JR Automation, a Hitachi Group Company, accelerates what’s possible with intelligent, connected manufacturing solutions that adapt, evolve, and scale for customers around the world. Leading the charge on the IT infrastructure side is Ryan Walker, JR Automation’s Senior Systems Engineer. Ryan is a systems architect responsible for managing the entire global storage, compute, and virtualization platforms for an enterprise supporting thousands of employees and massive, mission-critical datasets.
The Challenge: Performance Grids, Hidden Costs, and Vendor Gaps
JR Automation’s large engineering datasets (e.g., 3D scans, CAD) with hundreds of terabytes of backups. Their existing legacy infrastructure was quickly proving inadequate performance, forcing Ryan to consider expensive, proprietary alternatives.
Ryan's team faced three major hurdles that prevented operational efficiency:
The I/O Performance Conflict was critical. The legacy hardware struggled to handle the random read/write I/O required for their backup and restore processes. This created severe operational conflicts, particularly during tape archival:
“When we were on a spinning disk solution, when we were doing those tape-out jobs, you couldn't touch that storage. It was absolutely just maxed out.”
This meant that if a tape job was running, mission-critical activities like emergency file restores had to wait, costing valuable time. Ryan needed a platform that could handle high-throughput sequential writes and critical random reads simultaneously.
The issue of Expense and Efficiency Trade-Offs compounded the problem. Proprietary alternatives that offered the necessary speed were would not meet their cost objectives at scale . Moreover, many alternative solutions - both flash based and spinning disk - wouldn’t have aligned with our corporate sustainability objectives due to their much higher TCO, including power usage and reusability
Finally, the lack of a Single Point of Accountability with previous multi-vendor solutions was a major frustration. Managing an open-source environment on commodity hardware meant accountability was fragmented, leading to finger-pointing when issues arose with the hardware, the OS, or the storage software.
“I like that with 45Drives you guys, you know, stood behind that hardware... I'm not nearly comfortable enough to feel confident of having that without having someone to lean on and have... that single point.”
The Solution: 45Drives All-Flash Ceph Storage Cluster, Architected with High-Velocity Mass Customization
Ryan engaged 45Drives, seeking a partner that could deliver a single point of accountability combined with the security and flexibility of an open-source license, without the project risk. The resulting solution was a Ceph-based, all-flash cluster, designed and fully supported by 45Drives, with no vendor lock-in.
The strategic shift to this Ceph platform delivered clear advantages:
The concurrent performance of the all-flash Ceph cluster eliminated the I/O conflict:
“With Ceph, I can be sitting there and sustaining hundreds of MB/s reads to saturate tape backups... I can be doing writes from different protocols, I can be doing multiple concurrent incremental jobs, and I can do all of that at the same time.”
The solution provided both Cost-Effectiveness and Sustainability, being significantly more affordable than proprietary alternatives while offering substantial power savings, supporting JR Automation’s sustainability goals.
Additionally, Ceph’s Protocol Flexibility provided native Object Storage, a key requirement for modernizing their on-prem Veeam backups for Exchange Online and SharePoint.
"It has an objects repository that just sits in the background, and it churns away. And again, I don't have to worry about performance."
The Impact: Resilience, Flexibility, and a True Partner
The 45Drives Ceph cluster immediately delivered the necessary performance and operational concurrency. The solution provides superior resilience, allowing the team to build a cluster that can sustain multiple node failures and remain operational, a level of uptime not achievable at a comparable cost with legacy vendors.
For Ryan, the collaboration with 45Drives transcends a simple vendor relationship; it’s a partnership rooted in a shared belief in the power of the open-source model.
“You guys aren’t just a vendor. In a way, you’re contributing back to the Ceph community. The fact that you attend conferences and actively support the open-source ecosystem shows your commitment to the community.”
By partnering with 45Drives, JR Automation secured a truly open, high-performance, and cost-effective infrastructure that scales with the demands of global automation engineering while gaining the flexibility and dedicated support of a trusted partner.