ARKIVIO Case Study :: Fortune 500 Electronics Manufacturer Saves $3.9 Million Automating Tiered Storage Architecture.

Company Background

GHI Company is a Fortune 500 Electronics Manufacturer with over 30,000 employees located at about 100 different production sites, advanced R&D centers, design and application centers, and direct sales offices. Due to intense competitive pressures and a difficult economic environment, the executive team has implemented a corporate-wide initiative to cut costs. The IT Department is investigating ways to reduce storage infrastructure costs and minimize future hardware acquisitions.

IT Environment

A Business Unit at GHI Company has 40 terabytes of primary storage capacity where data is stored from its core ERP/CRM applications on both SAN and DAS systems. Current utilization is estimated to be 60 percent with annual data growth rates of 65 percent. The Business Unit has also implemented two terabytes of network-attached storage. The NAS secondary storage was purchased in an attempt to reduce the cost of acquiring and deploying storage for user and application data. However, users have been reluctant to change behavior, so current utilization is less than 20 percent and year over year growth has been limited to 30 percent or less.

The Problem

The IT Department has decided to move to a tiered-storage architecture to take advantage of the price/performance of their new low-cost NAS appliances from NetApp. However, this plan to use low-cost storage creates another problem. It increases administrator time required to manually examine all the data, choose which data is best to move to these low-cost devices, move the data, and then inform the end users as to the changes to their environment. The IT Department is looking for solution that automates this process.

ARKIVIO Solution

ARKIVIO® auto-stor is the answer to this customer's storage capacity management problem. First, the ARKIVIO® auto-stor software is loaded onto a standard Windows 2000 server connected to the Business Unit network. Then the ARKIVIO solution automatically discovers all the storage and data resources on the network, which enables the IT administrators to see exactly how much capacity is available and used on the SAN and NAS storage systems.

GHI Company then deploys the ARKIVIO® auto-stor Policy Automation Engine (PAE) and push install Remote Server Assistants for the servers that they want to manage. The ARKIVIO PAE automatically and transparently migrates the company's low-value data on the SAN to the low-cost NAS storage volumes. This saves the administrators from personally having to examine each file, its owner, project, creation date and last access time. Also, the administrators do not have to manually move the files, inform the end users that the files are in a new location, or go to end users' client systems to change file access paths. From this point forward ARKIVIO® auto-stor automatically directs data to the appropriate storage tier optimizing the company's cost per managed terabyte of storage.

The Result

After implementing ARKIVIO® auto-stor, GHI Company immediately frees up storage capacity on their high-end SAN devices by migrating less valuable data to their low-cost NAS appliances. Within the first year, a total of 7.6 terabytes of data is migrated. In addition, GHI Company defers incremental SAN purchases, which results in a total hardware savings of $3.9 million by the end of the first year at just one Business Unit. As a result of implementing ARKIVIO® auto-stor, GHI Company is able to achieve a more cost-effective balance between its storage tiers as it makes better use of its lower cost network storage.