When your company is responsible for delivering licensed and unlicensed medicines across five continents it's critical to have resilient infrastructure.
FarmaMondo is a Swiss pharmaceutical group that provides patients access to both licensed and unlicensed medicines across five continents via 14 subsidiaries. The company's extended supply chain is designed to "fulfill patients’ unmet medical needs globally."
The company's model revolves around being a trusted partner to the medical value chain that includes health professionals, international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and patient advocacy groups. FarmaMondo named Yaron Spigel CEO in 2013, and the company launched its first international subsidiary in Brazil that year. New locations have been added nearly annually since.
Get this customer story as PDF.
FarmaMondo's services include marketing and distribution agreements, managed access and alleviating hospital shortages. FarmaMondo serves as an integrated partner for manufacturers and customers and handles payment as well as regulatory compliance so it can get the right medicines to the right place anywhere in the world.
Here’s a look at FarmaMondo’s global network.
With €100M in annual revenue, FarmaMondo has grown at a rapid clip, averaging about 30% a year and now has 150 users tapping into its SAP systems. Antonio Adorno, IT Manager for FarmaMondo, said that the pace of growth "was putting more demand on resources for broader services."
The project
Adorno said FarmaMondo upgraded its legacy storage infrastructure to Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) Block array with partner Netability. "We were looking to enable seamless scalability, improve user experience and deliver smooth application performance," said Adorno. "Our offices around the world must be able to connect to our central IT systems 24/7. To ensure near-100% availability, we depend on the highly reliable infrastructure and services provided by Hitachi Vantara and Netability."
FarmaMondo needed to modernize its storage and server landscape. Netability replaced four existing servers with two machines and swapped its Hitachi VSP G200 systems with a Hitachi VSP One Block array.
As part of the infrastructure swap, Adorno said FarmaMondo migrated its VMware, SAP applications and databases. FarmaMondo centralizes its mission critical apps such as its pharmacy and warehouse management systems in its Swiss data center and uses cloud applications for productivity.
Adorno said Netability migrated the data and installed the new storage system while creating a fibre channel network connection between the two arrays.
"Hitachi and Netability are credited with making it easy to move our data, without downtime or disruption to our business," said Adorno. The move to VSP One Block has allowed FarmaMondo to replace legacy SSDs with high-speed NVMe drives. Combined with the company's powerful new servers, this has transformed performance for both batch processing and interactive application workloads.
With the new systems in place, FarmaMondo plans to take immutable snapshots of data to protect the business from ransomware and other cyberattacks. FarmaMondo is also leveraging VSP One Block’s dynamic drive protection (DDP) groups to increase capacity one drive at a time. Adorno said this will make upgrades more seamless and affordable.
Following the move of VMware applications to VSP One, FarmaMondo decided to consolidate its SAP applications on the system. In combination with FarmaMondo’s new servers, the VSP One Block array has dramatically improved application response speeds. “Everything runs a lot more smoothly, especially our SAP applications,” Adorno says. “One SAP batch job that used to take 20 minutes to complete now runs in just six minutes, so it’s more than three times faster.”
Futureproofing
Adorno said the new Hitachi Vantara systems gives FarmaMondo the ability to scale operations in the future.
FarmaMondo's mission is to deliver unmet needs for specialty medicines around the world – especially in cases where physicians may not be able to source the pharmaceuticals their patients need. For example, a new medicine might not yet have been licensed in their country, or there may be a shortage of an essential drug that has no licensed alternative. In these circumstances, the only option is unlicensed medicines (ULMs). These are products that are not commercially available in the patient’s home market, but which healthcare professionals are permitted to source and prescribe when there is no alternative.
FarmaMondo can get those drugs to the right places through its extended supply chain and global network of partners.
“The storage we have purchased guarantees us performance and headroom for the future, at an affordable price. Moreover, it’s a much more sustainable solution," said Adorno. "To support the same level of growth with our old infrastructure, we would have needed three times more rack units and our electricity consumption would have tripled, so it’s a great energy and space saver.”
