Kelley Blue Book Turns to NetApp

NetApp, Inc. announced that Kelley Blue Book, turned to NetApp for its virtual storage needs to support its massive business growth. NetApp storage efficiency and VMware solutions enabled Kelley Blue Book to meet its growing business demands and maintain its position as the number-one provider of new and used car information while saving or deferring hundreds of thousands of dollars in IT costs.

In 1995 Kelley Blue Book launched an online version of its iconic new- and used-car pricing and information guide. By 2004 the company’s headcount more than quadrupled. As the company grew, so did its data infrastructure and storage requirements. Kelley Blue Book deployed more than 300 physical servers to run its Web site and serve its back office, but had trouble scaling its infrastructure as the company continued to grow and roll out new products and services.

Kelley Blue Book partnered with Trace3, a regional systems integrator and NetApp Star-level solutions partner in the NetApp Partner Program that achieved Virtualization Specialization. Together they worked to relieve the strain of its massive data growth and deploy an infrastructure that would allow the company to continue to grow and innovate. Trace3 recommended VMware to virtualize the servers and NetApp storage to reduce hardware costs and increase scalability. NetApp storage now supports nearly 300 virtual machines as part of Kelley Blue Book’s development, staging, production, and quality assurance environments.

Since installing NetApp storage to support its virtual infrastructure, Kelley Blue Book has kept up its frenetic growth while reducing cost and complexity. While the company continues to add 20 or more virtual machines a month, NetApp deduplication technology has reduced by 70% the amount of storage space used in its VMware environment. This alone helped Kelley Blue Book postpone $100,000 in disk purchases by at least a year. NetApp also streamlined Kelley Blue Book’s storage network and boosted system performance by 400%.

"With NetApp, data storage is no longer hindering the growth of our business or the ability to get data to our customers. Instead, our storage is now delivering tremendous business value," said Grant Leathers, director of Enterprise Infrastructure. "NetApp was definitely the right storage solution at the right price and exactly what our business needed to get to the next level."

NetApp has also helped Kelley Blue Book become more cost effective and flexible when bringing products to market. Since NetApp virtualization solutions are scalable and dynamic, Kelley Blue Book avoided spending $300,000 in storage when it adopted VMware. Instead of trying to predict how much storage it would need far in the future, it was able to buy only what it immediately needed and then later add capacity on an as-needed basis. This has helped the company reduce storage costs by not having to guess what its storage needs might be years down the line or by ripping and replacing storage when those needs change. This flexibility in NetApp hardware is also reflected in the software, which allows Kelley Blue Book to grow, configure, and provision virtual volumes on demand. This has been particularly useful to the development team at kbb.com and has avoided costly delays when production needs change at the last minute.

"Kelley Blue Book is a great example of how NetApp’s virtualization and storage efficiency technologies help our customers not only maximize their return on investment but also deliver greater value to their business," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. "Kelley Blue Book can now maintain its competitive edge, get products to market faster, and remain number one in its field."