Huhtamaki Sustainable food packaging leader looks to IBM to create a robust data storage environment.

If you’ve had coffee to go, there’s a good chance Huhtamaki made the cup. As a global manufacturer of sustainable food-on-the-go and food-on-the shelf packaging solutions, Huhtamaki’s innovative products help billions of consumers around the world make responsible lifestyle choices every day. And, as demand for more sustainable packaging grows, so too does their need for more flexible data storage and protection. So, Huhtamaki turned to IBM® Cloud™ Object Storage and IBM Spectrum® Protect Plus to create a more sustainable global IT infrastructure system.

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Business challenge

With organic and acquisitive growth during the past decade, Huhtamaki found their storage management tools unable to keep up with the scale and speed of their 24/7 data demand needs. And their increasing volumes of sensitive data left them vulnerable to attacks. They needed a better backup plan that could offer greater reliability and resiliency everywhere they do business.

Transformation

Huhtamaki sustainably scaled its data storage capabilities by implementing modern, flexible and cost-efficient data protection solutions using IBM Storage technology to protect the company’s critical data.

Business challenge story

Designing a more sustainable IT infrastructure

Global food packaging specialist Huhtamaki is a pioneer in exploring and using new sustainable materials such as bioplastics and recycled materials. Operating in 35 countries and offering a wide range of products and units, Huhtamaki requires a secure IT infrastructure to manage, store and protect vast amounts of data in various locations around the world.

Company growth was developing on several fronts, and the virtual IT environment in place was fractured. The infrastructure wasn’t able to scale alongside the expansive data the company was generating, resulting in multiple related problems.

Aki Kemppi, the Group IT Manager for Huhtamaki, explains: “The product portfolio that was in place for restoring and backing up at our data centers wasn’t evolving as fast as we needed it to evolve. It wasn’t reliable so that we could sleep soundly at night without worrying.”

Huhtamaki needed to look elsewhere for improved workload coverage, and better protection and data retention. “We needed to have something that could easily scale to manage data protection processes for 100s of VMs running at multiple data centers in a short timeframe,” says Kemppi.

“ With any backup products, trust is everything, and we weren’t getting that with our former product portfolio. ”
— Aki Kemppi, Group IT Manager, Huhtamaki Oyj

Transformation story

Storage scalability for growing data centers

Working with IBM, Huhtamaki put together a roadmap to achieve its data storage and protection goals. The company began implementing IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, a modern data protection solution for hybrid multicloud environments to support faster backup and restore processes—going from 12 hours to 3 hours— and better overall stability at Huhtamaki’s largest data centers.

“Working with IBM, we were able to find a path to a good situation,” explains Kemppi. “We started with one solution and added on another along the way. It’s not like you buy a solution and it’s perfect in a week, but working together, we’ve been able to get a modern data protection solution that meets our needs.”

To better meet the data retention needs of the business, Huhtamaki and IBM integrated IBM Cloud Object Storage to provide secure, cost-effective long-term data repositories. Today, Huhtamaki is able to backup and archive data for cloud and mobile applications—effectively managing costs while meeting data access needs.

Always in search of a more sustainable way, Kemppi felt their IBM solutions could do more—way more. “The products are way more flexible than what we used to have, and they’re not limited to being just backup and restore tools,” he says.

With less time wasted on downtime and backup, Kemppi and his team have found new and value-driven functionality with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. Today, Kemppi is using the products as an innovative data migration tool between the company’s locations. Kemppi and his team now perform up to 10x faster server migrations without server downtime.

Following the implementation, Huhtamaki reports that its virtual IT environment is now able to handle rapid growth. For example, the business has drastically decreased downtime during data backup and restore processes, and server migrations.

“The backup window for our systems has gone down around four times from where it used to be, and there’s been a significant improvement in the overall time it takes for server migrations,” says Kemppi. And with less time and money dedicated to operational components within its data centers, Kemppi and his team can take on more independent value-generating work.

“Now we have a much more reliable and easily managed solution that can get the big stuff done more efficiently and future proof our data protection as our IT infrastructure continues to evolve to meet the data growth, security, and compliance needs of our locations around the world.”

Having successfully implemented a new virtual infrastructure at multiple data centers, Kemppi and his team look to scale the operational efficiency out to more of Huhtamaki’s sites in the future.

“ We’ve been extremely happy working with IBM, especially on the storage components. And looking at where we are today, I can say we are seeing great results. ”
— Aki Kemppi, Group IT Manager, Huhtamaki Oyj

About Huhtamaki

Huhtamaki is a key global player in sustainable food-on-the-go and food-on-the shelf packaging solutions. Our innovative products help billions of consumers around the world make responsible lifestyle choices every day. Today, packaging plays a significant role in food safety and convenience. We are committed to making packaging more circular and we embed sustainability in everything we do. We are focused on achieving carbon neutral production and having all our products designed to be recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2030.

With 100 years of history and a strong Nordic heritage we operate in 35 countries and 81 sites around the world. Our 18,800 employees are working to deliver smart next generation packaging. Our 2019 net sales totaled EUR 3.4 billion. Huhtamaki Group has its head office in Espoo, Finland and the parent company Huhtamäki Oyj is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki Ltd. Find out more about our Sustainability Action Plan and our ambition at www.huhtamaki.com.

Solutions components

Cloud Object Storage
Spectrum Protect (inc CDM)