Compellent Helps Rudolph Technologies Remove the “Width” from Bandwidth
I recovered a directory for one of our offices a few days ago, and it only took me three minutes. I simply rolled back to a snapshot using Compellent’s Data Instant Replay.
Peter Fitch, IT Strategic Planning and, Infrastructure Manager, Rudolph Technologies
Electronics customers continue to demand more advanced, feature-rich products at lower prices. Rudolph Technologies helps semiconductor chip makers meet customer demands, achieve their cost targets and meet production goals with a suite of highspeed inspection and metrology solutions vital to the manufacturing process.
Rudolph’s wafer inspection equipment – a complex system that includes high-speed robotics, advanced optics and unique software – capture digital images of each die (a small piece of a silicon wafer that contains the complete device being manufactured) as it moves through the manufacturing process. The rapid pace of the electronics industry has fueled high-speed growth for Rudolph Technologies. When a recent merger multiplied that growth, the resulting explosion in imaging data made it clear that the company’s direct-attached storage infrastructure was no longer adequate.
“Our inspection work means we store a huge number of large digital images,” says Peter Fitch, IT strategic planning and infrastructure manager at Rudolph Technologies. “Moving 100 of those large images per second into storage can fill up a volume very quickly. We were spending far too much time provisioning new storage and expanding volumes.”
Every time they added a volume, the team was forced to start from scratch. “We had to back up all of the data to tape. Then we would install the new hard drives, create the new volume and restore all of the data from tape,” says Fitch. “The process was too cumbersome given our exponential growth.”
Like many rapidly growing companies, Rudolph Technologies’ disaster recovery plan lagged behind due to cost constraints associated with the bandwidth and storage requirements. The IT team had delayed implementing remote replication, because the cost of a sufficiently large data pipe seemed prohibitive.
Fitch’s team investigated several solutions for centralized storage management and recovery, ultimately selecting the Compellent® storage area network (SAN) for a modular solution that would give Rudolph Technologies the flexibility to grow at the speed of business. The team implemented a Compellent SAN to automate time-intensive management activities and affordably increase storage availability.
Modular Design and Thin Provisioning Provide the Flexibility to Grow
Compellent’s modular hardware and flexible architecture enables Rudolph Technologies to scale its storage without forcing difficult technology choices or having to purchase more storage than necessary in advance. Compellent’s highly scalable system can allow Fitch and his team to grow from one to hundreds of terabytes all without the need for a forklift upgrade.
“Some hardware vendors would have required us to replace an entire controller to expand capacity,” says Fitch. “With Compellent, we can simply integrate new technologies without discarding what we have.”
Now that the Compellent SAN is in place, the team can quickly adapt to user requests for additional storage. “We’re able to provision a server in just a few minutes using boot images stored on the SAN,” says Fitch. “In addition, we no longer have to spend hours backing up and restoring from tape to expand our existing volumes.”
Once a new volume is created, the IT team is able to use it much more efficiently. Compellent’s Thin Provisioning, called Dynamic Capacity™, provides the highest storage utilization possible by eliminating allocated but unused capacity. Dynamic Capacity enables Rudolph Technologies to provision volumes large enough to accommodate the growing number of digital images, yet only consume physical capacity when the data is actually written.
The new SAN includes Compellent’s Enterprise Manager software, which simplifies analysis of usage data so that the IT team can better predict future needs. Enterprise Manager’s reports provide real-time, accurate information that allow Fitch and his team to be more strategic about their storage decisions.
“Planning for growth is much easier and more accurate with the trending capabilities built into the Compellent solution,” says Fitch. “We can plan our purchasing to meet actual demand instead of over-purchasing based on guesswork.”
Thin Replication Offers Data Recovery Savings
Compellent’s Data Instant Replay™ and Remote Instant Replay™ have given Rudolph Technologies the snapshot and replication capabilities it previously lacked. Fitch and his administrators have lowered capacity, bandwidth and management costs while increasing business continuity.
Rudolph Technologies relies on Compellent’s Thin Replication to deliver multi-site replication at a fraction of the cost of many other options. Fitch can create continuous snapshots (Replays) at any time interval with minimal storage capacity and no impact on performance. That’s because Compellent’s Remote Instant Replay software uses a very space-efficient technology that replicates changes between Replays rather than duplicating all of the data each time.
Fitch and his team have paired Compellent’s robust business continuity solution with Riverbed Technology’s Steelhead Appliances to implement an affordable and accelerated replication solution that is easy to use. Riverbed extends Compellent’s robust disaster recovery solution by slashing the time required to replicate data and optimizing bandwidth utilization.
“We have offices around the world, so we needed a solution that would replicate data between local and remote sites,” says Fitch. “Other vendors told us that we would need a much larger data pipe costing upwards of $15,000 a month to link our three main offices. Compellent’s IP-based solution only requires a T1 line that costs us $600 a month.”