Making success sweet, simple, and sustainable

Mars, Incorporated is a family-owned global company that has been in business for over a century. Based in the USA, MARS operates a diverse and expanding portfolio across Petcare, Snacking, and Food & Nutrition, delivering quality pet nutrition, veterinary care, and some of the world's best-loved food and snacking brands to millions of people and pets. The company is also deeply committed to sustainability and positive societal impact through its Sustainable in a Generation Plan.

Astronauts take M&M’S into space. ALTOIDS help prepare many nervous couples for their first kiss. And eight out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas.
Chances are, you’ve encountered Mars, Incorporated products in some of life’s most familiar moments, even if you didn’t know they all came from the same company.

Mars, Incorporated is a global leader in pet care, snacking, and food. As a $65B+ family-owned business, Mars’ diverse and expanding portfolio of leading pet care products, veterinary services, and quality snacking and food products delight millions of people and support pets all around the world. The company strives to do business better every day, and this is reflected in technology investments that optimize operations, harness new possibilities for growth, and improve sustainability.

“Our team is responsible for making sure that every system runs at peak performance, including our production lines, so that we can continue to deliver products and services our customers love,” says Luciano Batista, Vice President of Enterprise Services Delivery at Mars. 

With global factories operating around the clock, downtime could result in product delays for consumers, financial loss, and reputational risk.

Recognizing that Mars’ existing data infrastructure could no longer reliably support always-on, global operations—especially during busy periods like Halloween and Christmas—Batista and his team selected the Everpure Platform as the foundation for Mars’ IT infrastructure transformation. 

“The Everpure Platform ticked all the boxes for us,” says Batista. “It’s a scalable platform that enables us to be future-ready and can plug into our hybrid-cloud infrastructure seamlessly. We save time, money, and sleep knowing that Everpure is the backbone of our critical operations.”

With so many people and their pets relying on Mars, the first step was to consolidate a complicated web of storage systems for mission-critical databases such as Oracle and applications such as SAP onto a single Everpure FlashArray™ system. Mars has since expanded its FlashArray footprint, supporting mixed workloads including VMware, Windows, and Linux in production, development, and quality assurance environments. Everpure FlashBlade® also supports the SAP global file system. 

“At our busiest times, Everpure supports up to 300,000 IOPS with no performance degradation,” says Lincoln Silva, Product Owner for Linux and On-Premises Storage at Mars. “Mars benefits from the market’s most sophisticated, yet simple-to-use technology.” 

Silva estimates that his team will save approximately three months’ worth of planning time with an Evergreen//Forever™ subscription for continuous hardware and software upgrades, which can be done nondisruptively and without forklift upgrades. That means they can focus on innovation instead of planning for constant upgrades. 

“With Evergreen//Forever, we get the most modern and agile data storage platform with the least amount of effort,” says Silva. “This technology is going to give us the reliability and resilience we need to keep running 24x7 without any interruption.”

Mars also benefits from the integrated Pure1® management pane. Pure1 uses predictive analytics and insights powered by AI to monitor performance, identify potential bottlenecks, and optimize storage usage across Mars’ environment. What’s more, it gives the Mars team visibility into storage resources both on premises and in the cloud.

“With Everpure, our team has the time and mental room to innovate, learn, and collaborate more closely with our partners to bring the best to Mars,” says Batista. “We can engage with the business on a whole new level.”

This efficiency paved the way for a major new initiative at Mars: enhancing the company’s hybrid-cloud strategy. Through a joint effort with Everpure, Accenture, and Microsoft, Mars is working to bring on-premises storage capabilities to its Microsoft Azure cloud workloads with Everpure Cloud Dedicated. 

Once fully implemented, Mars will improve its disaster recovery and resiliency by replicating on-premises snapshots to the cloud. The company plans to use SafeMode™ Snapshots for additional security and to help achieve recovery point objectives ranging from four to 24 hours depending on the system priority.

“Our success represents the success of our partners at Accenture, Microsoft, and Everpure,” says Batista. “We embrace the spirit of mutuality to get the most from our collaboration so that we can grow together and exceed our customers’ expectations.” 

With help from the Everpure Advanced Services team, Mars intends to complete this hybrid-cloud transition, integrating Everpure Cloud Dedicated to seamlessly run VMware workloads and extend its IT infrastructure into the cloud with improved flexibility and cost efficiency. Mars will also expand its use of cloud-native applications through Microsoft Azure. 

“We are seeing 18:1 data reduction—nine times the anticipated compression rate with Everpure Cloud Dedicated—which puts us on track to save up to 50% in cloud storage costs,” says Batista. “We can also now operate more efficiently and make better decisions with intelligence and automation.” 

The funds from these cost savings can be redirected and invested in progressing Mars’ use of AI—yet another avenue for the company to innovate and delight millions of consumers across its brand portfolio.

“The possibilities for AI in our business are endless,” says Alex Stemp, Cloud Center of Excellence Strategy Lead at Mars. “We are exploring different ways to apply AI to deliver value across our operations. Having an AI-ready platform such as Everpure enables us to innovate without limits.”

Mars is aligning its IT transformation with its long-term sustainability goals. By consolidating on the Everpure Platform, Mars has significantly reduced its data center footprint. For example, compared to a previous array, Mars slashed its power consumption sixfold and decreased the number of rack units by a factor of 14.

“We are building a sustainable future by transforming the way we work, from sourcing through production,” says Batista. “The decisions we make today impact the world we leave behind. Everpure is aligned with our commitment to think in terms of generations, and not just business quarters.”