RAID Helps Automotive Parts Company Implement A Scalable Data Warehouse

Kansas-based Long Motor markets its products worldwide solely through mail order. One-third of the company's employees are dedicated to staffing the customer call center from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. This company markets automotive parts and accessories for British sports cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles. Several catalogues, under the name of Victoria British, offer hard-to-find parts and accessories for Austin Healy, Triumph, Sunbeam and MG enthusiasts.

Running A Customer-Centered Business
A customer-oriented business, Long Motor designed and implemented a fully-integrated business system, according to Tony Holland, data processing manager at Long Motor. The company originally chose a Unisys workstation platform based on the CTOS operating system. However, once Unisys decided to phase out the CTOS product line, Long Motor decided to migrate to Windows NT.

Storage Is The First Concern
Due to several issues, upgrading storage was the first phase of the transition plan. Storage capacity was limiting the company's ability to analyze and model customers' preferences and buying patterns. Database performance needed improving,says Holland. Archiving was also becoming a concern.

RAID Technology Stands Out
Holland and his team evaluated several RAID vendors. Support for multiple, heterogeneous servers, and, eventually, clustering was critical to Long Motor. Says Holland. "Our new data warehouse, as well as our enterprise-level applications, demand a reliable and resilient shared-storage resource. We knew that the storage we chose had to perform at a high level to support the I/O demands of our multiple servers and planned cluster environment."

He continues, "The Storage Computer architecture was the best performer based on the caching controllers and number of spindles that we could have. The more spindles you apply to your disk subsystem, the better performance you get. By linking three drives with a caching controller, you get higher performance."

Selecting A Vendor & A VAR
Holland's team contacted Storage 2000, a Chicago-based Storage Computer VAR, to review its storage requirements. Working jointly with Storage 2000, Holland developed benchmarks. "The benchmarks showed general I/O to be 3 to 5 times faster with Storage Computer's RAID 7 Storage Server," says Holland. "We were sure that the Storage Server would provide the performance needed in our multi-server environment and the environment needed to maximize our clustering configuration."

Navigating With New Data Warehouse
A Storage Server with 72GB was installed in a heterogeneous CTOS and NT server environment. The Storage Servers have provided 100% uptime since installation almost a year ago. The increased capacity provided by the Storage Server has enabled Long Motor to implement strategic decision-support programs. "The Storage Server allowed us to implement a scalable data warehouse," explains Holland. "We can now keep online multiple years of data about our customers and sales. By analyzing and modeling this data we make better decisions about seasonal trends, regional buying characteristics and other parameters that affect our revenues and profitability."

Programs Run 800% Faster
"Because our production environment runs three to five times faster, we've realized savings in several areas," says Holland. "Our server-to-server I/O has doubled to 1,000 X 1,000 byte packets-per-second. Before the Storage Server, our starting call center representatives needed 45 minutes to bring up their systems. Now, they can bring their systems up in 10 minutes."