West Monroe Partners
StoreVault helps technology solution provider in delivering effective solutions in short timeframe
Customer Overview
West Monroe Partners (WMP) is a business and technology solutions provider, with offices in Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Montreal, New York, Seattle, and Toronto. With more than 200 consulting professionals, WMP was named one of Consulting Magazine’s 2005 “Small Jewels,” and one of Chicago’s “101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For” in 2006.
Customer Challenges
Currently, WMP employs 225 consultants, for whom its IT team has deployed 75 virtual and physical servers, 25 virtual server using Microsoft Virtual Server solution and 50 physical HP servers, running Windows 2003.A datacenter and six remote sites host 1.1 TB of direct attached storage (DAS) in HP servers. WMP created full backups weekly with daily incremental backups using Backup Exec. 500GB of backup disk media went offsite for disaster recovery.
WMP was nearing a new server hardware refresh cycle. WMP had historically only purchased servers with DAS. Current business growth required entering new markets through a remote site in Dallas. The number of employee had grown by 50% last year and projected to grow 150% in the next 3 years for a total of 565 employees. Data was growing at 25% rate per year. While looking to refresh server hardware in late 2006 and 2007, it made sense to leverage a storage solution that could grow with the expanding needs of the organization.
Most of the WMP employees do not regularly work from the office, making it difficult to perform backups to a central file server. As a result, significant amount of intellectual property (IP) remained local on laptops. To prevent the loss of this IP, a laptop backup solution was rolled out enabling the retention of data regardless of whether the West Monroe Partners staff member were in the office or not.
WMP was looking to consolidate and manage its lab and testing environments better. Testing machines needed to convert from stand-alone desktops and laptops to a virtualized environment utilizing Microsoft Virtual Server. Leveraging centralized storage for virtual server hosts could allow for a more suitable investment in shared CPU and RAM resources for the virtualized environments.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Nathan A Ulery, Infrastructure Architect and Bob Rice, Senior Consultant at WMP started building a long-term storage strategy. As a consulting firm, they had already implemented NetApp FAS in their client sites and were extremely happy with Data ONTAP architecture and NetApp’s high quality support. When they found in a press release that NetApp was introducing storage solution at a lower business price point, they immediately decided to buy a Storevault S500.
The StoreVault S500 runs with a total capacity of 6TB in 12 drives including one hot spare and RAID-DP. Virtual servers, SQL servers, Exchange, Great Plain software connect to StoreVault using iSCSI while utilizing CIFS for file sharing of critical data like software packages for the whole enterprise. This application data migration to StoreVault has resulted in additional space in Windows 2003 servers.
The Backup Exec solution utilizes a multi-tier strategy where the first level of backups go to StoreVault for faster restores onsite and second level to off-site backup disk media like before. The S500 enables WMP to include an additional disk tier in backup architecture, allowing for reduced backup and restore windows.
Customer Experience
Bob says, “The StoreVault S500 has provided WMP with the enterprise level manageability, performance, and expandability we had only previously experienced when implementing full-scale NetApp FAS series appliances. Its disaster recovery capabilities compared to its competitors is well ahead of the curve. The S500 is an ideal solution for a middle-market organization looking for an enterprise class storage solution.”
Nathan says “As we work with our customers on their storage, virtualization, and disaster recovery strategies, the StoreVault product regularly makes the short-list because of its flexibility, ease of use, and price point.”
Lorren Brooks at Arlington Computer Products, the VAR, was extremely helpful in the entire cycle of product purchase. She was also helpful in getting the right resources on time in the early stages of the transition to the appliance from DAS. Bob added that provisioning a new virtual server for development and testing takes approximately 30 minutes, compared to days or weeks required to procure and install new physical servers. He also says that SAN-based backup is completed approximately 40% faster than previous DAS solutions.
Customer Benefits
As WMP adds software products to its solution mix, the ability to setup new test and development environments quickly has become crucial to their success. The S500 has also allowed WMP to expand virtualization environment significantly, providing developers with testing environment to deliver their solutions to clients effectively. The StoreVault solution was appropriately sized and priced with the stability of NetApp because of which, it was preferred over the competition.
With StoreVault, West Monroe Partners’ business expansion worries are history.
