Three Organizations Stop Buying Hardware by Using Symantec Software

Symantec Corp. announced that Golden Temple of Oregon, LLC, Health Alliance Plan and Molina Healthcare, Inc. are using Symantec storage and information management software to better utilize existing storage resources and eliminate the need to purchase new hardware. Statistics show that organizations have as much as 50 percent available storage capacity, yet continue to purchase additional storage. Storage resource management, thin provisioning, data deduplication and archiving solutions can help organizations make better use of existing storage resources.
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"After conducting a recent survey, Symantec found that more than half of respondents intend to buy more storage in 2009 – yet 79 percent believe storage utilization can be improved," said Steve Morton, vice president of product marketing, Symantec. "Through storage management and deduplication technology, Symantec is helping IT organizations better utilize the storage they already own to avoid new purchases."

Golden Temple
Streamlines Mail Server with Archiving

Founded in an Oregon garage in 1973, Golden Temple of Oregon, LLC has grown to be a world player in wholesale natural foods, including breakfast cereals and herbal teas. Several years ago, Golden Temple’s IT department installed Symantec Enterprise Vault on a virtual server to help with limited capacity with its Microsoft Exchange email server rather than choosing to upgrade from Microsoft Exchange Standard Server to the Enterprise version.

"The only cost was the application itself, with no hardware or management costs because of our virtual environment," said Gurusimran Khalsa, systems administrator, Golden Temple of Oregon, LLC. "Upgrading Exchange would not have helped reduce the size of our mailbox and several of our users noticed the size of their mail databases was degrading systems performance. Enterprise Vault removed the performance roadblock and eased information management by eliminating Personal Folders (PST files) from the Exchange environment."

Health Alliance Plan
Drives Down Utilization with Storage Management

Health Alliance Plan, one of Michigan’s largest health plans, employs 800 workers to provide health coverage and other healthcare solutions and services to more than 500,000 subscribers in southeastern Michigan. Health Alliance Plan needed a strategy for its data center, which runs 18 production databases, amounting to more than 26 terabytes of data, growing by 12 percent a year. The company implemented Veritas CommandCentral Storage and Veritas Storage Foundation to provide a total view of its storage environment, manage storage utilization rates and keep costs down. Additionally, Health Alliance Plan uses Symantec NetBackup for information management and is exploring data deduplication technologies to further improve storage utilization.

"Managing storage manually can eat up a lot of our time," said Dan Trim, director of IT infrastructure, Health Alliance Plan. "Symantec’s storage management technologies have helped us cut administration costs by 90 percent and our storage utilization rates are over 70 percent, compared to the industry standard of less than 40 percent."

Molina Healthcare
Turns to Archiving, Data Deduplication

For more than 30 years, Molina Healthcare has arranged for the delivery of health care services to persons eligible for Medicaid, Medicare and other government-sponsored programs for low-income families and individuals and currently serves over 1.3 million members in 10 states. As with any growing organization, Molina’s IT team recognized the need to implement technologies that would allow them to reduce IT overhead to continue to provide quality, affordable care. As part of its strategy to transform its outdated and resource intensive data protection process, Molina chose to deploy NetBackup PureDisk to reduce bandwidth and storage consumption.

"We’ve seen deduplication as promised, on the order of 10 to one," said Sri Bharadwaj, director of infrastructure and operations, Molina Healthcare, Inc. "By using NetBackup, we can centralize backup over the network without disruption to production."

Molina also faced challenges with email storage. Symantec Enterprise Vault enabled the team to detect 3,000 PST files on the network and migrate them into a central repository where their contents have been indexed and are easily searchable. The initiative has reclaimed hundreds of gigabytes in primary disk space. In addition, when Enterprise Vault archives messages, it deduplicates and compresses them, providing a significant reduction in email storage.

About the Survey
A March 2009 survey conducted by Applied Research provided insight into organizations’ storage utilization and management practices, including how the current economic climate has impacted storage budgeting and purchasing decisions. The survey targeted 400 U.S. IT professionals with responsibility for storage infrastructure and operations. Respondents reported their storage volume will grow by about 40 percent each year, while nearly one third (31 percent) reported their first response to storage capacity issues is to purchase new storage hardware. Almost 40 percent of respondents also reported they could last 12 months without buying new storage by using the right software tools.