, powers real-time simulations of hybrid cloud environments, and delivers actionable insights in just 15 minutes. 

HPE CloudPhysics helped us analyze our infrastructure needs before we even adopted HPE GreenLake. We analyzed our workloads, storage needs, and performance bottlenecks to right-size our configuration in advance.

We continue to perform periodic HPE CloudPhysics assessments to ensure our IT infrastructure runs smoothly and continues to meet our operational requirements.

The final piece of the puzzle is HPE’s stellar customer support. HPE GreenLake offers flexible support options and proactive features, including capacity planning and a wellness dashboard that generates automatic incident alerts and support tickets. We also benefit from an assigned account team that coordinates the delivery of HPE GreenLake Services, ensuring optimal performance and right-sized infrastructure at all times.

A stronger, more reliable future with HPE

Replacing legacy infrastructure can be nerve-wracking, but we’re excited about what we’ve built with cutting-edge HPE technology. It’s helping Kaltun Mining prevent data loss, secure our IT assets, and scale our resources in response to customer demand and industry trends.

We have gone from uncertainty to stability and are fully equipped for our present and future needs. HPE has given us IT tools that reflect and empower our commitment to quality, innovation, and excellence.