Slumberland Expands Compellent SAN More Than 20 Times Without Requiring a Forklift UpgradeJuly 11, 2007
Retailer Reports Exchange Performance Boost of 70 Percent, Significant Disk Storage Savings
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn., July 11, 2007 — Compellent today announced Slumberland, a regional furniture retailer with $350 million in revenue, has upgraded its Compellent storage area network (SAN) more than 20 times since installing the system in 2004. With a small initial deployment, the Compellent Storage Center has allowed Slumberland to improve the storage utilization, availability and performance of Slumberland’s retail systems while expanding end-user IT services and deploying enterprise-class disaster recovery.
With more than 2,300 employees at 110 locations, Slumberland is a fast-growing privately owned business. For years the business supported its retail information technology 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 SAN.
"We needed to start small and show management the real performance, reliability and efficiency benefits of the enterprise storage system, such as saving 60 percent in disk costs through thin provisioning," said Seth Mitchell, infrastructure team manager for Slumberland. "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."
The modular Compellent SAN allows users to easily upgrade and expand over time. Slumberland initially installed a 1 TB SAN with a 1 Gbps Fibre Channel switch and began demonstrating the system’s speed and uptime benefits to management, who 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. Without hiring additional IT staff the company now manages more than 25 TB of usable storage.
"We even made upgrades with a live system during business hours—a process that’s been amazingly seamless to our end-users," continued Mitchell. "The upgrades have fueled performance—for example we’ve quadrupled the number of users on Exchange, and Compellent is still 70 percent faster than our old storage system. The upgrades have also allowed us to execute an enterprise-class business continuance plan."
Business continuity has been implemented with Compellent’s all-in-one suite of enterprise storage management applications without requiring upfront storage purchases. Slumberland has also replicated its critical retail and warehouse systems data to a second SAN over an IP network to enable instant recovery. In addition, the retailer can automate booting servers from the Compellent SAN without requiring third-party applications, server disk drives or server-based software, further increasing the cost savings.
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Compellent is a leading provider of enterprise-class network storage solutions that are highly scalable, feature-rich and designed to be easy to use and cost effective.