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Etos Successstory- EqualLogic SAN

EqualLogic Solution Success

Etos

Health and beauty giant Etos has 430 stores in The Netherlands and five stores in Sweden which promote general health and well-being to customers. Established in 1911, it operates centrally from its single-building headquarters and also had a separate distribution centre. Recently, Etos has introduced an Etos-Pharmacy point of sale in both its own retail outlets and in sister shops.

The challenge: An Easy and Economical Storage System
In accordance with this development of the organization and the growing amount of data being harvested, Etos' IT department began to look for an enterprise-class storage system that would be easy and economical to implement and maintain. IT needed to have all the features required in a single solution. At that time, Etos had been using EMC® CLARiiON® for three years and IBM® SSA cabinets for seven years but neither offered a suitable option. We contacted Etos to suggest it try an iSCSI solution instead.

"Based on the low cost and the features the system could offer, we decided to go for this approach and buy this system. However, it didn't actually deliver what we expected, so we conacted them again to see if they could provide an alternative,better solution," explained Idema. "They suggested an EqualLogic PS Series SAN,but I was very skeptical."

The solution: The EqualLogic SAN
The next stage in the process saw Etos speaking to EqualLogic and its customers who were using PS Series arrays. Equallogic not only showed the features of the PS Series but provided a PS100E array for Etos to trial and test for a week. Following the results, which Idema pronounced "amazing," Etos promptly went back and was offered to exchange the initial solution for the EqualLogic SAN.

How Etos Benefited from EqualLogic
Idema was impressed with several other aspects of the EqualLogic solution including the fact it took less than 15 minutes to create a working storage system. The system is also fully redundant, making it very reliable to run, and unlike the previous solution, it allows for space allocation to be adjusted in a second. In addition, the PS100E array ensures transparency and ease of use in one holistic system with all the features incorporated without the need for additional licenses.

Edwin Idema concludes, "What really amazed us was the short amount of time it took to set up an operational SAN and the speed at which the system was adopted without us needing to educate our storage managers. On top of these benefits, the system has more throughput and I/O handling than our previous system. Considering our investment in buying an EqualLogic SAN was 10 percent of the amount we almost invested in a Fibre Channel SAN – including all the same features and greater functionality – this really says it all."

Simplifying Networked Storage
EqualLogic PS Series solutions deliver the benefits of storage consolidation in an intelligent, enterprise-class storage system that is easy to install, manage and grow. Visit our web site at www.equallogic.com and let us show you what simplifying networked storage can mean for your business.

“Based on the promise of enterprise-quality storage for lower cost, we had decided to investigate an iSCSI storage system. Consolidate IT presented an EqualLogic PS Series storage array for us to test for one week, and the results were amazing. Not only was it a stable system, but it eliminated the complexity of managing a SAN, which had been both expensive and difficult to scale. The EqualLogic solution was 10 percent of the cost of a comparable Fibre Channel SAN while offering the same or better features and functionality.” – Etos Edwin Idema, IT Director at Ahold