National Print Group posts large-scale savings with Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN and Dell Fluid Data architecture
I’m meeting customer expectations for quick access and full redundancy, but doing it in a very cost-effective way. Dell Compellent allows me to reduce costs by $15,000 to $20,000 just by moving that data to low-cost but fast bottom-tier drives.
Michael Miller, Chief Information Officer, National Print Group
From pop-up displays to 3D billboards to wallscapes and building wraps, the art of the sign maker knows no bounds. Those extensive digital assets must be stored electronically, and Web-based programs are now selling the product and helping customers manage campaigns. Where craftsmanship meets cutting-edge printing technology, there is now a third essential—storage.
Premier provider of in-store and out-of-store signage, National Print Group (NPG) has four state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities and 12 sales offices across the United States. More than 400 employees design, produce and fulfill innovative signage for clients including Target, The Children’s Place, Rack Room Shoes and Sears.
One of the many ways NPG delivers high-level service to its clientele is through an automated online tool to help manage signage campaigns, retain profiles and place orders in much less time than traditional paper or phone methods. NPG also hosts an extensive digital assets repository so clients can easily access their artwork portfolios. These services are built on highly customized applications and managed by the IT department, a complicated and time-consuming job.
But as the digital library and business applications continued to grow, so did data storage inefficiencies and costs. The aging equipment had limited storage capacity and there was no disaster recovery strategy other than time-consuming backups. When a large retail customer required 24x7 access to its own online repository, terabytes of capacity and bundled print services before it would award NPG a new multimillion-dollar project, Michael Miller, chief information officer, took it as a sign for change.
“Customers expect uptime from our hosting services as if it were their own data center. For us, business continuance and flexibility are critical to providing top tier services—not just today, but five or ten years from now—that our customers can count on,” says Miller. “When we learned about Dell Compellent, the Dell Fluid Data architecture and the Copilot Support team, we felt confident that it could grow as business demanded and that we could support any new customer requirements.”
Automating replication and tiered storage saves time and money
NPG implemented a primary storage area network (SAN) in its Chattanooga, Tennessee, headquarters and a second SAN in a facility located 10 miles away and connected by a Metro Ethernet circuit. Using lightweight Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay and Remote Instant Replay technologies, Miller has established an affordable disaster recovery strategy.
Nightly, 12 TB of key production data is asynchronously replicated over IP lines to a second Dell Compellent system using Remote Instant Replay thin replication. As a result, Miller can keep critical data highly available in the event of a disaster while minimizing the impact on bandwidth performance during the working day.
“Because of the amount of data we are moving, we had anticipated the need for a larger and more expensive link to handle traffic,” says Miller. “With the Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN, we’re able to use our existing 30 Mb circuit to control priorities without performance issues. That’s saving us around $10,000 every quarter.”
The Data Progression automated tiered storage feature saves NPG time and money with built-in intelligence that transparently manages data movement between tiers. This Dell Fluid Data technology allows information that might be accessed only once in its lifetime to be moved off of the faster, more expensive disks, opening up space for higher-priority data.
“I’m meeting customer expectations for quick access and full redundancy, but doing it in a very cost-effective way,” says Miller. “Dell Compellent allows me to reduce costs by $15,000 to $20,000 just by moving that data to low-cost but fast bottom-tier drives.”
With the system’s open, agile architecture, Miller feels NPG has seen real savings by minimizing the cost of upgrading hardware in its data center, achieving twice the functionality that upgrades to existing equipment were forecasted to deliver.
“To get the same level of capacity and functionality from another provider would have cost me twice as much,” says Miller. “I’d say we’ve saved over $120,000 by going with the Dell Fluid Data architecture.”
Optimizing digital assets with unmatched efficiency
Rather than earmarking large amounts of storage for future use, Miller uses Dynamic Capacity thin provisioning to dynamically provision capacity without having to pre-allocate space.
“We had a customer request for 3TB of storage that we knew wouldn’t be used for several months. Thin provisioning allows us to defer purchasing additional storage until it is actually needed, sometimes up to 12 months or more. That means huge savings and better value,” he explains.
NPG is also deriving more value by combining Dell Compellent storage virtualization with VMware server virtualization for better use of resources.
“We wanted to adopt Microsoft Exchange for email, but server and license costs made it prohibitively expensive,” says Miller. “With the virtualized storage of Dell Compellent and its easy integration with VMware, none of that was necessary and Exchange is up and running without additional costs.”
Zero touch management eliminates need for extra manpower
Dell Compellent enables NPG to satisfy its customers without having to increase staffing or training. Storage Center automates time-consuming, repetitive storage monitoring and capacity planning tasks, and gives Miller’s team a central interface for managing the entire range of functionality.
“I had budgeted $80,000 for an extra full-time administrator, but Dell Compellent has eliminated that need by giving us the ability to satisfy new, demanding customers without adding to our headcount,” says Miller. “Dell Compellent gives us simplified administration that doubles our technical capability and allows us to get more done in less time.”
Plugged in with Copilot
What could be better than having an extra set of eyes watching over your systems? For Miller, the answer was a Dell Compellent Copilot Support team to watch their entire storage network “We live in a digital world, where we live and breathe by hitting fast turnarounds and being able to get high-quality products out the door with very little notice,” says Miller. “So it’s extremely important to have the assurances that our IT systems will stay up all the time. When Dell Compellent Copilot Support shows up with replacement parts before we even know we have an issue, I feel confident that we can rely on Dell Compellent the way our clients rely on us.”