Melco
StoreVault S500 Enables Embroidery Machine Manufacturer To Save a Stitch in Time
Customer Overview
Melco is the world's leading manufacturer of sophisticated embroidery solutions for home-based and commercial markets.
Melco engineers, manufactures, and distributes embroidery systems around the world, provides training and support, and offers embroidery supplies through MelcoMart.
Hardware and software engineering, development, manufacturing, sales, & distribution all work together to bring the most technologically advanced and easy-to-use commercial embroidery systems to market.
Customer Challenges
IT manager Tom Seedroff has his time cut out managing 25 installed
servers, all with direct-attached storage and supporting more than a hundred users.
Seedroff manages under one terabyte of data currently, but that is growing every year. With a direct-attached storage environment, storage was fixed in silos across different servers, making it difficult and inefficient to add storage where it was needed.
One of the biggest pain points was backup. The backup window was just too long, even with improvements to the tape mechanisms installed at the company. Recovering individual files required swapping out the tapes from the library, mounting the right tapes, finding the file, restoring, then swapping the tapes again.
Solution
Melco installed a StoreVault S500 to consolidate storage and improve
the speed, reliability, and automation of data restores.
One of Melco's key applications is SQL Server. Seedroff decided to take the company's first foray into iSCSI SAN. Melco already had a Gigabit Ethernet backbone and no incremental infrastructure was required to take advantage of StoreVault built-in iSCSI SAN capabilities.
Customer Experience
The installation of the StoreVault S500 went well from the beginning. "It just works!" said Seedroff. Recently
a forced upgrade and migration to a more powerful application server required more storage. "I just set up
an iSCSI LUN, punched in 300GB, and walked away." Besides making it easier to manage data, Seedroff says,
"It's peace of mind-it's on disk so there is no restore from tape. Backups are really simple, we can keep our
SQL backups online!"
Customer Benefits
- Simplified backup and restore
- Ability to consolidate storage and manage as a virtual pool
- File serving and application storage in one appliance
Rather than separate islands of storage on individual servers, Melco can now centralize its data onto a single network storage appliance, enabling more efficient data management and control. Prior to the StoreVault S500, with only a tape system, it took Tom two hours to find, then restore a file accidentally deleted by a user. With NetApp Snapshot™ technology, this same process takes only five minutes.
"The S500 has changed our IT direction. Snapshot copies are a great security blanket." Melco is planning to move towards a disk-to-disk-to-tape model. The company's aging servers will be replaced with either 1U or blade servers linked via iSCSI to the StoreVault S500.
Seedroff sums it up: "I love it when things just work as advertised."
Melco Industries Inc.
1575 West 124th Ave.
Denver, Colorado 80234
www.melco.com
www.melcomart.com
