Marshalls improves business landscape with data management solution
1 min read
Hard landscaping manufacturer Marshalls, which operates quarries and manufacturing sites, as well as 12 service centres and 14 offices around the UK, says its new EMC data management solution is streamlining processes and enabling major cost and time savings.
Design for the IT and network infrastructure was worked on by communications integrator Affiniti, and Marshalls says its new system has not only slashed maintenance costs but increased storage performance three-fold – also providing for rapid storage expansion capability.
Most important, the new infrastructure – which has been sized to handle a mammoth 54 Terrabytes of data and, with the DMX, brings a threefold performance improvement – is now enabling the company to manage data much more flexibly and efficiently than its six-year old legacy system.
“This new solution brings performance gains and cost savings along with consistent backup and data recovery times, which helps Marshalls in achieving a highly resilient 24 x 7 operation,” says José Chacoris, information systems manager at Marshalls. “We have been working closely with Affiniti for some time. This partnership has complemented and facilitated Marshalls’ own in-house knowledge and has been a positive experience.”
By adopting a tiered storage strategy Marshalls says it now has a more detailed view of the data environment, so that it can be moved and tiered according to value and criticality throughout its lifecycle. This flexible approach ensures that Marshalls can gain access to information quickly and efficiently – hence some of the reduction in the overall cost of storage.
Says Chacoris: “As in any successful business we need to be in a position to adapt to today’s constantly changing business requirements by ensuring that the environment is able to deliver performance, stability, resilience and fluid expandability.”
Meanwhile, the resilient nature of the Centera architecture has been harnessed to reduce backup times and ensure multiple copies across sites, which eliminates the previous 18-hour backup programme. Automatic archiving also provides easily searchable and indexed information to ensure consistent backup and data recovery times and protects the organisation in the event of a disaster.
As part of a best practice approach, the infrastructure design also enables improved business continuity. In the event of an outage the environment is capable of automatic fail over to the disaster recovery site, essentially reducing any business downtime and enabling the organisation to meet its goal as a highly resilient, 24 x 7 operation.
