CNS Reduces Storage Administration and Has Room to Grow
Overview
CNS designs and markets consumer health care products, including Breathe Right® nasal strips and FiberChoice® daily fiber supplements. With 60 employees and approximately $90 million in annual revenue, the company focuses on better breathing and digestive health products that address important consumer needs within the aging well/self care market. The company's data is mostly comprised of sales, finance and inventory information contained within its Exchange and SQL servers. CNS recently was looking to upgrade its servers and operating system, and in doing so, wanted to make sure the company had flexible storage capabilities well into the future. After a short run with a competitor's storage area network (SAN), CNS replaced it with Compellent's Storage Center to support its long-term storage needs.
Situation
Before implementing a SAN, CNS' storage solution consisted of nine independent servers, each with its own internal disk drives. If a server reached capacity, CNS' only options were to acquire an external array or move applications to a new server Ñ time-consuming and costly processes. As a result, CNS was constantly managing storage capacities, a time intensive process that consumed 75 percent of one person's time. CNS wanted to make a clean break from direct attached storage. In addition to seeking a solution that would enable more efficient and affordable expansion of its storage capacity, CNS wanted the ability to easily create test environments for evaluating new applications.
Solution
As part of its system upgrade, CNS purchased nine new servers without disk drives and implemented a SAN so it could boot directly from the servers. Not satisfied with its initial SAN selection, CNS quickly swapped out the competitor's system and replaced it with the Compellent Storage Center. According to Don Himsl, IS director for CNS, the previous system took three days to implement. The Compellent Storage Center was up and running within a few hours. Using Compellent, CNS has reduced administration from 75 to 5 percent of one person's time — regaining almost 30 additional hours every week. Overall, the Compellent system has exceeded CNS' expectations, delivering the scalability, recovery and ease of use capabilities CNS was seeking.
Creating Test Enviornments for New Applications
Compellent's Data Instant Replay feature allows CNS to create parallel test environments in a matter of minutes, and test new software applications quickly and easily. When the company upgrades to new software, Data Instant Replay allows CNS to thoroughly test it and determine whether or not to move forward with a complete implementation before loading the software on the system and impacting users. This new process saves CNS critical time and minimizes the risk that often accompanies untested software.
Streamlining Implementation and Administration
CNS' IT staff is small, and according to Himsl, is comprised of technology generalists with multiple responsibilities. It was imperative that the company's new storage solution not only be implemented quickly, but be easy to use. Compellent's single, Web-based, intuitive interface centralizes management for all of CNS' storage resources.
In addition to being implemented in only a few hours, the Compellent solution enabled CNS to quickly migrate three of its old machines to the new network in less than three hours.
Easily Expanding Capacity
In the past, CNS' only options for expanding storage capacity were short-term, patchwork solutions. Compellent's Dynamic Capacity enables CNS to use significantly less storage and improve overall performance by allocating space only when data is physically stored. Compellent allows CNS to expand capacity, bandwidth and performance online without disruption or downtime.