C&K Market
C & K Market, Inc turns to StoreVault for high availability and disaster recovery
Customer Overview
C&K Market, Inc. is a closely held, family owned company with corporate offices in Brookings, Oregon. It. is the parent company of the Ray’s Food Place chain of conventional full service stores, along with Shop Smart and Price Less Foods stores that offer everyday low pricing in a warehouse format, and Pharmacy Express. With 51 stores in 2004, it earned a 21st-place ranking in the Oregon Private 150.
Customer Challenges
C&K Market has approximately 2,500 employees using 400 computers. Until recently there were 12 Dell Servers loaded with Windows and Linux operating systems running MS Exchange, MS SQL as the database server, QuickBooks Enterprise as the pharmacy financial package, SonicWall GMS server, ShoreTel voice mail server, and other standard servers including directory, file, print, ftp, DNS, DHCP, and Web. Approximately 2 Terabytes of storage data were scattered across 12 servers as Direct Attached Storage.
That complex system led to constant problems with storage capacity as C&K Market’s data grew at 30-40% per year. The growth was fueled by the expanding size of the Exchange database as users stored more and more mail communications, a growing SQL database incorporating increasing amounts of data from retail business process automation, and larger numbers of shared documents.
Upgrades to server hardware and operating systems resulted in excessive downtime as they required bringing down the entire system. Moreover, since limited server capacity necessitated putting various applications on the same physical server, all application services went down whenever maintenance was required for just one of them.
Symantec System Restore transferred disk-to-disk backups onto a Promise Technology NAS device and later moved the backups to tapes using a Dell tape device. Unfortunately, because Symantec System Restore did not provide any database agent or hot backup facility, backups could only run when the application and database services were shut down. Since those services typically ran late into the night, backup windows were shrinking.
Solution: StoreVault
Yunfei Ma, Network System Manager, and Steve Perez, System Administrator at C&K Market, Inc. were hunting for a solution to deal with their server and storage issues. They looked into storage solutions from Dell/EMC and EqualLogic. However, Dell/EMC was overly complex and did not provide features like RAID DP, while EqualLogic was far too expensive. Then they heard of StoreVault from their VAR and liked its simplicity, easy integration with VMware and rich feature set.
Yunfei now runs two S500 appliances, each configured with twelve 500GB SATA II drives with CIFS, NFS, SnapRestore and Replication licenses. All the file shares have been consolidated onto the CIFS shares of one of the S500’s. The second S500 stores VMware Virtual Machines in NFS exports, with iSCSI LUNS for their data. Yunfei also has two S300s, one of which is used for replication of the S500s while the other is used to carry out testing for new configurations.
C&K Market has now virtualized most servers onto 4 new Dell servers running VMware ESX 3 using the S500 as the store. The Symantec System Restore server has been replaced with a more robust Symantec Backup Exec 11d which continues to take backups on tape devices to provide a second level of disaster recovery.
Customer Experience
According to Yunfei Ma, “C & K Market is very pleased after choosing the StoreVault S500 for its VMware deployment. End users now enjoy increased capacity and reduced downtimes without any adverse affects on their ability to perform their daily tasks. Although the complete infrastructure was revamped, it took only one day to install the StoreVault. Our VAR, Six Degrees Consulting, was extremely useful on pre-sales configuration and provided us all the information to make the decision.”
Customer Benefits
StoreVault provides better storage utilization than Direct Access Storage. Built-in snapshots and the replication function significantly improve system uptime and provide much needed disaster recovery capability. Instead of days, it now takes minutes to provision additional storage for virtual servers.
NetApp’s reputation, along with its rich feature set at a lower business price point, was the winning combination for StoreVault.
