Tegile Hybrid Arrays for Sporting Goods Manufacturer Mizuno USA

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that Mizuno USA, Inc., a manufacturer of sporting goods, including select equipment, apparel, and footwear, has implemented its hybrid storage architecture to manage and protect its information assets.

Mizuno USA, the Atlanta area-based subsidiary of Mizuno Corporation Inc. focuses on multiple sports categories, including running, baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer and golf. Building a business with year-over-year growth for the past decade, Mizuno USA was challenged to find a storage system that could address data growth, included multi-protocol flexibility, and support BC across two data centers.

Before selecting Tegile hybrid arrays with their IntelliFlash architecture, Mizuno USA evaluated other storage systems that appeared to make sense from a price and performance perspective. However, these alternatives required added cost and complexity when including multi-protocol capabilities. Tegile’s hybrid approach provides flash memory to accelerate performance for heavy transaction workloads and seasonal business spikes, while large-capacity HDDs accommodate a growing amount of large product image files and historical content currently maintained online.

“Tegile provides us the perfect storage platform to address these collaborative applications,” said Keith Neely, VP of customer support and IT, Mizuno USA. “As we evaluated our options for a next-generation storage system, the Tegile IntelliFlash architecture really impressed us with its intelligence to automate storage management tasks and provide a hybrid storage solution for accelerated performance and capacity scalability.“

Tegile’s system also delivered data protection that goes the distance, with deduplication and compression to conserve storage capacity and achieve faster transfers to a remote site, generating additional savings from reduced network bandwidth requirements. Prior to the Tegile implementation, full backups had grown beyond the backup window, but now Mizuno USA is able to execute full backups once a month, synthetic backups on weekends, and incremental backups every night – which complete in less than an hour on the arrays. As the Mizuno USA IT team prepares to transition to a new data center in late 2014, Tegile’s SAN replication will be used to test target devices and selectively move data sets and volumes.

“Our backup and deduplication efficiencies keep improving over time, and we can tell each volume what kind of compression to use for even greater capacity optimization,” said Neely. “Tegile provides us the network connection flexibility to run multiple file system protocols and multiple SAN protocols for a true future-proof storage solution. This has real business value for Mizuno USA as we can now use the same storage longer without upgrades or replacement for an attractive ROI.“

“Mizuno USA has been a pleasure to work with and, like all Tegile customers, are truly the best evangelists for our new generation of flash-based hybrid storage arrays,” said Rob Commins, VP marketing, Tegile. “A small technical services staff manages all servers, workstations, storage, networks and applications across three data centers in this fast, growing company, so we’re thrilled Tegile arrays delivered the best possible efficiency, reliability, automation and performance on the market.“