CVS Caremark Chooses Bridgeworks SANSlide Appliance

Bridgeworks Ltd announced
the implementation of its SANSlide appliance at US pharmacy
giant CVS Caremark Inc. As a result of the implementation, this user’s backups
are up to 50 times faster.

With 7,000
branches in 43 US states and over 60 million customers depending on it for
medicinal and health services, the CVS data centres cannot tolerate system
downtime across all systems is a must. To facilitate
this CVS needed to replicate around 430GB of data from its Scottsdale
to its Woonsocket
data centre on a daily basis using iSCSI over a distance of 2,660m/4,300Km. Due
to the large amount of latency on its link, and the effect this has on
performance, this process was taking far too long; almost 15 hours to transfer
just 50GB of data.

To identify a suitable technology to address its backup
challenges, the IT team at CVS, led by Don Lutes, senior technical advisor,
turned to backup, virtualisation and storage solutions integrator Tributary
Systems Inc. The answer was: Bridgeworks’ SANSlide was the
solution to overcome the effects of the latency and increase the speed of CVS’
backups.

Lutes
commented: "The implementation ran
so smoothly, we were able to go into production straight away and saw an
immediate ROI, with transfer speeds of up to fifty times faster than before."

By using artificial intelligence combined with its network latency-busting
techniques and scaleable architecture, SANSlide provides a flexible tool
to enhance the movement of large amounts of data for DR, remote
replication and remote backups. To achieve this, Bridgeworks’ SANSlide monitors the performance of the link between SANSlide nodes and
responds to changes in the network conditions such as packet loss, latency and
QOS pushback by changing a range of network and paralleled pipeline parameters
to ensure performance. This removes a burden on IT
staff, as the product is self-managing.

David
Trossell, Bridgeworks’ CEO, explains further: "Currently there are three ways to replicate data offsite and each
approach has drawbacks. You can store data on tapes which are then shipped to a
secondary datacentre: this is labour intensive, slow and costly. You can rely
on dark fibre: this gives high performance but at a high price. Or you can
leverage TCP/IP: the cost is affordable but latency significantly affects
performance. With SANSlide users such as CVS can achieve maximum performance at
an affordable price to optimise the day-to-day efficiency of their existing
storage environment."