Cardinal Logistics Estimates Cost Savings of 65% with CommVault and NetApp

Headquartered in Concord, North Carolina, Cardinal provides management of supply and demand chains to a diverse base of more than 800 customers, including 7-Eleven, Georgia-Pacific, and Office Depot. Customers depend on Cardinal to deliver to consumers everything from doughnuts to diapers. With 80 remote sites from which employees access applications and shared files within the data center, Cardinal maintains a complex business network. Like most enterprises, Cardinal also makes heavy use of e-mail for internal and external communications. For Cardinal's centralized data services group, this adds up to some 10 terabytes of data that must be kept safe and, at the same time, made readily available to business users.

With e-mail data growing at an alarming rate and which, according to Cardinal, accounts for nearly 15 percent of its total amount of storage, maximizing uptime and backup and recovery are top priorities. The sheer volume of e-mail in the company's Microsoft Exchange Server had slowed performance and threatened to affect end-user productivity. After evaluating a number of options, Cardinal determined that the combination of CommVault e-mail archiving software and NetApp storage would best meet these challenges while reducing the overall administrative costs of managing the company's e-mail storage.

Cardinal uses NetApp FAS storage both in its data center and at an off-site disaster recovery (DR) facility with CommVault Data Migrator to offload email messages on the primary Microsoft Exchange e-mail server to secondary NetApp storage at the DR site. By actively archiving all e-mail messages more than six months old, Cardinal frees up disk space and has realized significant application performance gains without sacrificing data accessibility for users. Also, by using less expensive secondary storage media, Cardinal has recognized a 65 percent cost savings through reduced management overhead and more cost-effective use of disk storage, according to Marty Hurd, IT administrator at Cardinal Logistics.

"The impact of the new approach was immediate in terms of improving efficiencies and service levels," commented Hurd. "When barely half of the users had been moved to the new archive system, performance already began to pick up noticeably since we were no longer taxing the e-mail server. Migrating information to the NetApp system at our DR site reduces the load on the Exchange Server, because the server does not have to work as hard to find messages the users want. It also saves storage space in the data center. We needed a single storage solution that was reliable, easy to manage, and cost-effective and the combination of CommVault and NetApp gave us just that."

In addition to cost benefits, Cardinal has also seen additional operational improvements by deploying CommVault Galaxy® backup and recovery software together with CommVault Data Migrator. CommVault's single unified console seamlessly manages both backup and archiving tasks, giving users one view across their archive environment. Deploying both backup and archiving software in combination with space-efficient NetApp SnapshotTM and disk-based backup capabilities on a single NetApp storage system, simplifies the task of managing the various phases of data use. Cardinal also is able to improve backup times and recover quickly without disrupting archive operations if a problem occurs - Network Appliance.