CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Key Benefits • Increases storage capacity • Simplifies network growth and eases management • Reduces backup and restore times • Eliminates need to purge data every 90 days • Enables designers to provide better customer service
Intransa Increases Storage Capacity and Streamlines Business Process for Leading Direct Marketing Firm. Business Challenge Money Mailer, LLC, a leading direct marketing firm that serves more than 30,000 advertisers and 140 million mailings a year, was facing a critical capacity situation. Graphic designers across the country were not able to centrally archive advertisements and found themselves continually recreating work from scratch. In addition, the company was unable to scale their storage network to meet the large volumes of data and support the growing business. Solution Money Mailer worked with Secure Data Group, its solution provider, to migrate storage systems from an inefficient direct-attached storage network to an Intransa IP SAN solution. The solution leverages the company’s existing IP network and allows for easier and more cost-effective scalability and management. The company now provides centralized storage to its franchisees and their artists for increased efficiency and better customer service.
The Problem From dry cleaning and car maintenance to burgers and flowers, Money Mailer delivers money-saving coupons and discounts to millions of homes each week. As one of America’s leading direct response advertising companies, Money Mailer ships over 140 million envelopes per year nationwide for 30,000 advertisers. For these clients, Money Mailer creates unique ads, each with their own artwork and content, resulting in huge amounts of data. Money Mailer supported file, print and Web-serving systems as well as its extensive art warehouse with a direct-attached storage (DAS) network. However, the company was producing much more data than the inflexible system could handle and was forced to purge data every 90 days. This required the company’s graphic designers to recreate artwork, rather than leveraging work done previously. In addition, the IT staff was spending unnecessary time managing the inefficient network and backup process inherent in DAS architecture. “Our data storage requirements were going through the roof as our business expanded,” said Frank Migliaccio, director of network operations for Money Mailer. “The legacy storage network had us tied down with very little space and costly upgrades. We knew we had to do something to manage our storage needs. We wanted something that could work with our existing infrastructure, would be easy to manage and most importantly, would scale and grow as needed without requiring a forklift upgrade.”
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY The Solution
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Migliaccio and his team decided that they needed a centralized storage system that could host a Microsoft® Exchange cluster, consolidate their other servers and provide off-site replication of their data. They were also dealing with a mixed environment, running more than 50 Windows® servers, 16 Apple X™ servers and five IBM AIX servers. The IT department approached their solution provider, Secure Data Group with plans to expand an existing HP Fibre Channel SAN solution. However, rather than simply fill the order, the Secure Data Group team assessed Money Mailer’s data storage needs and determined that an IPbased storage network was better suited to the company’s existing infrastructure and future expansion plans. “We discovered that Money Mailer’s art warehouse was stuck at 60GB of available space and they were regularly purging data,” said Ed Ginty, senior director, Secure Data Group. “They were also using an isolated Fibre Channel SAN solely for their Exchange server cluster. Based on this environment, we knew the best route was to harness the power of their existing IP network, realize dynamic growth and get the performance to support their growing business requirements.” After evaluating a number of options and with a recommendation from Secure Data Group, Money Mailer chose the Intransa IP-based solution with more than 70TB of IP SCSI SAN in three locations with plans for expanded capacity in two other locations. Intransa IP storage systems can grow to 1,500TB of RAID protected, fault tolerant and affordable storage. Intransa’s IP SAN solution was able to easily integrate with Money Mailer’s existing IP infrastructure and was installed and running within two days. With Intransa on board, Money Mailer was able to immediately increase capacity for several systems using traditional DAS storage. Storage capacity also increased dramatically for its art warehouse from 60GB to 1.5TB, eliminating the need for the company to purge data every 90 days. “We run a variety of applications at Money Mailer, including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL server, file storage, Web content, EMC VMware virtual servers and disk-to-disk data preservation volume, and the Intransa system has fit
“The savings in man hours with the Intransa system is unbelievable; it has changed the way we look at our business. With the help of Secure Data Group and Intransa, we’ve created an environment that’s immediately replicated. We no longer have to look at the constraints of the hardware, only the constraints of our imagination. I couldn’t have asked for a better solution.” – Frank Migliaccio, Director of Network Operations, Money Mailer into our environment seamlessly,” said Migliaccio. “We have continued to expand the system and are now up to over 70TB. The Intransa product is simple to implement and strikingly easy to enable for different systems. To be able to plug a network cable into a server and provision terabytes within a few minutes is amazing.” 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.
Business and IT Benefits With the Intransa IP storage solution, Money Mailer is able to serve its customers more efficiently. Prior to the new deployment, if a franchisee wanted artwork from a year ago to recreate an ad, they would have to contact the artist directly with the hope they still had the original artwork. Now, Money Mailer is able to keep all artwork and data centralized on an accessible network for quick and easy access. Graphic designers can now instantly pull the archive coupon history and artwork. With this type of access, franchisees can create coupons on-the-fly in the field, creating greater efficiency. “The savings in man hours with the Intransa system is unbelievable; it has changed the way we look at our business,” said Migliaccio. “With the help of Secure Data Group and Intransa, we’ve created an environment that’s immediately replicated. We no longer have to look at the constraints of the hardware, only the constraints of our imagination. I couldn’t have asked for a better solution.”
Intransa StorAlliance Technology Partners integrating with Intransa external IP storage solutions include more than 40 physical security vendor’s products plus those of more than 35 IT vendors. Intransa StorPartner Security Integrators offer complete video surveillance and other solutions to meet the most challenging customer needs.
Intransa, Inc., Corporate Headquarters 2870 Zanker Road, MS 200, San Jose, CA 95134 T: 408.678.8600 • 866.446.8726 • F: 408.678.8800 www.intransa.com • sales@intransa.com