HPC in the Cloud


Dedicated to covering high-end cloud computing
in science, industry and the datacenter

Language Flags

NetApp Enables Revlon to Simplify IT Operations


SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 6 — NetApp today announced its role in Revlon’s IT transformation. The global beauty leader turned to NetApp to help inject simplicity, agility, and cost efficiencies throughout all levels of its business. Through the NetApp storage foundation, which is at the heart of the company’s IT operations, Revlon is able to ultimately make smarter IT decisions that help fuel company growth.

Revlon manufactures and distributes millions of beauty products each year to more than 100 countries across six continents, creating layers of business complexity and incredible amounts of data. These challenges limited the company’s previous IT infrastructure, so Revlon approached NetApp to transform its IT capabilities. By building on NetApp, Revlon successfully implemented a private cloud infrastructure that increased agility and enabled the company to adapt to meet growing consumer demands. NetApp also helped Revlon harness its big data challenge, turning 3.6PB of data from a burden into a business driver.

“When we started our IT transformation in 2006, our overarching philosophy was to simplify. Simplification enables the speed to adapt, and speed is a competitive advantage. IT’s job is to make systems work for people, rather than people working for systems,” said David Giambruno, senior vice president and CIO for Revlon. “Leveraging NetApp as our single storage and data management foundation provides a newfound level of agility that impacts every aspect of our business. With 97% of our total compute running on our internal cloud built by NetApp, we wield the technology needed to turn data into information. Ultimately, that enables us to support the business and to deliver high-quality, innovative products to our consumers around the world.”

Revlon Delivers IT Simplicity with NetApp

  • Revlon’s private cloud infrastructure runs more than 500 applications in a virtualized environment, which support more than 15,000 automated application moves a month. NetApp enables nondisruptive operations of these applications with 99.9999% uptime.
  • Revlon has experienced significant data center efficiencies with NetApp that include reducing energy costs by 72%, cutting its physical footprint by more than 50%, and avoiding investments of more than $70 million.
  • With its newfound agility, Revlon IT has been able to increase project throughput by 425% since 2007, reduce time to deliver projects by 70%, and complete 99.6% of projects on budget and on time.
  • Revlon IT leverages NetApp to maintain business continuity by restoring or moving business processes within its cloud environment. This capability played a major role during a recent winter storm that forced Revlon to move data among its data centers. The entire process was managed by a single employee and took less than one hour, resulting in zero impact to the business or user experience.
  • Revlon created a new model to consume and organize 3.6PB of data generated from tracking 660 million SKU attributes per month. By leveraging NetApp, Revlon IT implemented a global master data system that enables the company to deploy actionable information across its global Mobile Business Intelligence platform to business units regardless of device or location for simplified operations.
  • Revlon is currently testing NetApp Flash Accel and has experienced considerable efficiency and performance gains that have allowed the company to avoid significant hardware investments while deploying a new global ERP platform on its internal cloud.

Supporting Quote

  • Julie Parrish, chief marketing officer, NetApp — “Revlon is an ideal example for how IT agility leads to business success. The company understands that the right IT infrastructure can be a significant enabler of the business and create a competitive advantage. Building their infrastructure on NetApp has enabled Revlon to streamline operations and change the way employees think about and utilize data.”


About NetApp

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Our commitment to living our core values and consistently being recognized as a great place to work around the world are fundamental to our long-term growth and success, as well as the success of our pathway partners and customers.

-----

Source: NetApp

Most Read Blogs

Aspen

Feature Articles

CometCloud: Using a Federated HPC-Cloud to Understand Fluid Flow in Microchannels

The ever-growing complexity of scientific and engineering problems continues to pose new computational challenges. Thus, we present a novel federation model that enables end-users with the ability to aggregate heterogeneous resource scale problems. The feasibility of this federation model has been proven, in the context of the UberCloud HPC Experiment, by gathering the most comprehensive information to date on the effects of pillars on microfluid channel flow.
Read more...

CERN, Google, and the Future of Global Science Initiatives

Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...

Avoiding Scientific Computing Bottlenecks in the Cloud

Frank Ding, engineering analysis & technical computing manager at Simpson Strong-Tie, discussed the advantages of utilizing the cloud for occasional scientific computing, identified the obstacles to doing so, and proposed workarounds to some of those obstacles.
Read more...

Short Takes

NASA Builds 'Climate in a Box'

May 23, 2013 | he study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...

Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

May 16, 2013 | When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...

In Support of Cloud-based Rendering

May 10, 2013 | Australian visual effects company, Animal Logic, is considering a move to the public cloud.
Read more...

Internet2 Awards Program Seeks Innovative Applications

May 10, 2013 | Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...

Sponsored Whitepapers

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Exploring the Potential of Heterogeneous Computing

04/02/2012 | AMD | Developers today are just beginning to explore the potential of heterogeneous computing, but the potential for this new paradigm is huge. This brief article reviews how the technology might impact a range of application development areas, including client experiences and cloud-based data management. As platforms like OpenCL continue to evolve, the benefits of heterogeneous computing will become even more accessible. Use this quick article to jump-start your own thinking on heterogeneous computing.

Sponsored Multimedias

Newsletters

Stay informed! Subscribe to HPC in the Cloud email Newsletters.

HPC in the Cloud Update
HPCwire Weekly Update
Digital Manufacturing Report
Datanami
HPCwire Conferences & Events
Job Bank
HPCwire Product Showcases


ISC

HPC Job Bank


Featured Events



  • June 16, 2013 - June 20, 2013
    ISC'13
    Leipzig,
    Germany

  • June 17, 2013 - June 18, 2013
    Forecast 2013
    San Francisco, CA
    United States




HPC in the Cloud Conferences & Events