Elanders AB

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Based in Sweden and with offices in 10 countries worldwide, publishing group Elanders is a leading provider of “infomedia” services. It combines traditional print publishing with the latest online media channels, helping its customers reach business and consumers with brochures, catalogues, magazines, and Web content. It publishes millions of pages for international brands such as IKEA, Nokia, Volvo, and Scania.

In addition to publishing content, Elanders archives documents and images on systems at its main office in Gothenburg and two remote sites elsewhere in Sweden. For example, it often stores user manuals for up to 10 years following publication so that they can be translated for new markets ― such as China or India ― if required. Until recently, Elanders used technology from EMC for day-to-day storage, archiving, and back up. But in 2008, the technology was approaching the end of its lifecycle.

The choice facing Elanders was clear: Upgrade the existing system working with the incumbent supplier or investigate a different approach from another vendor. Magnus Befwe, manager of IT Operations and Infrastructure at Elanders, says that in addition to extra storage capacity, the company wanted to improve performance, reduce the burden of administration, and cut overall costs. “To achieve these goals meant looking at technologies from other suppliers. But this presented a risk as well. We needed to have absolute confidence in a new vendor and the system that it recommends.”

Befwe and his colleagues researched the market thoroughly. In the process, they met with Sun partner Konsulthuset MMI. The Elanders team was impressed when Daniel Sunesson, account manager at Konsulthuset MMI, introduced them to the new Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System. “By taking advantage of solid-state disk (SSD) storage, this system represents a real breakthrough in terms of performance, scalability, reliability, and cost,” he says.

Befwe was impressed with the commitment shown by Konsulthuset MMI and the support provided by Sun. “They really understood our challenges and went the extra distance to ensure that we deployed the right technology for our business and our customers.”

Although relatively new by storage technology standards, the Sun system had already proven itself in demanding business environments, while winning plaudits from the technology industry for its innovative approach. Based on cost efficient industry standard components and a robust software stack built from OpenSolarisTM and running Solaris ZFS, these systems include the industry's simplest and most comprehensive analytics environment and innovative new tools to help isolate and resolve issues to minimize business impact.

Above all, the solution is highly scalable, which persuaded Elanders to deploy a 66TB Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System at the Gothenburg datacenter, and additional systems at the two remote offices, handling 23 TB each. If required, the new solution can easily be scaled to accommodate 576 TB of information. When deployment is complete, it will be possible to offer full replication of data between the main and remote offices. This in itself will dramatically reduce the burden on the Elanders IT team. The previous tape storage solution has now been recommissioned as a long-term archiving solution.

In addition, it is now much easier and faster to add capacity in increments. Thin provisioning technology helps Elanders to provide dynamic data storage for its customers and Befwe estimates that this solution gives Elanders ten times the capacity for growth than the previous environment. Says Befwe, “When we were using direct-attached disks, we had to work out well in advance the capacity for a given customer and then charge that company for blocks of storage. Now customers simply pay for what they use, which is a highly attractive sales model.” This system has similar benefits for Elanders' IT team. Befwe says, “This solution allows us to keep all our data in one place, without the need for downtime or time-consuming relocation to larger volumes.” This manifests inconsiderable savings for Elanders' customers, which Befwe believes have come down by as much as 40%.

What's more, the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System is based on open technology, which means that Sun doesn't charge Elanders additional license fees for protocols and data services. The technology also reduces costs by lowering power consumption and cooling requirements -- SSDs consume about 80% less power than moving disks -- and increasing storage density, which reduces space requirements. As such, with this solution, Elanders consumes up to 50 % less power than with its previous technology. Added to all this is the significant difference in cost of acquisition versus competitive traditional storage solutions.

The technology is also highly available and reliable, ensuring that the Elanders IT team can continue to deliver outstanding service to the business and its customers. For example, it supports a two-node cluster configuration, which has no single point of failure, minimizing the risk of downtime. This level of availability was critical given that Elanders chose to utilize the solution for virtualization storage, with most of the VMware servers hosting business critical applications with 7x24 uptime demands. They currently have approximately 50 servers on five hosts in their VMware cluster. These are mostly Windows 2003 and 2008 servers, but include Linux platforms too. Elanders' applications range from front-end web servers to demanding applications like Microsoft Sharepoint and database servers.

The Sun solution not only delivers outstanding performance but also simplifies management responsibilities for Befwe and his colleagues. In particular, the Sun Storage 7000's DTrace Analytics tool makes it easier to monitor performance. “It’s a delight to use,” says Befwe. “We spend less time reacting to the performance of the system and more time planning and supporting company strategy – overall administration time has fallen by 50%. From the team’s perspective, it means we can demonstrate the value of the investment to senior managers and prove our worth to the company.”