The Best Infrastructure at the Best Price: Gaining Flexibility and Predictability at Grupo Covirán

Family businesses are the lifeblood of a community, but it's getting harder for them to thrive. One of Covirán’s goals is to prevent family businesses from disappearing. The cooperative of independent retailers maintains its socially committed business model of giving small and medium-sized businesses the support and resources necessary to compete in the supermarket industry. In doing so, the cooperative creates high-value jobs in its local economies.

Grupo Covirán has grown in size over the years — today boasting over 2,700 supermarkets in Spain and Portugal — but in many ways, they’ve stayed the same. Founded in 1961, Covirán has always emphasized its ideals of democracy and equality through its “one member, one vote” structure. Covirán has long set the benchmark in food retail and continues to be a pillar of the region’s social economy.

Covirán has enjoyed great success, but the co-op’s IT infrastructure couldn’t support its growth.

I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Trevenque Group, a cloud service provider offering services such as IT infrastructure, management, and app development. Covirán has been one of our most important clients since we began working with them in 2012. So when the cooperative came to us wanting to embark on a digital transformation journey, we were excited to help them choose the best technology.

Wanting more from modern infrastructure

Covirán wanted to improve their IT infrastructure for a few reasons:

• to lower the costs associated with their legacy hardware
• to reduce the physical space of their infrastructure in our cloud data center

In moving away from their legacy infrastructure they also wanted more: more flexibility, more compute power, more storage, and better IOPS.

This project was a great opportunity for Covirán to build for the future. As their business evolved, they needed predictable pricing and a clear path for growing and improving their IT infrastructure. Like many of our clients, they wanted to move to a pay-as-you-go approach, opening the cooperative to reap financial benefits.

Having worked with Covirán for so long, we understood their position better than most other ICT providers could. Like Covirán, we are based in the Spanish city of Grenada. Also like Covirán, we have a longstanding relationship with HPE. We knew that Covirán wanted to stay with HPE, and we presented the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform as the best option.

Greater flexibility at a predictable price

The HPE GreenLake cloud is unique. It combines the flexibility of hybrid cloud infrastructure, performance benefits from the latest technology, and cost predictability. It’s a complete infrastructure package covering compute, storage, backup, software, and migration.

No one other than HPE offers the ability to access hybrid cloud software, hardware, and services on a pay-per-use basis. By moving to the HPE GreenLake cloud, Covirán could upgrade their infrastructure and simultaneously get more value for the money.

Covirán agreed, and we moved forward with the project. Today, they use several solutions through the HPE GreenLake cloud, including:

• HPE Synergy Storage
• HPE ProLiant DL Gen10 Plus
• HPE Alletra 9000
• HPE StoreOnce
• HPE Data Protection solutions 

Covirán has improved their system performance—with more compute, storage, and better IOPS—due to moving to more robust and reliable solutions. Most importantly, they have the flexibility to expand these resources as needed as Covirán continues to grow.

Less space, more sustainability

In moving to the HPE GreenLake cloud, Covirán achieved their goal of reducing the space used in the data center. They went from three racks to one, while also boosting their computing resources.

Reducing the data center footprint is also important when considering the sustainability of solutions. Covirán is a socially conscious organization, and sustainability is a deciding factor when undergoing significant IT infrastructure projects like this. HPE offered Covirán an opportunity to improve scalability and have room for growth in a more sustainable model.

Empowering Covirán to continue strengthening the social fabric

For both Covirán and Trevenque, the biggest benefit of working with HPE is having the expertise of a world technology leader. The HPE GreenLake cloud is the best end-to-end hybrid cloud solution, and it has the best people behind it. Whether working with technicians, engineers, product managers, or sales teams, we’ve always experienced true professionalism, and we know everyone is always there to help us.

Covirán now has the flexibility and security necessary for their next big project — whatever it might be. Powered by the right technology, they can continue their mission of improving the social fabric in each of their communities.