CMA With Fluid Data Storage Environment From Compellent and VMware

Compellent Technologies, Inc. announced that credit information specialist CMA is making annual savings of more than £500,000 after virtualising its storage and server infrastructure using Compellent’s Fluid Data storage and server virtualisation technology from VMware. These money savings have been achieved by avoiding unnecessary disk purchases, reducing management costs and minimizing power costs.

                         
                            Fluid Data architecture

CMA’s production environment originally operated solely on a packaged server cluster with direct attached storage. After auditing the company’s requirements for existing systems and future scalability, it was clear that the legacy environment simply would not cope with the sophisticated real-time services CMA wanted to offer its clients. There was a major need to improve and enhance the firm’s storage capabilities.

Ryan Sclanders, infrastructure manager at CMA, explains: “The ease-of-use and compatibility with virtualised environments, and the fact that Compellent’s Fluid Data architecture offered automated tiered storage made it an ideal solution for our needs. By automatically moving inactive data to low-cost storage without additional staffing time, we’ve saved on management costs while buying fewer disks even as our capacity needs grow. The overall savings have been considerable, in the region of half a million pounds a year.”

CMA implemented two separate Compellent systems. The first SAN supports the live production environment, while the second SAN, runs a combination of disaster recovery (DR) and corporate services. Instead of nearly 100 physical servers, each dedicated to a single client without any real redundancy, the IT infrastructure services team now maintains more than 100 virtual servers on four physical machines. This represents a massive saving in administrative overheads, energy costs, data centre space and regular capital expenditures.

In addition, all tiering of data is done automatically using Compellent’s software, which moves data at the block level between tiers of storage based on frequency of access, eliminating repetitive manual transfer of data between tiers. Around 60 percent of CMA’s data sits on the fastest, most accessible storage, the virtual application servers reside in the middle tier and all the company’s historical data sits on a third tier of low-cost disks.

Andy Hardy, managing director for international sales at Compellent, said: “Fluid Data storage cuts costs and delivers new capabilities to organizations such as CMA while helping to improve their bottom line. Armed with insights from forward thinkers such as Ryan Sclanders, Compellent will continue to deliver innovative technology that helps data flow intelligently, automatically and efficiently to meet the needs of businesses worldwide.”

By combining its Fluid Data enterprise storage system with built-in automation and intelligence, Compellent enables data to move throughout an organisation in a way that is directly aligned with the needs of the business. As a result, applications are implemented faster, information to make decisions is constantly available, new technologies are quickly deployed, and data is automatically secured against downtime and disaster.