Mitchell Communications Group Selects Compellent

Australia’s marketing communications company, Mitchell Communications Group, has installed a Fluid Data storage solution from Compellent Technologies to address SAN management issues, cut future storage capacity costs, and enhance disaster recovery (DR) capabilities.

With 70 percent annual data growth, Mitchell’s existing SAN infrastructure was struggling to keep up with user demand, prompting regular complaints about application performance from across the business. Disk usage rates were also proving poor, typically less than 25 percent. Meanwhile, integration with the company’s VMware ESX virtual server environment was also problematic.

To address these challenges, Mitchell turned to reseller XSI Data Solution who recommended and installed a Fluid Data storage solution from Compellent.

Compellent Microsoft PowerShell-based command sets have helped Mitchell cut SAN management time by 50 percent. Meanwhile, Automated Tiered Storage has enabled the business to migrate 80 percent of its data, mainly infrequently accessed video, audio and graphics files belonging to its customers, onto low-cost SATA drives. Thin Provisioning eliminated pre-allocated but unused capacity, delivering the highest possible usage rates for Mitchell’s investment in disk capacity. The combined cost savings from integrating enterprise management, Automated Tiered Storage and Thin Provisioning software have helped Mitchell fund a second SAN for disaster recovery purposes.

Space-efficient snapshots, which allow Mitchell to keep copies of data on the Compellent SAN for longer, enable the company to recover files or volumes almost instantly, or roll back to a previous snapshot in the event of a serious problem. The single, scalable system simplifies upgrades, so that Mitchell can add more capacity or mix different technologies and components without the need to replace existing hardware.

Performance has also improved because the Compellent SAN virtualises enterprise storage at the disk level, creating a dynamic pool of shared storage resources available to all servers, all the time, and boosting system performance.

Andrew Nowak, storage architect at Mitchell, highlights the of integration between Compellent and VMware: "The simplicity of using Compellent and PowerShell to manage our virtual servers is a huge time saver for us. The integrated ability to create virtual storage, connect them to servers and then present them within that same script, talking directly to VMware to format the disks and do the rest, makes life so much easier."

Craig Stockdale, managing director for Compellent ANZ, added: "Compellent Fluid Data architecture drives business efficiency to new levels. Companies like Mitchell are able to increase system performance and drive down storage costs while making it easier for them to manage and protect valuable customer data."