Compellent Fluid Data Delivers as Advertised for Mitchell Communications Group
Every feature Compellent offers has delivered a tangible benefit to our business, something we were unable to measure before.
Andrew Nowak, Storage Architect, Mitchell Communications Group
With more than 600 staff, 2500 customers, and turnover in excess of one billion dollars (AU$), Mitchell Communications Group is the largest marketing communications group in Australia.
Mitchell has a lean IT staff of just 10, tasked with ensuring that all business and media buying applications required to run the business, along with all its associated data, are fully available during working hours.
Data Growth Outstrips IT Infrastructure
Because most of the data held at Mitchell actually belongs to its customers, having a data storage strategy offering first-class backup and recovery is also a primary concern of the IT department.
However, when the company recently began experiencing 70 percent annual growth across its digital media, technology, research and consulting business divisions, the IT team quickly found that its current storage infrastructure was not up to the task.
Andrew Nowak, storage architect at Mitchell, explains: “The needs of the business were quickly outstripping the capabilities of our existing SAN. Even though it was only a couple of years old, the old SAN just could not cope. It was not flexible enough, it was hard to scale, and we couldn’t expand the disks in a cost-effective way to cope with the data growth we were facing.”
Grinding Storage Performance Impacted the Business
The SAN also had performance issues, issues that were noticed by the users. Nowak said: “We would get regular complaints from across the organisation citing sluggish performance, something unacceptable for a business of our stature.”
There were other concerns. For disaster recovery purposes, Mitchell was backing up data from the old SAN to tape, a process that took over three days. In addition, the existing SAN was proving very inflexible with Mitchell’s new VMware ESX virtual server infrastructure making the provisioning of storage a time-intensive task for the while team. Lastly, the inherent nature of how the old SAN pre-allocated LUNs meant that Mitchell was rarely achieving greater than 25 percent capacity utilisation rates.
Metrics for a New SAN
For all these reasons, it was clear that a new SAN was urgently needed. Nowak’s team established five key metrics for a new SAN.
It had to be able to scale with their growing capacity and performance needs, rather than require periodic forklift upgrades. It had to integrate tightly with the company’s existing VMware environment. It had to be able to grow LUNs on the fly, to accommodate changing business needs. It needed to be able to take space-efficient snapshots of data for disaster recovery. Most of all, it had to make better use of available capacity through new thin provisioning and automated tiered storage technologies.
Compellent Comes Top, Down Under
After evaluating all the main storage brands, Nowak confirmed that the Compellent Storage Center SAN, with its Fluid Data management, came out on top “by a long way.”
Soon after, his team installed a SAN from Compellent including all the key software features required such as Thin Provisioning, Automated Tiered Storage and Replays.
The tiered storage configuration was made up of 20 percent fast Fibre Channel (FC) drives, and 80 percent low-cost SATA drives. Mitchell also opted for Compellent’s Remote Instant Replay feature, allowing data to be replicated to a second Compellent SAN for disaster recovery in the near future.
Integrated Microsoft PowerShell Cuts Management by 50 Percent
With Compellent, PowerShell-based command sets can be used for automating common, repetitive tasks within its Microsoft Windows server environment. Using this feature, which runs in line with VMware’s own PowerShell scripts, Nowak and his colleagues have learned to effortlessly produce scripts across the entire storage network for volume administration and data recovery, cutting management time by 50 percent in the process.
Nowak explains the benefit: “We currently have dozens of virtual servers on the Compellent system. The simplicity of using Compellent and PowerShell to manage our virtual servers is a huge time saver for us. The integrated ability to create disks, attach them to servers and then present them within that same script, talking directly to VMware to format the disks and do the rest, makes life so much easier.”
Performance Improvements and Reduced Recovery Time
Nowak has also seen performance increase dramatically due to the way Compellent virtualises enterprise storage at the disk level, creating a dynamic pool of shared storage resources available to all servers, all the time. With read/write operations spread across all drives, multiple requests can be processed in parallel, boosting system performance and ensuring data gets to users as soon as it is requested.
Nowak said: “Microsoft Exchange performance in particular has been boosted, even though it’s actually running on the lower tier of storage. Best of all, ever since we installed the Compellent SAN, complaints about system performance have become a thing of the past.”
Compellent’s snapshot technology, called Replays, has enabled Mitchell to improve its disaster recovery efforts considerably. Previously, since data was shipped offsite daily any data loss going back further than 24hrs would require a lot of time. By keeping older data locally on the Compellent SAN for longer, Nowak’s team is able to recover files or volume almost instantly, or roll back to a previous snapshot in the event of a serious problem.
Bottom Line Business Benefits
Compellent’s Fluid Data management solution didn’t just tick all the boxes in terms of Mitchell’s core requirements of performance and data protection. By having an integrated server and storage virtualisation strategy, Mitchell expects to see its hardware footprint drop dramatically, even as its data growth continues. The combined energy savings from running fewer physical servers and disks are expected to be considerable. These savings tie directly back to the company’s corporate green initiative that range from office lighting that automatically turns itself off to thin client technology.
As Nowak concludes: “Every feature Compellent offers has delivered a tangible benefit to our business, something we were unable to measure before. We finally have storage on our own terms, supporting and growing in tandem with the needs of our business. We’ve stopped spending time putting out fires and have instead been able to make a strategic contribution to the company’s bottom-line.”