Compellent SAN Inspires Savings at Arnold Worldwide
At Arnold Worldwide, a global advertising agency with more than $100 million in revenues based in Boston, branding is business. From raising awareness about the ills of tobacco to increasing Amtrak ridership and driving online traffic for ESPN, the wide spectrum of talent at Arnold helps make the agency highly successful.
Like their marketing colleagues, the IT department at Arnold takes a creative approach to supporting the agency’s branch offices spread across the United States and the United Kingdom. A reliable data center is crucial to effectively running the business, providing value-add technologies such as business intelligence functionality and customizable metadata that allows the company to label and search its body of work. Equally important, Arnold’s storage infrastructure must protect the agency’s creative assets such as datarich media files—which often cannot be compressed without jeopardizing quality—and mission-critical billing, e-mail, human resources, and client account information.
With data compliance regulations on the rise and looming maintenance renewal costs, senior vice president of information technology, Greg Folsom, wanted to replace the existing storage area network (SAN) with more intuitive and efficient technology. He sought a virtualized SAN that could provide a robust disaster recovery strategy and cost-effective scalability to meet the growing needs of the business.
Arnold Worldwide installed a Compellent Storage Center® SAN in its Boston headquarters and a second Compellent SAN at its New York office.
“We needed to improve business continuity while keeping capital and operating expenditures low. The Compellent SAN was unanimously selected for its ease of use, price/performance, expandability, and an advanced feature set,” says Folsom.
Simplified SAN Management Saves Time and Money
The old storage system at Arnold Worldwide required the IT department to wrangle with a variety of protocols, interfaces, and performance challenges that required labor-intensive storage administration. The Compellent Storage Center™ uses intuitive, point-and-click wizards to simplify storage and reduce administrative time and costs. Even advanced features like Replays (snapshots), replication and boot from SAN are less than six clicks away. After implementing the Compellent SAN, Arnold gained greater interoperability and performance.
“The SAN allows us to automate how and where data is stored, replicated, monitored and virtualized—all from a single GUI-based console. We went from days to minutes for once-intricate tasks like splitting a main file server—with over 3.5 million files—without even so much as a hiccup. The IT department can now reliably and painlessly support the creative output of our agency,” says Folsom.
Automated Tiered Storage and Replays Cinch Top-Notch Data Recovery Performance
The Arnold IT team uses Compellent’s Data Progression™ software, which delivers intelligent tiered storage with automated data classification and transparent movement between tiers, to better manage its digital assets and reduce administrative efforts. Folsom replaced the previous single-tiered environment with two tiers, blending Fibre Channel and SATA drives on the SAN to reduce the need to regularly buy expensive high-performance disks when meeting increasing demands for storage.
“Data gets stale quickly here as projects are completed. Automated Tiered Storage moves inactive data off high-performance drives, while making sure the files are still accessible when needed,” Folsom says. “We just set the policies and schedules—Compellent takes care of the rest.”
Folsom’s cost-effective solution for disaster recovery includes asynchronous replication over IP for reliable failover between the Boston and New York locations. He established a twice-daily replication regimen, keeping data online for three days before offloading to tape. The snapshots, known as Replays, are automatically tiered with Data Progression, improving business continuity without affecting performance or consuming highperformance resources.
“While moving a database to tape, it became corrupted and we didn’t have a backup. The Replay on the SAN allowed us to immediately restore the data with no corruption, saving a significant amount of time,” says Folsom.
Virtualization and Thin Provisioning Foster Efficient Storage and Lower Costs
However, Arnold Worldwide’s most substantial savings on equipment purchases, floor space, and administrative resources, was the result of storage and server virtualization. Storage and server virtualization helps Arnold Worldwide make better use of its current assets while maintaining the flexibility to grow or allocate storage easily. Folsom consolidated seven racks into three by virtualizing 45 servers on four physical machines—all sharing virtualized storage from the SAN, using VMware ESX Server® software.
“Even though going green wasn’t a purchase decision driver, it has been an added benefit,” says Folsom. “The Compellent SAN has helped us reduce our data center footprint and more efficiently use the power and cooling storage requires.”
In the advertising business, there can be extreme peaks and valleys in project workloads. Folsom’s team used to purchase an average of 10 storage disks each year to keep pace with growth and to pre-allocate capacity, which sometimes sat idle. Through the use of Compellent’s Thin Provisioning, IT is able to oversubscribe the disks rather than “over purchase” disks, saving many thousands of dollars annually and adeptly providing on-demand storage.
“Needs change dramatically with regard to creative workloads.” Folsom explains. “Thin Provisioning allows us to meet those needs without interrupting the creative process. Compellent even alerts us when we’re low on space so we can quickly and easily provision more storage.”