Morellato Group revolutionizes omnichannel

Morellato Group is the largest European jewelry and watchmaking group and a global leader in the watch strap sector. The Group's growth is distinguished by its manufacturing heritage and the expert selection and processing of high-quality materials. Morellato Group includes its own brands Morellato, Philip Watch, Sector No Limits, Lucien Rochat, Bluespirit, La Petite Story, Oui&Me, Live Diamond, Cleor, Christ, Noélie, and D’Amante, as well as globally licensed brands such as Maserati, Karl Lagerfeld, Trussardi, Chiara Ferragni, and distributed brands including Cluse, Police, and Timberland. Morellato Group is a European leader in multi-brand jewelry and watch retail, boasting a unique omnichannel platform in Europe. Morellato Group’s strategy is built on a business model that is unmatched in the jewelry and watch market, featuring complete supply chain integration, from production to the end consumer. With the addition of the Christ Group, Morellato Group has achieved widespread presence across Europe, now operating nearly 650 stores in key markets including France, Austria, Germany, and Italy, complemented by 7,000 distributors across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Greater China, numerous shop-in-shops in major department stores in the world’s top shopping capitals, and a workforce of 4,600 employees. To achieve the highest level of efficiency across various operational aspects, Morellato Group views technology and innovation as crucial enablers of its strategies. With this in mind, an updated and standardized technological infrastructure is a fundamental pillar for optimally managing data exchange between local IT systems and central units.

The IT infrastructure

Morellato Group’s on-premises IT architecture is distributed across a data center that hosts production systems and a dedicated backup facility.

Through specific application solutions, the IT team at the headquarters manages all IT activities related to various operational areas, from the supply chain and customer relations to the management of the entire omnichannel network.

Specifically, the IT architecture enables transparent supply chain management, allowing the company to respond efficiently and promptly to business demands, while ensuring Morellato Group remains highly competitive in the global market.

The need

For several years, Morellato Group has been using the SAP platform for its Enterprise Resource Planning services to manage business operations, customer relations, and interactions with its retail network.

Specifically, the SAP platform handles and generates business data and information across various areas, including Finance and Accountability, Controlling, Material Management, Sales Distribution, Production Planning, Quality Management, Warehouse Management, and Logistic Execution.

The transition of the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP BW) platform from version 7.0 to SAP BW 7.5 with a HANA database, along with the implementation of an omnichannel project, presented an opportunity to plan a technological upgrade of the hardware architecture, particularly concerning the storage component. Thanks to this new data-driven approach, Morellato Group now views data as a strategic business asset and the customer experience as crucial for achieving its growth objectives.

The storage solution choice

After a thorough screening of available storage solutions on the market, Morellato Group opted for NetApp's offering. In collaboration with its partner Enext, the specifications of the new architecture to host the data generated by the new application platform were defined, prioritizing consistent storage, the provider’s geographic distribution, and a configuration that truly meets the actual workload requirements.

The infrastructure project was managed by Enext and Morellato throughout all its phases, from the initial analysis to the production rollout. Enext identified the best options from NetApp's unified AFF storage portfolio based on the client’s requirements, selecting a NetApp AFF A250 appliance with NVMe drives and a NetApp AFF A150 appliance with SSD drives. Following the project presentation and the corresponding POC, Enext proceeded with the introduction of the chosen hardware solution in Morellato Group's data center and the connection of SAP HANA application services, with a total time from design to rollout of less than three months and downtime of just a few hours.

The Morellato team manages NetApp solutions for data volumes of up to 40 terabytes. Thanks to the system’s ease of administration, internal staff with proper training can handle the management effectively.

Currently, the storage project implemented by Enext using NetApp technology covers the production environment, with the next steps focused on extending the project to include a disaster recovery solution.

Benefits of the new NetApp storage

The exclusive NetApp storage snapshot technology, fully integrated with the SAP HANA platform, allows Morellato Group to perform backup copies minimizing management effort and with a minimal impact on utilized resources.

NetApp's proprietary data cloning technology proves particularly effective in a SAP environment. Cloning enables the creation of multiple, instantaneous, local copies with negligible impact on performance and storage space, since only the data that has changed from the original copy is used. Given the importance of the services to be delivered, a fundamental selection criterion was the evaluation of overall performance and its adaptability to the required workload.

Specifically, NVMe disks were chosen, which guarantee optimal and consistent performance with minimal latency, even when the storage subsystem's inline data deduplication, compression, and compaction features are activated.

Thanks to the performance achieved, it has been possible to consolidate all SAP test and validation environments onto a single system and obtain data management response times measured in seconds. Furthermore, the in-memory processing capability of the SAP HANA DB allows for real-time data handling, delivering instant updates on business data and enabling faster, more informed decision-making. Additionally, Morellato Group can now rely on complex and detailed analyses without compromising system performance. Finally, the agility of the new NetApp architecture enables the exploration of large volumes of data more quickly and accurately, allowing for deeper insights into business models and market trends.

The redundant hardware components and the functionalities of the Cluster Data ONTAP operating system define a storage solution that is resilient to hardware failures, allowing for maintenance and upgrades without service disruption. Finally, NetApp ensures the expansion of the architecture in terms of both space and processing capacity through the addition of interconnected systems.

NetApp's Unified Storage functionality offers the ability to support multiple data access protocols and has enabled Morellato Group to also use NetApp for SAP-related file sharing services, allowing for the migration of these services from a Microsoft architecture running on virtual machines to services delivered directly from the storage.