Rakon taps Pure Storage and partner Datacom for a storage overhaul

Rakon saw growth surge during the pandemic, in part due to offshore market disruptions.

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Auckland-based component maker Rakon has modernised its local IT infrastructure and prepared for growth using Pure Storage's technology.

With operations in New Zealand, the UK, France, India, and sales offices around the world, Rakon has seen increasing demand for its GPS components which customers use in 5G networks, satellites, ground stations, radar and precision positioning for agriculture and mining.

The company also appeared to benefit from global disruptions during the pandemic and a devastating fire at major Japanese competitor AKM, which created a global component shortage.

Ben Parry, IS infrastructure manager at Rakon, said that global growth was increasingly dependent on timely, accurate, highly secure data, therefore Rakon's approach to how information was stored and managed was increasingly vital.

"Our legacy storage solution, based on spinning disks, was grinding to a halt," he said. "Our infrastructure team was starting to see a number of failures around drives and we were also constantly running out of storage.

Working with Datacom as the systems integration partner, Pure Storage was able to migrate Rakon’s entire storage environment in one week, with no downtime.

As well as meeting growing capacity needs, the new system improved speed, performance and reliability, and reduce the burden of in-house management.

"Pure Storage came to us with an all-flash solution that would resolve all these issues and also help us migrate our legacy infrastructure seamlessly," Parry said.

Stuart Blythe, country manager for Pure Storage New Zealand, said the simplicity of Pure’s technology enabled Rakon to quickly migrate to support its global expansion.

The solution has delivered significant benefits including speed improvements of up to five time for ERP system record updates and faster and more reliable access to core applications including Rakon's database, which is now operating 60 times faster;

Compression and deduplication improvements enabled Rakon to almost halve its storage requirements from 80TB to 44TB and also delivered significant efficiency gains in accessing its business Intelligence system.

The improvements also allowed Rakon’s IT team to focus on more strategic initiatives.