Installation Review: Storage Solution Opens Door To Enterprise Clientele

By Gennifer Biggs, Business Solutions magazine.

It is never easy to get an audience with a Fortune 500 organization, so when Winslow Technology Group had the opportunity to present a storage solution to an enterprise insurance company, it knew it would only have one opportunity to stand out from the crowd. Scott Winslow, president of Winslow Technology Group, LLC, managed to wedge a foot in the door through a past relationship, but he knew that to walk away with the project would mean showing the customer a truly unique storage solution.

The insurance company was struggling with performance and cost issues surrounding the storage needs tied to having 40,000 employees dependent on Exchange. To meet the insurance company's need while reducing the physical and cost footprint of the storage solution, as well as easing management of the array, Winslow presented a Fluid Data Architecture solution from Dell Compellent. The solution allows highly active data to remain on high-performance RAID (redundant array of independent disks) storage while inactive data moves automatically to less expensive, higher-capacity storage.

Convincing the customer that the storage solution was the best answer wasn't simple, says Winslow. "The company had both technology objections and questions about capabilities, both ours and Compellent's," he explains. To overcome those technology questions, Winslow created a proof of concept and deployed that into the company's environment, allowing the engineers and technicians technicians in-house to become champions of the solution. Winslow also flew in executives and engineers from Dell Compellent, who helped answer questions about the technology.

With the approval in place, installation took about six weeks. "We used the customer's Exchange servers and software, then provided the storage system to support that application, including Cisco switches, QLogic HBA (host bus adapter) cards, and Compellent hardware and software components."