Download a PDF version of BlueArc's Advantage Sales & Marketing Case Study
After acquiring thirty small companies, each with its own technology infrastructure for storing employee files and e-mail, Advantage Sales & Marketing (ASM) set on an aggressive mission - to centralize the company's data, while providing the highest levels of performance and capacity. By deploying BlueArc Titan servers as NAS gateways to StorageTek SAN storage, the company met this challenge head-on, reducing equipment acquisition costs, and simplifying management.
Advantage Sales and Marketing, LLC was formed in October 1997 to combine the strongest sales and marketing agents in the country. Its goal was to become the leading sales and marketing agency serving the consumer packaged goods industry. Over a period of three years, twenty-one Tier I companies throughout North America joined Advantage and by April 2000, its goal was achieved. Today the company represents over 1,200 clients. The combined operations of Advantage have a revenue base that exceeds $700 million with an associate base that exceeds 11,500. Some of the company's top brand name clients include GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever, Schering-Plough, Del Monte, Quaker Oats, Tropicana, and Gatorade.
One of the fastest growing sales and marketing agencies in the industry, ASM expanded its corporate reach to include thirty separate companies, following a series of acquisitions that grew the company to 3,500 employees and more than $700 million in revenue. But with each of the acquisitions came existing technology in remote offices around the country, pre-existing policies and no easy way to integrate or manage data. The company's IT staff, led by national technology director William Hiatt, set out to merge the resulting disparate e-mail systems, implement a common document management platform, a centralized database, and support a wide array of applications, all while keeping costs down and the servers up.
"We had 30 different companies and 30 different ways of doing things."
"With unmatched flexibility and performance, BlueArc was the ideal solution for us, and it beats anything in the marketplace."
"We are a best of breed shop. In our opinion, BlueArc has the best NAS head on the market today. That Titan worked with existing disk makes good sense to us."
The scalability of the Titan architecture provides us with a solution that is future proof."
-- William Hiatt,Leveraging the company's existing relationship with StorageTek for SAN disk storage, ASM deployed a pair of Titan NAS servers as gateways to the existing SAN on site, bringing BlueArc's world-record performance and scalability to the company's data center. The Titan servers virtualized the block SAN storage and allowed file-based shared access to all users and applications. Titan not only delivered a solution that met the company's present needs, but an architecture designed for future demands - whether the data arrive through continued acquisitions or through organic growth. Titan's ability to serve both Fibre Channel and Serial ATA (SATA) disk environments offered ASM a single target for multiple applications, with the flexibility to continue adding disk or upgrade Titan blades to advance capacity, performance and connectivity as needed.
Deploying Titan with more than 40 terabytes of disk gave ASM the capacity required for the company's 3,500 employees to store e-mail and all associated attachments, access databases and generate reports, benefiting from a large, centralized shared storage pool that dramatically simplified management, all while reducing costs, floor space and power demands.
ASM specializes in the presentation, promotion and distribution of consumer packaged goods in a wide array of supermarkets. In addition the company's large employee base, more than 6,000 retail representatives, each with wireless handheld devices connected to a centralized SQL server, upload current storefront data to ASM servers around the clock - with no allowances for slowdowns or service interruption.
With each of the company's employees averaging more than a gigabyte of e-mail per user, and attachment sizes continuing to balloon, ASM needed to ensure several terabytes capacity be available for messaging alone. While e-mail quotas were considered, the cost of acquiring additional disk was weighed against the management and productivity costs to end users over establishing limits. In the end, it was decided that there were not going to be limits on archive storage sizes, and that all the data would be stored centrally on the server, rather than on local machines to allow for centralized back up and improved storage efficiency. This made Titan's scalability to the hundreds of terabytes - even more critical.
As Hiatt and his team evaluated potential storage offerings from multiple NAS players on the market, including Network Appliance and BlueArc, the fact that Titan was architected in hardware, rather than in software, evading bottlenecks often seen in processor-based solutions, gave great comfort to Hiatt and his team as they investigated options.
"Our business critical systems are dependent on network storage to always be available and scalable, not just now, but in the future," said Hiatt. "BlueArc offers the reliability and the security for us that we need as a company, without asking us to compromise on performance and scalability. Titan's architecture is designed to scale with the company as we continue to grow."
While key components of a fail-safe infrastructure, system security and rock-solid uptime are not all that is required for today's most cautious companies to ensure highest levels of business continuance. Following the company's efforts to consolidate their disparate storage infrastructure, ASM took additional steps to protect mission critical data through the development of a second data center in Mesa, Arizona, where information would be replicated in real-time, from the company's headquarters in San Diego, for disaster recovery.
Having already seen the benefits of Titan at headquarters, ASM implemented a second system in a NAS gateway configuration to StorageTek SAN at the DR site, further extending peace of mind, not just to the company's IT staff, but to the thousands of users for whom anytime access to e-mail and databases is critical. This was accomplished through Titan's Incremental Block Replication (IBR) software, which enabled the data to be replicated to a remote site with little or no impact on local performance.
"Looking at the Titan architecture, having something that is future proof is a nice feeling," Hiatt said. "We have thousands of people accessing data on the Titan every minute of every day - nonstop. After trying other NAS solutions that were not reliable, Titan is truly a leap ahead of any offering we have ever seen."
Consolidating thirty disparate companies and their differing technologies, both hardware and software, is no easy task - especially with more than three thousand employees across the country who require anytime access to their e-mail and database for business critical information. By deploying Titan servers at the company's headquarters and at their off-site disaster recovery facility, Advantage Sales and Marketing increased capacity and dramatically simplified their infrastructure while at the same time delivering ultimate reliability, scalability and performance, while reducing costs. Their centralized Titan infrastructure has given ASM the ability to better focus on their end-user requirements and applications.