NetApp announced that Blue Ridge Paper has realized significant cost savings and database performance improvements by leveraging NetApp network and data management solutions to transform its data center infrastructure. With these improvements, Blue Ridge has successfully implemented a solid disaster recovery system with high reliability and low total cost of ownership with a combination of NetApp virtualization technologies, including Snapshot, and iSCSI. In all, Blue Ridge has saved over $450,000 in the last three years with a reduction in hardware infrastructure and administration costs and established demonstrable Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Blue Ridge Paper, a paper, packaging, and form board manufacturer based in Canton, North Carolina, faced a growing concern over storage need and cost, while automated, around-the-clock manufacturing required better database reliability and availability than what the company’s system could provide. Tape backups meant that critical databases such as Oracle could be unavailable for four or more hours during a restore process. The company’s direct-attached storage model for UNIX and Windows systems meant administration was complicated, sharing data between systems was difficult, and efficiently provisioning data was nearly impossible. Blue Ridge looked to NetApp to solve these issues and help improve its ability to compete in a price-sensitive market.

“Our CRM and manufacturing execution systems use Oracle Databases, so the strength of the Oracle and NetApp relationship is important,” said Jeff Trantham, IT director at Blue Ridge Paper. “NetApp also has the best support for iSCSI storage. Equally important in our decision to deploy NetApp is that the solutions give us the ability to manage storage for heterogeneous systems using a unified storage platform.”

NetApp provided Blue Ridge Paper networked storage for the company’s applications and file systems, as well as the ability to replicate data to another data center, reducing ungainly restore times from over four hours to less than five minutes: a 98% reduction. As a result, Blue Ridge Paper no longer has major disruptions to production when a database goes offline and needs to be restored. The company has also seen a jump in database performance by moving to NetApp, with the time needed to perform long running queries, access large data sets, and create indexes falling 30% to 35% thanks to NetApp.

In addition to time, Blue Ridge Paper has saved money as well. While increased access speed was important, the company had a limited budget. Blue Ridge Paper found good performance, flexibility, and affordability in NetApp iSCSI technology. By coupling high-performance iSCSI storage with unique data management software, Blue Ridge Paper now enjoys the benefits of its existing Fibre Channel SAN along with the advantages realized by the flexibility, familiarity, and ease of management of iSCSI and IP networking, all with a low total cost of ownership. The company has also saved about $150,000 simply by moving from a tape infrastructure to disk-to-disk backup. Best of all, Blue Ridge Paper has greatly expanded its IT productivity without expanding its IT workforce.

“NetApp helps us deliver superior levels of application availability while maintaining a very lean IT shop,” said Trantham. “We have grown our server and storage infrastructure in the past three years by 30% to 40%, without hiring additional administrators. This results in potential savings of up to $300,000.”

“Customers rely on us to transform their IT productivity with a comprehensive suite of solutions that can be tailored and customized to precisely fit our their business needs,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Blue Ridge Paper and NetApp have come together to find exactly what solutions will deliver Blue Ridge Paper all the benefits it needs to run its business effectively while maintaining low TCO; high ROI; and, most importantly, give the company a competitive edge.”

NetApp iSCSI solutions are built on the 14+ years of IP-based storage foundations, on which more than 10,000 NetApp iSCSI customers rely today to increase the availability of their critical data, simplify their data management environments, and increase their storage asset utilization while lowering their costs substantially. IDC’s Tracker shows that NetApp continues to lead the iSCSI storage market in Q307, maintaining the number-one market share position in iSCSI for both capacity shipped (28.3%) and revenue (20.5%). For more information about NetApp iSCSI systems, visit www.netapp.com/products/storage-networking/ipsan.