Gaston County sees productivity soar with Dell Compellent Storage Center SANs and Dell Fluid Data technology
Four years ago we went looking for a solution that was going to accommodate our future needs and growth. Today we know our data is more secure. We know that it is more accessible. We know that it is more reliable than it has ever been in the past.
Brandon Jackson, Chief Information Officer, Gaston County
With 26 hypermarkets and 120 supermarkets across Italy, Iper is a large and growing retail outlet chain that achieved annual revenues of €2.5 billion in 2008. Technology infrastructure – and data storage in particular – plays a major role in the day-to-day running and accountability of the company.
Iper employees carry out numerous logistical and administrative functions, from managing payroll and human resources information to handling large volumes of data relating to stock control and inventory. The Iper data warehouse alone hosts more than 400 gigabytes of stock keeping units (SKUs) and barcodes. The company needed a virtualized storage and network infrastructure that would make information easier to access and allow room for growth. The solution had to be powerful, affordable and easy to scale on demand.
Giovanni Oteri, ICT Manager, Iper Montebello SpA Finiper Group, says: “Our business strategy is directly affected by where our data is stored.
Just like product warehouses, our data warehouse holds goods that must be easy to move and relocate – it must be able to adapt to changing access requirements. Managing inactive historical data is crucial for Iper because it is these volumes that grow continually – unlike active data, which doesn’t accumulate in the same way. In the past, much of our historical data was hidden among stacks of expensive, inaccessible disk storage.”
Storage footprint is halved by intelligent data management
Iper used a legacy Fibre Channel– based SAN, and Oteri was often frustrated that expensive, highperformance disks were not being used to their full potential – a problem he found replicated in many competing storage solutions. Iper continued to research the market for a more innovative approach. Oteri identified Dell Compellent as the solution he had been waiting for and replaced the entire storage infrastructure with a Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN based on Dell Fluid Data™ technology. Using intelligent policy-based automation for block, file and object-based data, the Dell Fluid Data architecture combines capability with flexibility so
organisations can scale seamlessly.
As a result, Iper cut its storage footprint significantly. When the company moved an Oracle database from its previous enterprise storage solution to
Dell Compellent, it halved the number of drives. For another application, Dell Compellent matched the capacity and performance of a 60-drive storage
solution offered by a competitor with just 20 drives.
“With Dell Compellent you get less hardware and more brainware,” says Oteri. “All other storage technology now seems obsolete in comparison. Thanks to Dell Compellent, we’ve created the perfect modern storage architecture for our business.”
Company saves time and cuts costs with automated tiered storage
Oteri chose Dell Compellent primarily because of its unique approach to automated tiered storage, called Dell Compellent Data Progression. Data Progression dynamically moves enterprise data to the optimal tier based on actual use. The most active blocks reside on high-performance drives, while infrequently accessed data migrates to lower-cost, highcapacity drives.
The result is automated tiered storage, which has lowered administrative time and reduced overall storage costs. Oteri can depend on the solution to classify and move data between tiers of storage without the repetitive manual transfer of data between tiers.
“At Iper there is a heavy burden on our database and storage capacity because we must retain data indefinitely without necessarily purging historical information,” says Oteri. “Dell Compellent’s automated tiered storage allowed us to store inactive data on relatively inexpensive yet
extremely safe SATA drives. The information is not buried, as with some rival solutions, but is continually transferred to the most convenient and
logical storage space.”
Storage utilisation increases with thin provisioning
In addition, the solution’s thin provisioning software – Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity – helps Iper achieve higher storage utilisation. Dynamic Capacity separates storage allocation from utilisation, enabling Iper to allocate virtual storage volumes to applications on demand, while only consuming actual physical capacity when data is written.
“Thin provisioning allows us to make the most of our investment in each disk,” says Oteri. He also appreciates the Dell Compellent SAN’s ability to create continuous snapshots. The Data Instant Replay feature can recover data volumes of any size to any server from any point in time in less than 10 seconds, using a simple point-andclick interface.
“Before, we couldn’t take any snapshots at all because it proved too expensive to use disk volumes in this way. Now, thanks to Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay, we’re even beginning to use remote replication,” says Oteri.
Business continuity protected with mirrored SAN
Iper’s SAN was installed without incident in just two days. The firm now has an entirely virtualized environment, built on Dell Compellent storage, VMware® ESX virtualization software and Xsigo virtual I/O technology. Iper chose to deploy two Dell Compellent Storage Center SANs on sites 50 miles apart, each with a mix of SSD, Fibre Channel and SATA drives.
Rather than running a primary storage site and a secondary disaster recovery location, Iper configured the two SANs to be identical and reciprocal. They
support around 100 virtual machines each and are connected by twin 400Mbps MAN links to enable business continuity and disaster recovery. Continual snapshots are taken with no disruption to network performance, and Dell Compellent Remote Instant Replay replicates snapshots between the primary and secondary SANs.
Iper has also added an additional Storage Center SAN and today manages over 180 terabytes of storage. “As far as I’m concerned, Dell Compellent is the future,” says Oteri. “The Storage Center SAN is three to four years ahead of anything else available. The company’s innovative approach to automated tiering in particular has delivered unprecedented reductions in storage costs and administrative overheads, giving us a competitive edge in the market. Our management didn’t have to analyse our purchasing decision for very long to realise that Dell Compellent was the only choice for us.”
For more information go to: dell.com/casestudies/emea and dell.it