U.K.-based gm2 Logistics Ltd., a warehousing and logistics Company sells about £2.7million of paper a day, so they can't afford any downtime as they have to work 24/7.

High availability and low costs are essential in such extremely competitive, low-margin industry. Any downtime would leave trucks wasting time on docks waiting to be loaded, and running out of storage meant taking a system down and potentially disrupting deliveries. As the company's aging storage system struggled to support growing demand for capacity, IT manager at gm2 Logistics, turned to server and storage virtualization to simplify data management and ensure business continuity.

After looking at several vendors and following the recommendation of a local IT support company, IT manager at gm2 Logistics, and his team decided to implement two Compellent Storage Center storage area networks (SANs), located 135 miles apart.

Compellent Data Progression™ software automatically classifies and migrates data at the block level between tiers of storage based on frequency of use. As a result, gm2 Logistics started processing critical "just-in-time" data from high-performance Tier 1 Fibre Channel storage and once that data became inactive, it was automatically moved to lower-cost mid-tier drives. This level of automation dramatically reduced the IT staff effort and decreased the risks associated with manually moving data. Compellent's powerful and easy to use software applications enable the team to manage the system entirely in-house.