Whidbey Telecom Chooses Compellent SAN

Compellent
announced Whidbey Telecom, a regional telecommunications and
security services company, has rolled out a series of improved e-mail
services to its residential and business customers. These services
utilize Compellent’s sophisticated feature set and easy-to-use
interface to provide highly-scalable storage and provisioning that can
quickly adapt to increased customer demand.

Whidbey provides e-mail and Web services to thousands of residential
and business customers in Washington state. With competitors like
Comcast and Verizon, and Web-based e-mail services like Google, Yahoo
and Hotmail all rapidly increasing e-mail storage capacity for clients
at no cost, Whidbey needed to find a way to quickly and
cost-effectively scale its storage.

In the past, Whidbey customers had to download e-mail to their
computer. Utilizing Compellent’s scalability and performance, Whidbey
now stores every message and allows customers to access e-mail from
anywhere via a Web-based interface. Customers’ mailbox storage has
increased from 20MB to 250MB of space without a performance or
significant cost impact to Whidbey. As a result, client satisfaction
has increased and new subscribers continue to sign up at a rapid rate.

"To maintain our loyal residential customer base and attract new
users, we needed to increase the level of service we were offering,"
said Rich Sandberg, System Administrator for Whidbey. "We wanted to let
customers can do whatever they want with their mailbox without limits.
With Compellent, we have the tools, technology and time to make it all
work."

Whidbey found its previous storage environment hard to scale and
difficult to administer. Using Compellent’s thin provisioning, Whidbey
can allocate significantly more capacity than the physical disk
available, yet only consume disk space when data is written by the
application. This subscription strategy enables Whidbey’s IT department
to delay future storage purchases and only add disks incrementally as
needed.

Compellent’s thin provisioning technology also automates
time-intensive capacity planning activities, so Whidbey spends less
time and resources provisioning storage, expanding and assigning
volumes, and tracking volume utilization. Administrators at Whidbey can
now quickly and cost-effectively expand data storage for its customers
by multiple terabytes.

"The features in our Compellent SAN are going to last us years and
years – thin provisioning, automated tiered storage and easy multi-site
replication," commented Sandberg. "Compellent’s thin provisioning will
save us thousands of dollars in disk and labor costs going forward. One
of the biggest reasons we bought it was it will let us grow as far as
we need to while supporting our customers."

Compellent enables thin provisioning in every Storage Center SAN it
ships. In addition to Whidbey Telecom, diverse organizations such as
the South Carolina Office of the Attorney General, Rivals.com and the
Worldwide Wildlife Fund utilize Compellent’s oversubscription
capabilities to provide better service to end-users, simplify storage
management tasks and lower storage costs.

Compellent

Whidbey Telecom