by Susan Twombly, July 2007
When data growth turns into data glut, you've got a storage problem. Chances are, you've got performance and productivity problems, too, along with skyrocketing cost and complexity as you try to wrestle control over data stores.
The answer for many companies today is storage consolidation: standardizing and simplifying the storage environment to reduce complexity, increase agility and boost efficiency.
Read on to find out how these HP customers consolidated storage to conquer their worst data storage problems.
» Hear and see more storage consolidation successes in the HP video 'The art of consolidation: Painted by our customers.'
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Tektronix
Challenge: Application performance declined as data stores grew.
Solution: Worldwide data archive solution with HP StorageWorks Reference Information Manager (RIM) for Databases.
Result: 40 percent performance increase.
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When large application databases put performance at risk, consolidating data to near or online archives can greatly increase service levels.
For example, an HP archiving solution at Tektronix, Inc. in Beaverton, Oregon helps the company manage data growth, improve application performance and meet compliance requirements in 29 countries.
Tektronix provides test, measurement and monitoring solutions for the communications, computer and semiconductor industries — as well as military/aerospace, consumer electronics, education and a broad range of other industries worldwide.. When the company went live with a single global instance of Oracle applications, its production database was only 60 GB. Despite tuning and hardware upgrades, the database quickly grew by about 1.25 GB per month. Application performance suffered, threatening the productivity of nearly 800 worldwide users.
Today, an aggressive purge schedule and an online archiving environment — based on HP StorageWorks Reference Information Manager (RIM) for Databases — saves disk space and maximizes application performance. In fact, disk space for accounts receivable dropped by 48 percent, while application performance jumped by 40 percent.
RIM for Databases also helps keep Tektronix ready for changing international regulations around financial reporting. In fact, when Congress mandated Sarbanes-Oxley, the company's transaction retention policies were already in compliance.
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SA Eagle
Challenge: Unreliable data backup.
Solution: Consolidated backups to an HP StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Tape Library.
Result: Increased backup success rates from 98.32 percent to 99.99 percent.
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Consolidating backup can cut time and costs and provide a robust solution for business continuity.
Consider SA Eagle, South Africa's fourth-largest short-term insurer — an industry known for massive volumes of documentation and strict regulations around its management.
At one time, several different systems provided overnight backups for four data centers. With 93 separate backup operations a day, they didn't always complete by morning and, on average, at least one backup failed each day.
Today, SA Eagle uses virtual tape technology with an HP StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library System to accelerate backup — improving backup success rates from 98.32 to 99.99 percent. They not only meet regulatory requirements for disaster recovery, they reduce tape costs and the time staff spends on managing backups.
Online storage area network (SAN) consolidation can increase utilization, link storage islands and pool storage resources to streamline management and costs.
When new servers and applications pushed storage resources to the max, North American packaging manufacturer Applied Extrusion Technologies (AET) consolidated storage to an HP SAN and realized a near-immediate return on investment.
AET estimated support costs for the previous non-HP SAN at $250,000 for the year ahead. But the consolidated HP SAN solution only cost about $160,000 to buy and provides nearly 2.5 times the storage capacity.
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CitiStreet
Challenge: High hardware costs and time-consuming management.
Solution: HP StorageWorks EVA8000 arrays and HP Storage Essentials software.
Result: Projected benefits of nearly $5 million over the next five years.
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Unifying storage and server management across the infrastructure can increase efficiency and lower costs without compromising control.
As a global benefits provider and one of the U.S.'s largest retirement plan record keepers, CitiStreet's storage needs are constantly expanding. At one time, this put tremendous strains on IT staff and budgets. It often took an entire team of engineers to reconfigure existing systems. Purchasing new storage only added to number of systems IT had to manage.
In response, CitiStreet consolidated storage onto an HP StorageWorks EVA, then unified management with HP Storage Essentials — an open, standards-based storage management suite designed for heterogeneous network storage.
Now, scaling and managing storage is much easier and faster, costs are lower, productivity is higher and sluggish performance is a thing of the past. As a result, CitiStreet projects it will gain a cumulative, five-year net benefit from the new solution.
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National Medical Health Card Systems
Challenge: Keeping up with up to 10 TB of data growth a year while keeping costs down.
Solution: HP Pay-per-use Storage Utility
Result: A projected cumulative five-year net benefit of more than $8 million.
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Expanding and contracting storage resources to stay in synch with business needs can be easier and cost-effective with HP Utility Ready Storage solutions. You pay only for the actual storage capacity you use, when you use it.
That's what New York-based pharmacy benefits manager National Medical Health Card Systems (NMHC) does to keep up with storage demands that grow by up to 10 terabytes a year.
With a Pay-per-use HP Storage Utility solution, HP quoted a monthly fee for storage services, then installed storage devices and metering technology on site.
Now, NMHC handles usage spikes without purchasing additional storage and only pays for the storage it uses. Together with reduced IT maintenance and troubleshooting costs, NMHC expects a cumulative five-year net benefit of more than $8 million.
Don't struggle with unwieldy, unrelenting storage demands. Now is the time to consolidate your storage environment — so you can write your own success story.
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