Logicalis

Mercury Marine's storage environment has experienced significant growth of between 30-35 percent a year and consulted Logicalis to help find a way to reign in their current storage environment.

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The success of Mercury Marine has not occurred by chance. Since the company was founded in 1939, Mercury has consistently emphasized quality, innovation and reliability. This pledge remains as strong today as ever.

Mercury Marine, a division of Brunswick Corporation of Lake Forest, IL, began as the Kiekhaefer Corporation of Cedarburg, WI. Carl Kiekhaefer and a small but dedicated staff of employees sought to design and produce the best possible boat engine. For over 60 years now Mercury has been providing the most advanced, powerful and intelligent marine power in the world. It's the result of over 40 years spent refining and reengineering the world's best stern drives and inboards. It has been over 40 years spent as the unquestioned technology, performance and propulsion leader. This market leadership has resulted in fast growth which has kept their information technology team moving at maximum speed.

Along this journey Mercury Marine's storage environment has taken on significant growth of between 30-35 percent a year. "As a technology driven company, our storage needs are significant," states Dave Schecher, Mercury Marine IT Strategic Planner. With several different types of storage and storage management systems, reliability, redundancy and stability within the storage environment was becoming a challenge. With a diminishing window for change control, system outages were no longer acceptable to an industry leader requiring 24/7 availability.

Mercury Marine's storage environment consisted of several different storage and storage management systems such as SSA Disk, FastT, and DS family products. As the storage environment grew so did the difficulty of managing it. "Our current environment crept up on us and was becoming difficult to manage," says Schecher. Mercury consulted with Logicalis to help find a way to reign in their current storage environment and move away from the current reactive position. By creating a p lan that helps better utilize resources, make better future storage decisions and utilize newer technology, Mercury Marine is positioned for growth.

Logicalis completed a storage assessment of the current Mercury environment which supplied the information needed to start planning for the future. "We have found great success with our storage assessment," states Ken Rogers, Logicalis Sales Specialist. "It allows us to examine current and future needs and provides a plan to address them."

After completing the assessment, a joint team from Mercury, Logicalis and IBM developed a flexible enterprise storage environment. The new environment implemented SVC software to replace all the disparate management systems. The storage hardware was refreshed with two DS6800, two DS4300, a Cisco switch and 3592 tape. Mercury also plans to replace the three F20 ESS systems with DS8300.

Mercury is starting to realize significant benefits from the new, more efficient storage environment. "The biggest benefit is that storage management has been simplified through SVC software and reduced the amount of hours we spend on storage management up to 50 percent," says Schecher. "We have also seen an improvement of I/O throughput of up to 50 percent." Downtime has been significantly reduced with the redundancy that has been put in place. The new environment has provided financial ROI with reduced maintenance costs, allowing them to refresh their storage hardware without an increase to their budget.