July 15, 2009, 7:31 PM — The company: Based in Atlanta, Georgia, AMB Group, LLC, is the parent company for the diversified business and investment assets of Arthur M. Blank. Mr. Blank is the retired co-founder of The Home Depot. He is currently Owner& CEO of the Atlanta Falcons National Football League (NFL) team and the Georgia Force Arena Football League (AFL) team.
The problem: In addition to providing management services for the Atlanta Falcons, AMB Group, LLC, is responsible for providing IT direction and support services to the teams’ ticket, retail and online sales. The company also provides IT for the Atlanta Falcons Physical Therapy Centers, Georgia Force arena football team, The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and Mountain Sky Guest Ranch.
This large roster of responsibilities brings with it many challenges, not the least of which includes managing growing data storage and performance requirements with a small, five-person team and limited budget. Until recently, the company struggled to find a strategy to manage its annual storage growth of nearly 15 percent. AMB Group found itself playing a constant game of catch-up by spending large amounts of money for bigger servers with greater attached hard drive space. The company quickly realized it needed to go long, as in a long-term, cost-effective, IT solution to support its continuous business growth.
The solution: After reviewing a host of expensive, Fibre Channel-only storage options, AMB Group decided to upgrade to a Compellent Storage Center storage area network (SAN) that would allow it to cost-effectively manage a central pool of storage and seamlessly implement both storage and server virtualization.
The Compellent solution, an enterprise-class SAN, significantly lowers capital expenditures, reduces storage management and administration time and provides continuous data availability. Storage Center’s industry-standard hardware and sophisticated software manage data at the block-level, maximizing utilization, automating tiered storage, simplifying replication and speeding data recovery. In addition, with Compellent’s storage virtualization, AMB Group was able to easily and simultaneously implement Virtual Iron server virtualization.
How it worked: Compellent’s modular hardware architecture and support for virtualization has allowed the company to scale storage to meet business growth without rebuilding its IT infrastructure from the ground up. Combining server and storage virtualization has allowed AMB Group to decrease its data center footprint and energy expenses, significantly reducing power and cooling costs each month. And thanks to Compellent’s easy-to-use interface, AMB Group is able to support its growing business without having to expand its existing staff.
With the Compellent SAN in place, AMB Group now has a scalable long-term solution to meet the constant rush of information demands, and to ensure 24x7 access to critical applications. The Compellent solution backs AMB Group’s servers from a central storage unit with disk backup 10 times faster than the old tape system. Additionally, its simple management tools have reduced weekly storage maintenance from five hours per week to one hour per week.
Rules for success
With a small staff and limited budget, it was crucial that AMB Group’s transition was a quick and painless process. The implementation of the Compellent SAN was just that – it seamlessly integrated with its existing infrastructure. The ease-of-use made it possible for the IT team to hit the ground running – AMB Group didn’t lose any unnecessary time or money.
Five classic mistakes
- Implementing a technology that does not have long-term growth potential – Be sure to select a storage technology that can grow with your business so you don’t get caught ripping and replacing sooner than you’d like.
- Getting caught in a cycle of purchases due to an inability to efficiently provision or utilize storage – Select a storage solution that can maximize storage utilization through virtualized storage applications like thin provisioning and automated tiered storage. Thin provisioning only consumes space on drives when data is actually written, not allocated, which makes it easier to plan for future storage purchases. Automated tiered storage dynamically moves infrequently-used data from high-performance but costly drives to more economical, higher capacity drives.
- Not leveraging the expertise of the reseller channel to identify complementary – and interoperable – technologies that maximize data center efficiency – Your resellers are a valuable resource – so use them. Resellers can ensure you implement complementary technologies that optimize your data center’s capabilities.
- Assuming the vendors have all the answers – Often times some of the best input comes from the end user, so networking with your IT peers can provide valuable insight and help you select the right technology for your business needs. In our case, we were introduced to Compellent by PGA TOUR Superstores, which had already implemented a SAN and realized the benefits of working with Compellent, says Don Norton, Director of IT Technical Services at AMB Group. Seeing a Compellent SAN in action alleviated our efficiency concerns and demonstrated the benefits of technologies such as virtualization and automated tiered storage. This made our decision much easier and was the deciding factor in the choice to switch to Compellent.
- Giving your storage environment control over your staff – Evaluate whether you can manage the new storage environment with the same level of staffing and expertise that you have now, or if you’ll need to add to your team just to manage the storage.
Best practice checklist
- Future-proof your technology – Select a storage technology that will grow along with the needs of your company and is flexible enough to interoperate with other data center technologies. This will ensure your company won’t be caught a few years down the road investing in a forklift upgrade to replace your system.
- Virtualization – Invest in a virtual storage platform that easily integrates with server virtualization technologies. By implementing compatible technologies, you’ll be able to store your existing and future data easily and efficiently, saving time and money, while reducing the total data center footprint. Now, our single integrated virtual solution supports consolidation, saving a three-year estimated cost of $50,000 in hardware replacement and reducing power costs by about $5,000 annually.
- Ease of Use – Make sure your solution is easy to learn and easy to use. With limited budgets, it’s important that a new storage solution doesn’t require additional employees or excessive training. By purchasing an easy-to-use technology, you can enhance your company’s infrastructure without expanding its staff. We’ve significantly reduced our storage maintenance time with the simplified management tools of the Compellent SAN.
- Maximize your existing space – By implementing a storage solution that employs cutting-edge management technology, such as thin provisioning and automated tiered storage, administrators can maximize storage utilization and keep projected spending under control. Thin provisioning has helped us delay additional disk purchases and made provisioning storage easier than ever before. By utilizing a tiered storage strategy to keep mission-critical data on Fibre Channel drives and older data on more economical SATA drives, we’ve been able to extend the life of existing drives and hardware.
Three must-ask questions
- Does this technology really solve my storage pain points and best address the business needs of our organization?
- Is this the most efficient storage solution to help our company best cut costs and manage our growing data?
- How can I be assured this technology will grow with our company and not require future rip-and-replace upgrades?
Hindsight is 20/20 Going into the project, the virtualization of both servers and storage had our team under the impression there would be a lot of work, and some downtime, resulting from the transition. However, early in the installation process it became clear that virtualizing storage makes virtualizing servers very easy. Thanks to same-time installation between Compellent and Virtual Iron (our server virtualization provider), we were able to maximize efficiency and save a great deal of time and money.
Final takeaway
As mentioned earlier, it’s crucial to understand your company’s IT needs and budget limitations. Identifying your organization’s major storage pain points will allow you to research technologies that meet your IT demands and best help your company grow. In our case, after considering a host of vendors and more costly storage options, we witnessed the benefits of the Compellent SAN while visiting a colleague’s facility.
After further research, we quickly learned that the Compellent SAN was the best match for our company – and our budget – and would make our storage and server virtualization process much simpler than we originally thought. So, whether its maximized performance, increased savings, server virtualization or future-proof flexibility, determining your IT needs and budget will allow for focused research and help in selecting the storage solution that best fits your company.
Who's a candidate? Any company with rapidly growing data, IT budget constraints and an overstretched staff should consider Compellent for its long-term storage solution. This highly scalable enterprise-class SAN delivers extraordinary results for customers of all sizes, across industries. These companies use Compellent to lower storage costs, reduce administration time, improve utilization, automate replication and speed data recovery.
For more information please visit www.compellent.com
