Slumberland Sleeps Better at Night with Selection of Compellent SAN
Slumberland, a fast growing privatelyowned business with $350 million in revenue, is the Midwest's largest retailer of Sealy and Simmons mattresses along with a full line of home furniture. The company's goal is to make the lives of their customers comfortable, with easy to maintain products and affordable prices. To meet this goal, the company depends on the information technology (IT) systems that are the backbone of the retail infrastructure.
For years, the business supported its retail IT needs by buying servers loaded with the biggest drives available. In 2003 the retail information system reached its end of life and the company's IT team decided it was time for a storage area network (SAN). Seth Mitchell, infrastructure team manager for Slumberland, began searching for a storage solution that would allow his team to prove the benefits of a SAN by starting small and growing overtime.
Mitchell considered many of the SAN offerings from traditional vendors but their fixed product categories wouldn't allow for Slumberland's future growth. "We needed to start small and show management the real performance, reliability and efficiency benefits of an enterprise storage system," explains Mitchell. "The other systems we evaluated came in different models where you had to rip out and replace systems regularly depending on the data growth - costly and time-consuming tasks that would have meant downtime for us."
Instead, Slumberland selected Compellent's Storage Center SAN. The modular, flexible growth path, ease of management and rapid recovery let the IT team at Slumberland rest easy.
Flexible Growth and Improved Performance Without a Forklift Upgrade
Compellent's modular architecture has allowed Slumberland to upgrade more than 20 times since installing the system in 2004. Slumberland initially installed a 1 TB SAN with a 1 Gbps Fibre Channel switch and immediately began demonstrating the system's speed and uptime benefits to management, who quickly approved further enhancements. Additional upgrades included adding storage enclosures with mixed disk technologies to enable Automated Tiered Storage, faster switches and an additional SAN for remote replication over IP.
Today, Slumberland has grown to over 25TB of usable storage without ever having to physically replace the original Compellent system. "We even made upgrades with a live system during business hours - a process that's made life easier for IT and been amazingly seamless to our end-users," explains Mitchell. "The upgrades have fueled performance - for example we've quadrupled the number of users on Microsoft Exchange, and Compellent is still 70 percent faster than our old storage system."
Replays and Replication Speed Time to Recovery
Compellent's Data Instant Replay software takes successive snapshots called Replays that allow Slumberland to quickly and easily recover lost or deleted files. "We've done a lot of what I call convenience restores with Replays," explains Mitchell. "A few times a month we're asked to get a file back and we can deliver in under 10 minutes. With tape it would take up to 3 hours."
To ensure the same rapid recovery in the event of a disaster, Slumberland replicates its critical retail and warehouse systems data to a second SAN over an IP network. With Compellent's Thin Replication, Slumberland can easily setup and manage replications and set bandwidth priority based on time of day to maximize bandwidth utilization. Additionally, Slumberland can test disaster recovery while online, a process that takes only a few minutes but enables Mitchell to ensure his business continuity plan is solid.
Ease of Use Improves IT Service and Cuts Overall Cost and Management Time
Compellent's unified interface speeds both common and complex storage tasks. Using this interface, Slumberland administrators can easily respond to increasing demand for storage across the business, expanding capacity on demand without downtime. "Our end users at Slumberland have benefited a lot from the Compellent technology, specifically, through better response time," says Mitchell. "They say they want more storage, we go in and expand it within minutes of their making the request."
The ability to provision on demand is fueled by Compellent's Thin Provisioning, called Dynamic Capacity. Thin Provisioning also allows Slumberland administrators to allocate capacity upfront without requiring the physical capacity in the SAN, a feature that Mitchell says has cut overall storage costs by 60 percent.
The ease of use of the Compellent SAN has made it possible for Slumberland to manage its growing capacity and implement advanced storage applications without adding staff. For instance, Compellent's Data Progression software allows Slumberland to meet the performance demands of the business while still saving money with an Automated Tiered Storage environment. Data Progression dynamically migrates infrequently accessed data to lower cost drives without requiring manual administrative intervention. "It just takes care of itself," Mitchell comments.
In fact, Slumberland's overall storage management time has been cut from 16 hours a week to less than one hour. Mitchell comments, "The single biggest benefit we've realized from our Compellent solution at Slumberland is a savings of time, specifically, the time that our system administrators spent managing storage across our network. That's just been a huge win for us."