Arnold and National Print Group Customers of Compellent

Compellent Technologies, Inc. announced that two of its customers, Arnold, a global advertising agency, and National Print Group (NPG), a premier large-format design and production firm, significantly reduced annual IT expenditures while protecting valuable digital libraries using the Compellent storage area network (SAN).

By implementing Compellent’s automated tiered storage and thin provisioning features, both organizations have lowered the total cost of ownership (TCO) and reduced the physical footprint of their data centers. The integration of VMware virtualization tools into the Compellent virtualized storage systems allowed Arnold to consolidate 45 servers into four, and saved National Print Group more than $120,000.

“Arnold and National Print Group are using Compellent’s advanced storage capabilities to gain a competitive edge in today’s market,” said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, Compellent. “By pairing Compellent’s virtual storage solution with VMware’s server virtualization, and employing automated tiered storage and thin provisioning technologies, these organizations are protecting their creative digital assets on multiple levels, while simplifying data management for the clients and professionals that generate it.”

National Print Group produces everything from building wraps to three-dimensional billboards, and as its client digital library and business applications continued to grow, so did data storage costs. NPG selected the Compellent SAN to scale capacity for online data services and simplified management to support its clients rapidly growing storage needs.

“With Compellent’s automatic replication and tiered storage, my team only needs to configure the correct settings and let the SANs manage the storage and keep our data online, which is no easy task with the large digital image files we are creating every day,” explains Michael Miller, chief information officer, NPG. “By coupling those applications with storage and server virtualization, as well as thin provisioning, we’ve saved an estimated $120,000 on storage costs by choosing Compellent. And because the SAN is so easy to use, I’ve avoided hiring a full-time SAN administrator, which could have cost me upwards of $80,000 per year.”

Arnold, the 16th largest ad agency in the U.S., implemented two Compellent SANs, one in its Boston headquarters and one at its New York office. The two systems have improved business continuity through robust disaster recovery capabilities, and reduced TCO with automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and storage and server virtualization technologies.

“The creative work we produce for our clients is absolutely critical for Arnold’s success – if we lose an important media file, we can lose a client,” said Greg Folsom, chief information officer, Arnold. “Our Compellent SANs enable us to both protect data cost-effectively through asynchronous replication between sites and take advantage of Compellent’s integrated storage applications to reduce the hardware in our data center. So far, we have consolidated our physical servers from 45 to four and eliminated our annual purchases of at least 10 storage disks per year.”

The Compellent SAN is the first networked storage system to manage data inside the volume, automate tiered storage and reclaim unused disk space in every drive. The SAN’s integrated data tiering software can automatically move data between high-performance and lower-cost drives on multiple tiers of storage, based on rules established by administrators. Compellent’s thin provisioning software creates virtual volumes of any size, yet only consumes actual physical capacity as data is created to help maximize storage utilization.

In addition to NPG and Arnold, other companies are taking advantage of Compellent technologies to enhance online data archiving for business operations and end-user services, while lowering total cost of ownership and streamlining storage management. Organizations such as PING Golf, Rivals.com and the Royal Horticultural Society in London have utilized Compellent’s automated tiered storage and thin provisioning capabilities to improve online access to their digital content, which is increasingly important in a time of exponential data growth.