IWCODirect Increases Efficiency and Performance with Compellent SAN
For more than 35 years, IWCO Direct has uniquely positioned itself as the go-to source for direct marketing services. By integrating services that streamline the direct mail process with processes that improve the accuracy of respondent contact information, the company strives to achieve increased response rates and return on investment for its clients.
With more than two billion pieces of direct mail shipped each year, undeliverable mail has a large impact on both the bottom line and client satisfaction. To improve the accuracy of names and addresses, IWCO Direct recently added National Change of Address (NCOA) services to its data quality processes and looked for ways to check for changes as late in the process as possible to further increase deliverability. Nearly 200,000,000 addresses are verified each month, putting a growing strain on IWCO Direct’s storage infrastructure.
“Prohibitive mainframe storage costs meant the runtime for data quality processes was measured in days, not hours—holding up a mailing for a lengthy validation process could mean missed opportunities for our clients,” explains Rodger Smith, enterprise architect at IWCO Direct. “And even after leaving the mainframe, we faced new validation procedures that more than doubled the processing time, so being able to optimize performance speed became essential for keeping up.”
The IWCO Direct IT team decided that a storage area network (SAN) would reliably handle the transition from the mainframe and offer flexibility for future growth. “We didn’t have the resources for extensive retraining, so we needed something that was easy to manage. We were also on the fourth year of nearly 30 percent annual growth in production, so we needed a system that could adapt,” Smith says. “Our long-time business partner brought the Compellent® Storage Center™ to our attention, and we quickly realized that the SAN’s features were a perfect fit for IWCO Direct.”
Flexible Storage Center Architecture Builds Capacity for Growth
The modular architecture of the Compellent SAN offers flexibility and growth, allowing IWCO Direct to scale as needed. In the four years following its move to 4 TB of Compellent storage, IWCO Direct has easily expanded to 10 TB of total storage on a single platform—an incredible increase in capacity that has easily accommodated business growth. “The three or four upgrades we’ve gone through since adopting Compellent have taken only a couple of hours each,” Smith explains. “Leaving the mainframe environment to implement a brand-new infrastructure would have nearly been impossible without the support of Compellent. And our platform upgrades over the past four years have been minimally disruptive, allowing us to handle growth without impacting availability.”
Ease of Provisioning Enables 5x Increase in Business Productivity
The manageability of the storage infrastructure has grown in lock-step with IWCO Direct’s capacity. A single, unified interface offers easy access to the entire set of Compellent capabilities. Compellent’s Dynamic Capacity™ software completely separates storage allocation from utilization, enabling Smith’s team to quickly create virtual volumes of any size up front. Actual physical capacity is only consumed when data is written by the application.
“Overall, Compellent helps us run about five times the workload with the same staff as in the mainframe days—to this day we haven’t had to dedicate a single person to manage storage,” Smith says. “We can create storage volumes of any size at any time and expand them in any amount without rebooting the server. When a sudden surge of work has us about to run out of disk space on a data processing server, being able to add 50 GB to a volume in less than five minutes with no production impact is priceless.”
Automated Tiered Storage Ensures Efficient Use of Assets
A total of four storage tiers in the Compellent environment helps Smith and his team to better manage how data is stored and used. With Compellent’s Data Progression™ software, IWCO Direct can now classify and automatically move the large name and address files for each project from highperformance storage to second- and third-tier drives as they move toward completion.
After a project is completed and the mailings are out the door, Smith uses CommVault® DataMigrator™ to transfer the now-obsolete files from high-performance storage to a secondary SAN. As those files ease off the secondary SAN, they are retained on tape. “Although our files are very large, they have a definable shelf life,” Smith says. “By allowing us to easily implement an advanced approach to tiering, the combination of Data Progression and CommVault software helps ensure that we have the high-performance capacity available to promptly respond to our clients’ demands— without increasing spending on Tier 1 drives.”
Copi lot Servic es Helps IWCO Direct Realize Solid-State Performance
To meet client demands for accuracy as well as comply with new postal regulations, IWCO Direct recently adopted national changeof- address verifications and delivery point validation on addresses. These processes came at a price, increasing processing demands by more than a factor of five. Technical experts from Compellent worked hand in hand with Smith’s team to improve performance within the specific context of IWCO Direct’s unique environment. They added very expensive, super high-speed solid-state disk which could then be carved up into the chunks needed by each server. Together, the team was able to reach performance goals, increasing throughput by nearly 500 percent for some critical processes.
“The throughput we realized with the help of Copilot Services shortened the cycle time dramatically for data processing—the data quality process stands to be reduced from two days to only four hours,” Smith explains. “That will allow our manufacturing facility to complete jobs sooner and get offers to mailboxes faster—speed that our customers tell us can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”