HarborOne Credit Union Selects Compellent’s Storage Area Network to Centralize and Manage Increasing Volume of Customer Data March 21, 2005
Compellent's Boot From SAN feature cost-justifies entire purchase price of HarborOne’s first storage area network
Minneapolis, March 21, 2005 — Compellent Technologies, a provider of modular, affordable storage solutions distributed exclusively through a select national network of business partners, today announced HarborOne Credit Union, New England’s largest state-chartered credit union, has selected Compellent’s Storage CenterTM storage area network (SAN) to centralize and manage its increasing volume of valuable customer data.
With strong growth over the last three years and a rapidly expanding volume of valuable customer data, HarborOne needed a data storage solution that would expand in scale and features to support its more than 350 employees and $1 billion in managed assets.
Previously, HarborOne had 11 servers, each with its own internal storage and varying levels of utilization, spread across three separate offices. Storage management was a challenge and only kept under control by providing each server with more than five times the storage space required by its applications.
"The advanced capabilities of Storage Center put it out in front of competitive products," said John White, MIS officer and network administrator for HarborOne. "Compellent's ability to boot directly from the SAN generates ongoing return-on-investment by allowing us to buy low-cost, diskless servers. As a result, Compellent will pay for itself in reduced hardware costs alone."
Compellent's Boot from SAN feature optimizes the boot process by creating a golden copy of the boot image on the SAN rather than on the internal disk drives within every server — saving money, increasing performance and conserving capacity. Diskless servers can now be utilized, reducing the purchase cost of every server going forward. Servers also boot faster since the boot image is stored on the SAN and not on lower performance direct attached storage.
By combining Boot from SAN with Compellent’s Data Instant Replay application, the boot process is optimized even further. Using Data Instant Replay, boot images for every additional server can be made from the original boot image by copying only the minor differences between servers. In this fashion, boot images can be placed on the SAN for literally dozens of servers and consume only slightly more storage than the space typically required by one server.
Winslow Technology Group LLC, a regional data storage consulting firm and a Compellent business partner, worked closely with HarborOne to understand its requirements and design a solution that delivers high-end functionality at an affordable price.
"HarborOne was faced with a challenge that many mid-size enterprises are struggling with today – how to improve network storage efficiency on a limited budget," said Scott Winslow, founder and chief executive officer of Winslow Technology Group. "The Compellent SAN solves this immediate need and also equips them with an affordable platform for long-term expansion."
Common Direct Attached Storage Restrictions
Compellent's Storage Center frees users from common SAN limitations, providing companies the ability to share a single, unified pool of storage across any number of servers. Common restrictions resulting from servers with internal storage include:
- Servers with internal storage are expensive and more vulnerable to disk failure
- Installing upgrades and fixes for each server is a time intensive process
- New server and temporary server deployments must be scheduled off hours and impact system availability
- Internal storage results in wasted capacity and excess storage purchases
- Recovery from failed servers is slow and impacts system availability
About Storage Center
Storage Center builds on its Dynamic Block Architecture to deliver a scalable, open-systems hardware platform that is designed to allow businesses to mix and match disk drives, controllers and enclosures; an integrated foundation of core storage capabilities providing functionality previously available only in high-end systems; a suite of software applications that can optimize utilization, automating replication and speeding data recovery; and a single, intuitive, centralized management interface streamlining storage administration.
About Compellent
Compellent delivers affordable, modular storage solutions exclusively through business partners that provide companies of all sizes enterprise storage capabilities without big system costs or complexities. For more information, visit www.compellent.com.