by Greg Folsom, Senior Vice President, Information Technology Director, Arnold Worldwide — February 22, 2011
Arnold Worldwide is a global communications company delivering services across all communication touchpoints – advertising, digital, promotions, direct, design and branded content. We’re proud to represent a diverse portfolio of worldwide brands, and we’ve been a Dell shop for as long as I can remember. We have always relied on Dell servers to host critical applications the agency and our clients depend on.
In the advertising business, creative workloads often change dramatically. Projects and campaigns come and go but leave behind an enormous electronic trail. Five years ago, I recognized that our legacy SAN couldn’t keep up with the massive data files we were generating and the system offered zero scalability. To cut costs and keep up with our competitors, we were forced to look for a better solution.
After evaluating and considering a number of options, we chose the Compellent solution because we knew it would work great with the VMware virtual servers we were going to run on Dell. Once implemented, we saw immediate results due to the SAN’s persistent architecture and intuitive technology. We eliminated 80 percent of our hardware and consolidated down to four physical servers. With rack space at a premium and energy costs on the rise, it pays to virtualize. With our data center running on Compellent and Dell, we did that easily.
We’ve also greatly improved our ability to withstand data disasters that might occur. For example, I remember a time soon after we installed the Compellent SAN—we were doing some system maintenance, and someone accidentally deleted a bunch of digital images. However, we had the volume backed up with a Compellent snapshot, so it just took us a few minutes to roll back in time to before the images were deleted. That’s another benefit of virtualization that people don’t really think about. Fortunately, we’ve done all this while keeping capital and operating expenditures low so we can focus our efforts on what we do best—deliver the right IT services to support the creative marketing and advertising campaigns of our clients around the world.
We’re still totally satisfied with our decision to switch to Compellent. Due to budget cutbacks in recent years, the advertising industry has been forced to look for ways to do more with less. But our bet on cutting-edge storage and server virtualization has enabled us to stay ahead of the competition. Dell’s acquisition of Compellent validates the critical decision we made five years ago, and our faith in the two companies has never been stronger. We look forward to seeing the two companies flourish and continue to create innovative IT offerings for many businesses, not just ours.
Editor’s Note: Greg Folsom is the CIO of Arnold Worldwide, and a Compellent and Dell customer. To learn more about Arnold Worldwide, its use of Compellent Fluid Data storage and its annual cost-savings, read the case study.