CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Key Benefits Comarco called VLSystems, a systems integrator specializing in mid-size organizations, who evaluated Comarco’s storage problem and suggested a solution that best met their needs out of a range of potential solutions offered by VLSystems. The solution was not what Comarco asked for or even what they originally thought they needed.
Intransa and VLSystems Team with Comarco Business Challenge Help Comarco, a leading provider of products, services and expertise for the wireless industry, find a storage solution for their Microsoft Exchange environment, solve their growing storage needs and streamline their data backup procedures. Solution The VLSystems team introduced Comarco to the Intransa IP Storage platform for a collaborative environment and a more streamlined, consistent means to capture, store, back up and retrieve data.
VLSystems Introduces Wireless Company to Intransa Storage Platform, Providing New Solution to Store, Centralize, Manage and Retrieve Data Comarco, a company that provides wireless products, services and consulting, is growing quickly, particularly with new international projects for its wireless test solutions division. While this growth is great for the company’s bottom line, it presented a challenge for Comarco’s IT group: how to store and manage its growing data. With more than 200 users, capacity was quickly reaching its limit and recovery and backup of data was becoming more and more time consuming. “We knew we had to make a change to our current storage setup, and we thought the way to go was a fibre channel SAN solution,” said Sean Anderson, director of IT at Comarco, Inc. “We contacted VLSystems and talked to them about our ideas and concerns. Instead of just giving us what we thought we needed, they were able to help us look at things in a completely different way, delivering solutions we didn’t even know existed. They not only met our needs, but gave us a solution that is costeffective and scalable.”
Streamlining Storage As a growing company, Comarco was adding more and more servers and creating huge amounts of data. They were also buying discs for backup, which was expensive and unwieldy, making the backup process a headache. What they wanted was to consolidate, streamline and manage their data and their Microsoft Exchange server environment – ultimately to have a single point of management for all storage functions, including backup. Anderson had a long-standing relationship with VLSystems, calling them often for advice and purchasing hardware from them; but he had not tapped into them for actual implementation. He told VLSystems he thought Comarco needed a fibre channel SAN solution, yet at closer examination, it seemed wasteful to buy a point storage solution for an Exchange cluster and not address other storage requirements. VLSystems began reviewing their overall needs.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
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“We soon realized that the solution Comarco was considering would not scale adequately toconsolidate all their servers and offered only limited growth,” said Edward Ginty, ExecutiveVice President, Business Development, for VLSystems. “We came up with a more effective way to streamline operations and eliminate redundancies, inconsistencies and delays. The solution would also provide greater availability of their Exchange system while taking advantage of their current network infrastructure.” VLSystems recommended the Intransa IP SAN storage platform, a fully-redundant, scalable, network storage system. Comarco hadn’t even considered a storage solution that leveraged their existing Ethernet and IP infrastructure and was immediately intrigued by what it had to offer. The Intransa storage solution leverages the large installed base of Ethernet/IP networks and enables storage to be accessed over LAN, MAN, or WAN environments, without needing to alter storage applications. It also lets IT managers use the existing Ethernet/IP knowledge base and management tools. For Comarco, it provided a more cost-effective solution with the enterprise features they needed, including dynamic space allocation, storage virtualization and load balancing. These features were all included in the packaged solution with no incremental costs for additional nodes, which was a huge positive for the growing company. The Intransa IP SAN storage platform created a scalable, highly-available Exchange cluster to solve Comarco’s current problems. Since Intransa’s architecture disaggregates the storage controller from the disk enclosure this enables future growth for Comarco. They can scale the storage grid independently of the storage controllers and allow all the storage to take advantage of the scaling performance as additional storage controllers are added. Comarco would also be able to consolidate multiple servers into the existing Intransa storage grid without having to do a costly storage/controller equipment replacement. Since the management of the solution would be centralized, it would enable Comarco to efficiently manage the
system remotely, minimizing the cost and pain of having to manage disparate storage systems for different environments. Also important was that the system scaled to meet their future needs to implement disaster recovery by providing the capability to do remote-site data-replication using asynchronous replication technology that Intransa offers. Intransa is both a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, the first to certify a 10GbE IP SAN solution with Exchange 2007, which was tested with up to 11,000 users, and a VMware Technology Alliance Partner, with systems certified in every VMware category for Green IT benefits.
All Systems Go Proven data-migration and co-existence tools and strategies were used to ensure that the move to the Intransa platform was a success. VLSystems provided its expertise in installation and management, working hand-in-hand with the Comarco IT team. Elapsed time from the initial call to VLSystems to platform integration was three weeks, and Comarco experienced an immediate difference. They eliminated their backup window problems using the built-in snapshot capabilities. In addition, more server and network resources are now available for production use. This has freed up time and money for Comarco, creating efficiencies and streamlining operations.”
Conclusion Comarco is convinced that the tangible benefits are significant: Exchange backup time has been reduced by nearly sixty percent. Based on the most important measure, customer satisfaction, the project was a success from the reseller’s perspective as well. “The product is really mature and reliable with great performance, giving us the solution we need today as well as setting us up for future growth,” said Anderson. “We are very pleased with the advice, service and solution VLSystems provided.”for your disaster recovery plan.
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