Teavana
StoreVault helps in implementing a paperless information system
Customer Overview
Teavana is a specialty tea retailer providing fresh, high quality, loose leaf tea and tea accessories including music and books from all over the world. Teavana’s tea products are exclusively handpicked from the finest hillside plantations of India, Nepal and Japan. A wide variety of teas are imported into the United States, every month to encourage a healthy, alternative lifestyle.
Customer Challenges
Currently, Teavana employs 400+ employees and has deployed 125+ desktops, 10 Dell servers inclusive of 2 SQL Servers, 2 application servers, and 1 email server with a storage capacity of 400GB of data. Recently, Teavana faced several IT challenges.
First, Teavana’s backups were being managed by an external company. The company exercised limited control on an inefficient process that took 12 hours, disrupting normal operations as applications were shutdown during backups. The backup staged on into local storage and consumed significant hard drive space, resulting in frequent storage upgrades and downtime. Backups were only performed five days in a week instead of daily.
Secondly, the company was running low on network storage space. The IT infrastructure was transforming to a paperless system. This required scanning all documents and images, creating PDF files and also maintaining a relational database for the entire repository of documents using Kwiktag application. Using the Microsoft dynamics GP software, a business management solution, and archiving the email server required additional space as well. In a span of six months Teavana’s server and storage requirements had grown from 2 servers to 10 servers and from a mere 50GB data to a whopping 400GB!
Finally, the IT team at Teavana used a Snap Server 4100 as a temporary solution for handling storage growth. CIFS performance was poor and adding drives required replacing old drives with bigger drives. The lack of Snapshots resulted in manual backups using copy utilities. In addition, the pricing was not impressive as every new feature like replication required licensing. The Snap Server had gone through multiple owners and it did not instill much confidence in the current team
Solution: StoreVault S500
David Eshelman, IT Manager with Teavana started looking out for another storage solution that would be reliable, provide efficient backups as well as offer growth without downtime. He compared StoreVault versus using Microsoft DFS with additional storage in several of the servers.
DFS was complicated and required managing scattered storage with multiple backup streams. On the other hand, StoreVault provided a rich feature set and the NetApp reputation addressed his security concerns.
David now runs two StoreVaults with six 500GB hard drives, a hot spare and RAID-DP in each. StoreVault utilization is thirty percent with critical network shares migrated to StoreVault. He uses NAS (CIFS) for all the user file shares and iSCSI volumes for server data.
Backup and restore are now controlled by automatic schedules and are very reliable. For disaster recovery, a StoreVault unit with primary data in Buckhead, GA is replicated to another StoreVault unit in downtown Atlanta, GA. For the SQL servers Snapshots are taken of iSCSI volumes to be backed up and replicated every night. All other servers backup to NAS volumes on the StoreVault using third-party backup utilities and are then replicated.
For the future, David plans to continue adding new StoreVaults. He may consider upgrading to StoreVault’s Fibre Channel kit if he sees a need for faster performance.
Customer Experience
David says “The S500 was just as described – a plug-n-play NAS/SAN unit. We were very impressed!”
Installation was quick – a record 45 minutes included racking 2 units and setting up a test environment for replication. He says that STA Network Accounting, VAR from Atlanta, acquired the unit and helped them with installations and configuration for great comfort. Support people were very friendly and highly knowledgeable and ensured installation was smooth.
Customer Benefits
Backup and recovery are fluid with StoreVault’s Snapshot and replication features, and are automatic with no interruptions to normal operations. The StoreVault lowers Teavana’s costs for backup/recovery by eliminating the need for third party services and reducing the hard drive and application and server downtime requirements.
The SQL Server uses iSCSI volumes which can be added or expanded on the fly without having to take the servers down for maintenance. Increasing storage now takes only a few minutes and requires no downtime as opposed to ordering new drives.
StoreVault won over the Snap Server competition due to its high reliability features like Replication, Snapshots, easy expandability and NetApp’s tried and tested DATA ONTAP operating system. Of course the low price of $18000 for two StoreVault units was extremely attractive. In addition, StoreVault’s CIFS performance is at least better by 20 Mb/sec than Snap Server. Teavana storage environment is as healthy as its fresh handpicked tea products.
