Komprise Cloud Data Migration - Carhartt Case Study

Michigan-headquartered Carhartt makes clothing at nine manufacturing plants in the US and Mexico, with satellite locations in Europe and the Far East. It has two primary datacenters with 3,200 staff and more than 1,000 contractors who access its systems.

It is primarily a Microsoft user, with SAP as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider.

The key issues that faced the company were a great deal of “data sprawl”, said systems engineer, Earl Williams.

“The main reason we ended up using Komprise was that we needed to keep the system trim,” said Williams. “We had 22TB on the main file server, with everything from HR information to user file shares. There was no rhyme or reason; there was just data.”

The file server runs a Windows 2008 R2 operating system and had “become a big mess”, according to Williams.

“If servers went down we wouldn’t have access to data and it meant we ran risks in terms of security,” he said. “The plan to implement Komprise was so we could get a grip on the box because it was getting out of control.”

They needed a solution to help solve:

• Reduce overall cost of data storage
• Accelerate data migration and archiving to Microsoft Azure
• Move data without breaking user and application access
• Provide on-going data management

The Solution

After trying other solutions, including writing manual scripts, the company eventually chose and Komprise Intelligent Data Management software provided Carhartt visibility into their NAS data.

Komprise “observers” were deployed, which run as a virtual appliance at the customer site to analyze data across on-premises storage, move the data and provide transparent access to data stored in the cloud.

• Komprise analyzes NFS, SMB data on Carhartt’s Windows Servers
• Carhartt has policies in Komprise on when data should be archived to Azure
• Cold data that reaches the age thresholds is automatically archived by Komprise in Azure Blob
• These archived files continue to look like local files and can be opened by users and applications exactly as before
• Carhartt can also open the cold data directly on Azure Blob as native objects, so their data is usable in the cloud
• As data grows, Carhartt does not need to add more on-premises storage since Komprise continuously archives cold data to Azure

The company now has around 16TB of data on-premises and the same amount in Azure, which is 75% less costly.

Besides storage cost, Williams cites the benefit of ease of access for users to the company’s file servers. “It doesn’t take the user five minutes to open a file, and remote regions can access content on the Azure cloud,” he said.

Komprise storage analytics can index content and migrate it according to user policy. Komprise Deep Analytics functionality allows the customer to query potentially petabytes of unstructured data and create a distinct virtual data set from disparate stored data.

Customers can set policies to categorize data by when it was last accessed, who accessed it, type of data, and so on. Komprise also migrates to other storage platforms, and can do so between protocols and to the cloud, with a dynamic link left behind for local access.

Komprise empowers businesses to take control of their data with no interference to applications, users, or hot data. Komprise Intelligent Data Management is the foundation for analytics-driven data management which is key to putting data in the right place at the right time across all storage. Analyze, move, and easily find your data with Komprise.