Storage Enterprise All-Stars Minimizing the Risk of Information Security Breaches: Best Practices for SOA Governance and Compliance: View now

Guide to the '06 All-Stars Winners alphabetical listing WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY Applications | LANs & Routers | Network Management | OS, Servers & Data Center | Security | Storage | WAN, VoIP & Convergence | Wireless & Mobility WINNERS BY INDUSTRY Construction | Education | Financial Services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Media | Retail | Travel/Transportation | Utilities Vendors to the All-Stars

At Las Vegas Review-Journal, company growth - largely through acquisition - had turned data storage into a huge management challenge. By addressing the problem using innovative class-of-service technology, IT has eased the storage burden while saving the company money - and netting it a 2006 Enterprise All-Star Award.

Steve Olson, infrastructure manager at the Las Vegas-based publishing group, describes his quandary. The most business-critical editorial, advertising and accounting data was stored on a 4TB EMC Symmetrix DMX 8530 array and a 1TB EMC Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) array. Desktop data - files, e-mail and archived documents - was mostly stored on about 60 Macintosh, Solaris and Windows servers at 40 sites in nine states, but some of it resided on the high-end Symmetrix. Storing nonbusiness-critical desktop data on expensive primary storage didn't make sense; neither did buying more servers with direct-attached storage, which would have complicated the management problem, he says.

"We needed storage that didn't need to be as fast or as expensive for our Tier-2 data," Olson says. He wanted a system to which he could move the less business-critical data being stored on the Symmetrix as well as for the messaging, home directory and file data being stored on the servers.