Storage Solutions You Can Count On

Wolf & Company, PC is a certified public accounting and business consulting firm with offices in Boston and Springfield, MA, and Albany, NY. A leading regional firm founded in 1911, they provide comprehensive audit, tax and risk management services delivering extensive resources, specialized industry expertise and outstanding service. The IT department consists of 4 employees, and supports 180 employees in their two offices.

As you can imagine, Wolf & Company deals with a lot of confidential client information, as well as regulatory audits, so secure, reliable storage is a must. And nothing is more important to a hundred year-old accounting firm than ROI. “We don’t even consider a solution unless it makes financial sense,” says John Sullivan, Director of Information Services. “We look at industry reviews, assess market leaders, and we look to test-drive the technology before we make a decision.”

A number of years ago, the Wolf IT environment had numerous servers, and started to run out of space. Sullivan explains, “We had switched to a program called CaseWare for our auditors. It has numerous checklists and backup functionality that rely heavily on storage, and we found we were running into storage issues.” While with a previous employer, Sullivan had gained first-hand experience with both Winslow Technology Group and Compellent, so he could personally attest to the benefits of a Compellent SAN. “When WTG offered to provide Wolf & Company with a SAN test-drive, that was additionally helpful in confirming that Compellent would be the best solution for us.”

solution

Initially, the primary purpose for purchasing the Compellent SAN was for better management of disk space, for greater fault tolerance, and ease of provisioning space to servers. Now when a server requires additional space, providing it is easy. The Compellent GUI is so intuitive that providing a LUN to a server is a snap. And Compellent’s Data Progression feature automatically and seamlessly migrates inactive data from RAID 10 to RAID 5 maximizing storage efficiency and performance. In terms of data protection, Wolf set up a variety of space efficient replays for various applications—some replays are scheduled hourly and some are scheduled daily depending upon the critical nature of the data or how quickly the data changes. Additionally, Wolf and Company takes advantage of the Compellent boot from SAN capability that makes the deployment of new servers faster than ever before. “Once a ‘bare metal’ server is racked, we can bring it on-line in 10-15 minutes.”

Sullivan lists the Compellent SAN features that are his favorites, “the speed of doing replays, the speed of restoring, the ability to manage space more seamlessly, and the ability to do remote replays. We’re not doing remote replication at the moment, but it is very important to us. For our disaster recovery purposes, we’re growing our Springfield environment and looking at installing a second unit out there.”

results

“The Compellent SAN has been tremendous. On a day-to-day basis, we find value in its space management, and the ability to provision a new server if something goes down. If we have an issue with server hardware, we have a spare in the rack, and all we need to do is move the HBA over to the spare server. Presto, the machine is back on-line with all its settings and data in 10 to 15 minutes. You can’t do that with a traditional system.”

“The firm as a whole—including non-technical people—sees the value in it. We can’t imagine life without the Compellent SAN. For DR purposes, we’ll be buying another one for our Springfield office. If someone were to ask me, ‘If you had to buy this SAN all over again, would you?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, and I have.’”

Sullivan is very pleased with the overall return on his investment. “The ROI can be seen in productivity, but also in the partnership we’ve developed with WTG. I deal with a lot of other vendors, and what I like about WTG is that they are responsive and I have great confidence in their abilities. As a matter of fact, not long ago, I called to tell them we were thinking about another Compellent SAN in Springfield, and asked what types of things we should be thinking about. In order to better define our needs, the WTG team helped set up a monitoring system to see what our rate of data change was, and what we discovered was that we required more bandwidth before we could move forward. We would not have known that if we hadn’t been able to call WTG to help us through the process.”