OfficeWare Replaces iSCSI-only SAN with Compellent’s Storage Center
Overview
OfficeWare is a Kentucky-based regional full-service business equipment dealership, providing businesses with equipment to enhance its document productivity. With over 100 employees, OfficeWare serves thousands of customers and has annual revenues exceeding $17 million.
OfficeWare selected Compellent to provide a flexible, high performance storage solution that would reduce the time and complexity of managing its storage.
Situation
OfficeWare relies on business management applications to ensure high quality external customer care. With demands for capacity and performance increasing, OfficeWare’s limited IT staff spent a significant amount of time dealing with disk space allocation and juggling capacity across servers in its direct attached storage environment. When preparing to install a key business management application with a SQL back-end, OfficeWare realized that direct attached storage was no longer a viable solution capable of supporting its growing business.
Initially, OfficeWare installed an iSCSI-only SAN to solve management and capacity issues but realized that this fixed solution wasn’t able to offer the performance and flexibility its business required.
Solution
With Compellent’s Storage Center, OfficeWare’s IT staff no longer spends its time manually allocating and reallocating direct attached storage. More importantly, OfficeWare’s critical business applications have the performance they require. With Storage Center’s flexible architecture OfficeWare can choose Fibre Channel for critical business applications today and add lower cost drives as capacity demands increase over time.
OfficeWare’s limited IT staff easily manages its 2TB Fibre Channel SAN with Storage Center’s intuitive, wizard-based interface. Additionally, with Storage Center’s Data Instant Replay, OfficeWare is assured its data is protected and should a failure or disruption occur they will be able to recover their data in minutes.
Cut Storage Management Time in Half
Compellent’s Storage Center streamlined management and allocation. With the Compellent solution, OfficeWare now spends fifty percent less time managing its storage. That’s time OfficeWare’s IT staff can devote to strategic initiatives and to delivering a high level of support to internal and external customers.
For OfficeWare, Storage Center’s easy-to-use management interface was a key selling point. IT administrators were able to quickly learn to manage the SAN through the single intuitive interface. OfficeWare also relies on automated functions provided by management wizards to cut “hands on” time.
Delivered 300 Percent Performance Boost
With its previous iSCSI-only SAN environment, OfficeWare experienced considerable performance delays when copying files, starting up or shutting down servers. With the Compellent solution, OfficeWare has seen a three-fold increase in transfer rates. OfficeWare configured the Fibre Channel disks supporting its SQL applications at RAID 10 to further boost performance and redundancy. The remaining disks are configured at RAID 5 to better utilize the drives.
Enabled Rapid File Recovery
Data Instant Replay has helped OfficeWare create a fail-safe environment for testing upgrades and new applications. Shortly after installing Storage Center, OfficeWare experienced a failure when installing a document management system upgrade. Data Instant Replay enabled a quick recovery. OfficeWare was able to boot a server from the SAN, roll back time to before the failure, copy the files and return online in a matter of minutes.