Munder Capital Management Reduces Storage Expenditures and Ensure Business Continuance
Overview
Munder Capital Management is a registered investment advisor, managing over $37 billion in client assets.
Munder’s investment teams rely on 24 x 7 access to email and client data in order to execute transactions and maintain service levels. Securities regulations require exacting data retention policies including extended archival and offsite replication. After evaluating the options available, Mike Dufek, the company’s Director of Information Systems, selected Compellent’s Storage Center to meet Munder’s data storage and disaster recovery requirements.
Situation
Munder had used a storage area network (SAN) for the past 5 years, however the system had reached the end of its life. When the vendor’s recommended upgrade did not include the features Munder required to meet its disaster tolerance requirements, Dufek began evaluating numerous systems.
Dufek’s vision was to design a storage centric architecture that allowed him to buy storage on the fly and grow without limits. Dufek needed a platform that could meet detailed data protection policies and could easily be managed by his existing staff. After evaluating the options available, Dufek selected Compellent’s Storage Center to meet his data storage and disaster tolerance requirements.
Solution
Compellent announced Storage Center on February 25th, 2004 and Munder was one of the first installations. The relationship has been a tremendous success. As an early adopter, Dufek has worked closely with the engineering team to implement dozens of improvements to the system. He credits the people and their “can do” attitude for the results he has accomplished to date.
Achieving True Disaster Tolerance
Munder has two dual controller Compellent Storage Centers, located seven miles apart. By creatively applying Compellent’s snapshot/point-in-time replication application (Remote Instant Replay) across geographically distributed sites, Munder maintains a mirror of their environment, not just their data. Both systems are active and in the event of a data hazard or server failure, time to recovery is reduced to minutes.
Reducing Storage Expenditures By 30 Percent
Dynamic Capacity, Compellent's virtualization / capacity management application separates allocation and utilization, and has allowed Munder to recover up to 70% of the unused space previously allocated to boot and application volumes. By only purchasing storage when it is needed Munder is able to “buy storage on the fly” and estimates that they have cut their total upfront storage expenditures by a third.
Speeding Deployment Without Adding Staff
Munder’s staff of five system integrators currently manage two dual controller systems with 28 TB of storage, across 130 servers. The intuitive user interface and ability to use a golden boot image allows new servers and new capacity to be deployed in minutes. Compellent’s disk based Replays speed migrations by enabling true SAN based migrations from other proprietary storage systems. Migrations, disk space management, backups and recovery now take one-third of the time.