The improvements have had a significant impact on cost reduction and operational efficiency.
“When we looked to technology vendors with expertise and knowledge to help us plan, build and execute a cloud – EMC and VMware were the clear choice,” says Tony Vaden, ATD’s vice president and chief information officer.
“We selected EMC VNX unified storage for its simplicity, efficiency and performance. We needed the ability to auto-provision our tier-one storage to critical applications without competing with tier-two applications,” he explains.
Managed services provider House of Brick Technologies assisted with the changeover.
The system “has been flawless at this point with 100 percent availability,” says Vaden. “The transactional speeds that we’ve achieved are impressive. We now have more flexibility in our environment with the scalability and tiering that VNX provides,” he adds.
Utilizing the new technology “has enabled us to scale our environment, add more power on-demand with no downtime and without any impact to our users,” says Angelic Gibson, ATD’s director of information technology operations.
“We can provide better performance, scalability and availability with no downtime – a major benefit to us. All the while, we’ve managed to remain transparent to the customer, delivering services to them seamlessly,” Gibson continues.
“We’ve had great success with EMC and VMware technologies and both companies have been integral along our journey. In addition, through the use of VMware server virtualization we have the ability bring up new application tiers for Oracle eBusiness Suite in less than 20 minutes, without application downtime,” she notes.
ATD plans to also use VMware software to virtualize its desktops, reducing the burden of managing more than 2,500 personal computers and laptops.
“By virtualizing Oracle, we’ve been able to provision only the amount of hardware that we need to run production so we don’t over-allocate,” says Gibson. “Through virtualization, we have reduced the number of physical servers from 79 to just nine.”
Gibson goes on to point out that “if you’re paying Oracle per CPU and you are over provisioning servers for your peaks, you are overpaying. Virtualization allows you to pay for the CPUs you are using to run your Oracle today more accurately, without over provisioning, decreasing the overall license cost to Oracle.”
ATD, established in 1935, was also seeking to transform its tape backup infrastructure to a more efficient model, looking to eliminate tapes while addressing the tremendous data growth it was experiencing. EMC’s Data Domain was selected, and administrators can backup and restore Oracle databases directly to and from the Data Domain systems using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN).
“Backing up our 2.5TB Oracle production database used to take 12 hours,” reports Bill Roberts, ATD’s senior enterprise architect. “Now, with Data Domain, those backups take just five hours. In addition, it used to take us 36 hours to restore our environment where as it now takes us just four,” he says.
“The operational time savings are tremendous as well,” Roberts observes. “It’s allowed our two full-time backup resources to go from spending 100 percent of their time working on backups to spending just 50 percent, allowing them to spend time on new projects to advance the business.”
ATD has been able to replace more than 200TB of tape infrastructure with just 24TB of storage.
“In moving away from tape, we’ve eliminated the need to purchase and use nearly 2,000 tapes a year by moving to Data Domain,” says Roberts. “We don’t need to worry about mechanical issues like we did with tape either. Our backups are much more reliable now.”
For more information, visit www.atd-us.com, www.houseofbrick.com, www.emc.com and www.vware.com.
