Wealth Advisers Towry Chose Two Compellent Systems

In the competitive world of wealth advice, even e-mails have become a form of currency that is constantly passed back and forth between clients and wealth advisers.

The IT team at Towry, the wealth advisers, supports 21 offices and was not only handling 20 percent organic year-over-year data growth but was also dealing with a recent 200 percent data growth spurt due to the integration of acquired firm Edward Jones Limited – not a simple task for any IT team to handl. The team needed a flexible, automated and scalable storage system to keep up with data growth, automatically manage data at a granular level, enhance its disaster recovery capabilities and improve the performance of business applications.

             Towry Offices

Towry chose the Compellent Fluid Data storage solution over other storage technology vendors to build their virtual IT infrastructure. Using Compellent Automated Tiered storage technology and server virtualisation from VMware, Towry expects to cut its overall physical hardware by more than 70 percent and achieve energy savings of up to 50 percent.  

With the company’s previous storage solution running at just 8 percent utilisation, performance of key applications, particularly Microsoft Exchange, suffered. Towry needed a different storage solution that would keep up with unpredictable business growth and efficiently manage data at the block level.

Towry selected the Compellent Fluid Data management solution because its sub-LUN Automated Tiered storage feature would allow the firm to move at least 80 percent of its data onto low-cost SATA drives, saving thousands of pounds in future capacity upgrades. This feature was attractive for a business that is required by law to keep the bulk of its data available and accessible at all times.

For primary storage Towry has deployed a Compellent storage Center SAN at its data centre in Slough with 54 TB of storage.  Of this, 40 percent is FC storage for active data and 60 percent is SATA storage for inactive data. Towry expects the majority of future capacity upgrades to consist of low-cost high-capacity drives.

A second 53 TB Compellent SAN, with a 25 percent FC and 75 percent SATA configuration, has been deployed for disaster recovery purposes at Towry’s head office. Snapshots from the primary SAN are replicated to the secondary SAN ensuring the protection and continuous availability of data for Towry’s employees working at 21 sites throughout the UK.

To address the previous issue of poor capacity utilisation rates, Towry is using Compellent Thin Provisioning feature to deliver high enterprise storage utilisation by eliminating pre-allocated but unused capacity. Towry expects usage rates to leap from 8 percent with the previous system to more than 80 percent with Compellent Fluid Data.

Adam Nielsen, IT manager at Towry, cites the Compellent automated tiered storage capability as a major part of the decision to choose Compellent: "We didn’t want yet another storage solution that needed to be ripped out and replaced in a few years’ time. The Compellent architecture gives us an affordable way to scale our storage to meet the precise needs of our business over the long term. In addition, because we can keep all our inactive data online, we have eliminated the cost of purchasing an additional archive system."

Andy Hardy, managing director for international sales at Compellent, added: "Enterprises are making strategic choices to deploy game-changing technologies.  Companies like Compellent are helping customers react faster to business demands while making it easier for them to manage and protect valuable data. Towry is the latest example of how Compellent Fluid Data architecture with automated tiered storage and thin provisioning can control storage costs and improve business efficiency."