Ping Under Par With Compellent

PING‘s innovation has been setting the industry standard in the world of golf for more than 50 years, and the company undertook an initiative designed to perfect its approach to delivering custom-fit performance to players.

The volume of PING’s corporate data, from back-office information to engineering design, was growing rapidly, and the legacy storage solution couldn’t efficiently scale to meet increased demand. To support this rapid influx of data from the custom orders, PING required a fluid storage environment with the same dedication to innovation as its own.

Eric Hart, end-user computing manager for PING, chose Fluid Data storage from Compellent Technologies, Inc. to enable the company to adapt to changing needs and manage unpredictable, but dramatic, data growth. Compellent Fluid Data storage features are all fully integrated, enabling PING’s IT staff to spend less time managing storage and focus on supporting the company’s innovation.

"Our customers demand the best, and we needed to support the efforts to streamline engineering lifecycles and shorten time to market when redesigning products so we can stay ahead of the competition," said Hart. "The combination of automated tiered storage and virtualization gave us the foundation we needed for our overall initiative. Compellent Fluid Data storage allows us to continue our tradition of excellence and seamlessly scale in the face of unpredictable data growth."

One storage management application in particular – automated tiered storage – had an immediate impact on PING’s business. According to Hart, PING realized that sorting through and classifying the data using a manual process would mean months of work for the entire company. Compellent’s patented automated tiered storage technology classifies PING’s data based on actual use patterns without requiring administrative effort. A powerful block-level data movement and management engine uses that intelligence to dynamically migrate 55 percent of PING’s historical and infrequently accessed data from Fibre Channel drives to low-cost SATA drives. The automated policies and integration with other virtualized storage functions enabled the PING IT team to configure the system in just a few hours. Overall, automated tiered storage allowed PING to save on disk costs and free up the IT staff to focus on strategic, business-driving projects.

Hart paired Compellent storage virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V virtual servers to improve system performance, increase storage utilization and consolidate hardware. Virtualization eliminated redundant physical machines, and reduced initial server deployment and management costs.

"PING is a cutting-edge company that will influence the game of golf for decades to come," said Scott Horst, vice president of corporate marketing for Compellent. "Likewise, self-tuning tiered storage is changing the buying behavior of IT, enabling companies to delay storage purchases and focus on adding low-cost, high-capacity drives."

In recent live polling, Compellent end-users reported that due to the efficiency and granularity of Compellent’s automated tiered storage, the vast majority (81 percent) of their disk upgrades were for cost-effective, high-capacity drives rather than for more expensive, high-performance drives.