Blue Ridge Says to Have Saved $450,000 in the 3 Years with NetApp

NetApp announced that Blue Ridge Paper has realized
significant cost savings and database performance improvements by
leveraging NetApp network and data management
solutions to transform its data center infrastructure.

With these
improvements, Blue Ridge has successfully implemented a solid disaster
recovery system with high reliability and low total cost of ownership
with a combination of NetApp virtualization technologies, including
Snapshot, and iSCSI. In all, Blue Ridge has
saved over $450,000 in the last three years with a reduction in hardware
infrastructure and administration costs and established demonstrable
Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Blue Ridge Paper, a paper, packaging, and form board manufacturer based
in Canton, North Carolina, faced a growing concern over storage need and
cost, while automated, around-the-clock manufacturing required better
database reliability and availability than what the company’s
system could provide. Tape backups meant that critical databases such as
Oracle could be unavailable for four or more
hours during a restore process. The company’s
direct-attached storage model for UNIX and
Windows systems meant administration was
complicated, sharing data between systems was difficult, and efficiently
provisioning data was nearly impossible. Blue Ridge looked to NetApp to
solve these issues and help improve its ability to compete in a
price-sensitive market.

“Our CRM and manufacturing execution systems
use Oracle Databases, so the strength of the Oracle and NetApp
relationship is important,” said Jeff
Trantham, IT director at Blue Ridge Paper. “NetApp
also has the best support for iSCSI storage. Equally important in our
decision to deploy NetApp is that the solutions give us the ability to
manage storage for heterogeneous systems using a unified storage
platform.”

NetApp provided Blue Ridge Paper networked storage for the company’s
applications and file systems, as well as the ability to replicate data
to another data center, reducing ungainly restore times from over four
hours to less than five minutes: a 98% reduction. As a result, Blue
Ridge Paper no longer has major disruptions to production when a
database goes offline and needs to be restored. The company has also
seen a jump in database performance by moving to NetApp, with the time
needed to perform long running queries, access large data sets, and
create indexes falling 30% to 35% thanks to NetApp.

In addition to time, Blue Ridge Paper has saved money as well. While
increased access speed was important, the company had a limited budget.
Blue Ridge Paper found good performance, flexibility, and affordability
in NetApp iSCSI technology. By coupling high-performance iSCSI storage
with unique data management software, Blue Ridge Paper now enjoys the
benefits of its existing Fibre Channel SAN along with the advantages
realized by the flexibility, familiarity, and ease of management of
iSCSI and IP networking, all with a low total cost of ownership. The
company has also saved about $150,000 simply by moving from a tape
infrastructure to disk-to-disk backup. Best of all, Blue Ridge Paper has
greatly expanded its IT productivity without expanding its IT workforce.

“NetApp helps us deliver superior levels of
application availability while maintaining a very lean IT shop,”
said Trantham. “We have grown our server and
storage infrastructure in the past three years by 30% to 40%, without
hiring additional administrators. This results in potential savings of
up to $300,000.”

NetApp

Blue Ridge Paper