Replacing hardware and software that had become “static”
and underperforming, American Tire Distributors (ATD)
has embarked upon cloud computing, taking flight with
systems from EMC Corp. and VMware, Inc.
The improvements have had a significant impact on cost
reduction and operational efficiency.
“When we looked to technology vendors with expertise and
knowledge to help us plan, build and execute a cloud –
EMC and VMware were the clear choice,” says Tony Vaden,
ATD’s vice president and chief information
officer.
“We selected EMC VNX unified storage for its simplicity,
efficiency and performance. We needed the ability to
auto-provision our tier-one storage to critical
applications without competing with tier-two
applications,” he explains.
Managed services provider House of Brick Technologies
assisted with the changeover.
The system “has been flawless at this point with 100
percent availability,” says Vaden. “The transactional
speeds that we’ve achieved are impressive. We now have
more flexibility in our environment with the scalability
and tiering that VNX provides,” he adds.
Utilizing the new technology “has enabled us to scale
our environment, add more power on-demand with no
downtime and without any impact to our users,” says
Angelic Gibson, ATD’s director of information technology
operations.
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“We can provide better performance, scalability and
availability with no downtime – a major benefit to us.
All the while, we’ve managed to remain transparent to
the customer, delivering services to them seamlessly,”
Gibson continues.
“We’ve had great success with EMC and VMware
technologies and both companies have been integral along
our journey. In addition, through the use of VMware
server virtualization we have the ability bring up new
application tiers for Oracle eBusiness Suite in less
than 20 minutes, without application downtime,” she
notes.
ATD plans to also use VMware software to virtualize its
desktops, reducing the burden of managing more than
2,500 personal computers and laptops.
“By virtualizing Oracle, we’ve been able to provision
only the amount of hardware that we need to run
production so we don’t over-allocate,” says Gibson.
“Through virtualization, we have reduced the number of
physical servers from 79 to just nine.”
Gibson goes on to point out that “if you’re paying
Oracle per CPU and you are over provisioning servers for
your peaks, you are overpaying. Virtualization allows
you to pay for the CPUs you are using to run your Oracle
today more accurately, without over provisioning,
decreasing the overall license cost to Oracle.”
ATD, established in 1935, was also seeking to transform
its tape backup infrastructure to a more efficient
model, looking to eliminate tapes while addressing the
tremendous data growth it was experiencing. EMC’s Data
Domain was selected, and administrators can backup and
restore Oracle databases directly to and from the Data
Domain systems using Oracle Recovery Manager
(RMAN).
PAGE 3
“Backing up our 2.5TB Oracle production database used to
take 12 hours,” reports Bill Roberts, ATD’s senior
enterprise architect. “Now, with Data Domain, those
backups take just five hours. In addition, it used to
take us 36 hours to restore our environment where as it
now takes us just four,” he says.
“The operational time savings are tremendous as well,”
Roberts observes. “It’s allowed our two full-time backup
resources to go from spending 100 percent of their time
working on backups to spending just 50 percent, allowing
them to spend time on new projects to advance the
business.”
ATD has been able to replace more than 200TB of tape
infrastructure with just 24TB of storage.
“In moving away from tape, we’ve eliminated the need to
purchase and use nearly 2,000 tapes a year by moving to
Data Domain,” says Roberts. “We don’t need to worry
about mechanical issues like we did with tape either.
Our backups are much more reliable now.”
For more information, visit www.atd-us.com, www.houseofbrick.com, www.emc.com and www.vware.com.
