Moss & Associates Increase Performance and Create an Affordable Email Archive with Data Progression
Overview
Moss & Associates is a fast growing national construction consulting and management firm. In 2 years, Moss has grown from 5 to 300 employees with annual revenues that exceed $750 million, and is now the largest construction company in South Florida.
Situation
Moss's development planners and estimators prepare and collect the documents – schematics, construction estimates, sub-contractor bids – that establish the cost of work. Moss keeps these files online and available so estimators can access data that may be relevant for new projects, minimizing the time it takes to process bids. In addition, Moss is required to save correspondence for legal purposes for 3 to 4 years.
As their business and employee base grew, the demand for storage capacity grew exponentially and servers were continually running out of storage space. Moss’s network attached storage solution was expensive to expand and didn’t offer the breadth of features at the price point Moss’s growing business required. With no end in sight for their storage appetite, Moss needed a long-term, scalable storage solution.
Solution
Moss selected Compellent Storage Center for its superior mix of features delivered at an affordable price. Storage Center’s Data Progression provides an Automated Tiered Storage solution for Moss, increasing Tier 1 application performance and creating an affordable and immediate email archive. Moss uses a combination of Data Instant Replay and Remote Instant Replay to ensure continuous data protection. A clustered controller configuration and continuous snapshots ensure maximum data availability. Storage Center's unified management interface enables Moss to easily manage all of their enterprise storage.
Increased Performance and Cost-Effective Online Storage
Moss employees save everything in email as many construction jobs run for 3 to 4 years. Maintaining historic data online is a key competitive advantage for Moss as it allows their estimators to reference old projects to save time when quoting new or similar jobs. But large Exchange storage requirements along with a SQL database were slowing down application performance.
After installing Storage Center, Moss loaded all their data onto Tier 1 Fibre Channel and enabled Data Progression. Within 5 to 7 days the inactive data, which comprised nearly 80 percent of Moss’s stored data, automatically migrated down to lower-cost SATA drives. Moving this inactive data off high-performance Fibre Channel drives freed up Tier 1 spindles, increasing Tier 1 performance by 60 percent. Data Progression has also allowed Moss to provide immediate access to historic data without purchasing expensive storage or dedicating an administrator to manage an online archive. With Data Progression, Moss can select sub-tiers within RAID levels for advanced tiering and easily monitor data allocation with Storage Center’s Volume Distribution Reports.
Easy to Use Snapshot and Replication Technology Delivers Maximum Data Protection
Moss has more than 20 estimators working on gigantic spreadsheets to estimate and quote new construction business. If they make a mistake or lose a file, it means the company loses and/or delays million dollar deals. With Data Instant Replay, Moss can quickly recover lost or deleted files and keep their estimators productive. Moss has scheduled Replays every hour from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. to ensure rapid file and user mail box recovery.
Like other Florida businesses, Moss and Associates has to deal with the challenges of hurricane season. Using Remote Instant Replay’s IP-based replication, Moss set up a duplicate SAN configuration at an earthquake and hurricane proof co-location center which is synchronized with their corporate office. The entire operation can fail-over at any time.
Remote Instant Replay leverages Compellent’s Thin Provisioning to send only the actual data within a volume during initialization and only blocks that have changed after that, significantly optimizing bandwidth and cost for Moss’s synchronized solution. Moss administrators can easily monitor and verify replication status and set priority to specific volumes as necessary.
Avoiding Technology Lock-in
Compellent’s standards-based hardware architecture frees Moss from technology risk by providing the capability to mix and match server interface or drive technology, and easily adopt new technologies as they become available. Storage Center’s ability to simultaneously support both iSCSI and Fibre Channel server connectivity was a key decision criteria for Moss.
Moss uses Fibre Channel server connections for business critical, performance intensive SQL, Exchange and file server applications and iSCSI connections anywhere they don’t need extreme performance.