Features

LeapFrog, a designer, developer and marketer of technology-based learning products, needed a major upgrade to its network–more specifically, its switches, processing power and storage systems. Essentially, LeapFrog’s supply chain and IT systems in data warehousing were inadequate for its business requirements. Senior Vice President and CIO Robert Moon sought to increase the company’s storage capacity and reduce costs for its multitiered data storage environment.

Since the majority of the products produced in-house were software, audio and animation clips, there were many large files, both Windows-based and Mac-based, that end-users needed to access. To keep pace with business, the company needed to expand its current storage environment to include its new enterprise resource-planning system, while also providing its end-users with adequate space for projects.

Moon decided to migrate the company’s expensive SAN environment to a more flexible and manageable SAN array system utilizing Pillar Data System’s Axiom 500. Moon’s staff tested the solution for about five months, and after studying the system’s architecture, he purchased his first 14-terabyte system.

Moon currently uses Axiom 500 to house network files and Microsoft Exchange files, though, over time, he plans to scale capacity and migrate LeapFrog’s entire Oracle database system.

Moon’s decision to purchase the product was based on the system’s ability to provision logical unit numbers with different quality-of-service levels within the same array, which resulted in higher utilization rates and lower costs. Another feature was that administrators did not need to keep a separate spreadsheet for the systems to know which disk goes where when partitioning out particular disks, because the array does this task automatically.

“To me, it comes down to a critical combination of quality, reliability, support and service after we buy it, and of course price,” Moon says. “I’m not going to buy something just based on price. The hardware and software that safeguard our data must be quality products that do what we really need them to do. Reliability is the key factor. Of course, we must also have confidence that our vendor will stand behind the product, because if we do have a problem and we need help, we need it now. Pillar sold us an enterprise storage system with seven times the capacity for about half the price quoted by a competitor.”

Moon stresses that with the management software he no longer needs to send somebody to school to learn how to use SAN, iSCSI or Fibre Channel technologies. Pillar’s Axiom virtually monitors itself and alerts staff if there is ever an issue. LeapFrog is now saving approximately 40% to 50% on its storage costs, he says, particularly when factoring in labor management savings.

Moon is also creating a remote disaster-recovery hot site in Arizona for the entire company, in which all data will be entrusted to a Pillar Axiom system. He also plans to use Pillar’s volume replication solution, which will enable LeapFrog to heterogeneously replicate volumes of data to and from an Axiom platform for enhanced data protection at the Arizona site.

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