National Print Group Posts Large-Scale Savings with Compellent SAN
“A sign of the times” means something to the talented staff at National Print Group (NPG)—literally. At NPG, craftsmanship meets cutting-edge technology for onestop large format design and production for everything from building wraps to 3D billboards. NPG has four state-of-theart manufacturing facilities and 12 sales offices across America, with more than 400 employees designing, producing, and fulfilling innovative signage for clients including Target, The Children’s Place, Rack Room Shoes and Sears.
One of the many ways NPG delivers high-level service to its clientele is through an automated online tool to help manage signage campaigns, retain profiles, and place orders in much less time than traditional paper or phone methods. NPG also hosts an extensive digital assets repository so clients can easily access their artwork portfolios. These services are built on highly customized applications and managed by the IT department.
But as the digital library and business applications continued to grow, so did data storage inefficiencies and costs. The aging equipment had limited storage capacity and there was no disaster recovery strategy other than time-consuming backups. When a large retail customer required 24x7 access to its own online repository, terabytes of capacity, and bundled print services before it would award NPG a new multimillion-dollar project, Michael Miller, chief information officer for NPG, took it as a sign for change.
“Customers expect uptime from our hosting services as if it were their own data center. For us, business continuance and flexibility are critical to providing top-tier services—not just today, but five or ten years from now—that our customers can count on,” says Miller. “When we learned about the Compellent storage area network (SAN) feature set and support team, we felt confident that the architecture could grow as business demanded and that we could support any new customer requirements.”
Automating Replication and Tiered Storage Saves Time and Money
NPG implemented a primary SAN in its Chattanooga, Tennessee, headquarters and a second SAN in a facility located 10 miles away and connected by a Metro Ethernet circuit. Using Compellent’s Data Instant Replay™, Miller schedules snapshots of data in 30-minute intervals. He also selects which volumes to replicate and when.
Nightly, 12 TB of key production data is asynchronously replicated over IP to the second site using Compellent’s Remote Instant Replay™ software, allowing Miller to keep critical data highly available in the event of a disaster while minimizing the impact on bandwidth performance during the working day.
“Because of the volume of data we are moving, we had anticipated the need for a larger and more expensive link to handle traffic,” says Miller. “With the Compellent SAN, we’re able to use our existing 30 Mb circuit to control priorities without performance issues. That’s saving us around $10,500 every quarter.”
Compellent’s Data Progression™ helps NPG save time and money with automated tiered storage that transparently manages data movement between tiers. NPG established tiers and set classification characteristics, turning the rest of the movement and categorization process over to Data Progression. This allows data that might be accessed only once in its creative lifetime to be moved off of fast Fibre Channel disks, opening up space for higher-priority data.
“Data Progression allows me to reduce costs by $15,000 to $20,000 just by moving that data to low-cost but fast bottom-tier SATA drives,” says Miller. “Even better, I’m meeting customer expectations for quick access and full redundancy, but doing it in a very cost-effective way.”
With the Compellent SAN, Miller feels NPG has seen real savings by minimizing the cost of upgrading hardware in its data center, achieving twice the functionality that upgrades to existing equipment were forecasted to deliver.
“To get the same level of capacity and functionality from another provider would have cost me twice as much,” says Miller. “I’d say we’ve saved over $120,000 dollars by going with the Compellent system.”
Op timizing Digital Assets with Thin Provisioning and Storage Virtualization
Rather than earmarking large amounts of storage for future use, Miller uses Compellent’s Thin Provisioning to dynamically provision capacity without having to pre-allocate space.
“We had a customer request for 3 TB of storage that we knew wouldn’t be used for several months. Thin Provisioning allows us to defer purchasing additional storage until it is actually needed, sometimes up to 12 months or more. That means huge savings and better value,” he explains.
NPG is also deriving more value by combining Compellent’s virtualized storage with VMware server virtualization for better use of resources.
“We wanted to adopt Microsoft Exchange for e-mail, but server and license costs made it prohibitively expensive, says Miller.“With Compellent’s virtualized storage and easy integration with VMware, none of that was necessary and Exchange is up and running without any additional costs.”
SAN Ease of Use Eliminates Need for Extra Manpower
The easy-to-use Compellent SAN enables NPG to satisfy its customers without having to increase staffing or training. Compellent automates time-consuming, repetitive storage monitoring and capacity planning tasks, and gives Miller’s team a central interface for managing the entire range of functionality.
“Compellent gives us simplified administration that doubles our technical capability and allows us to get more done in less time,” says Miller. “I had budgeted $80,000 for an extra full-time SAN administrator, but Compellent ease of use has eliminated that need by giving us the ability to satisfy new, demanding customers without adding to our headcount.”