Improving data, storage and backup management
Harte-Hanks' new RAID storage system
To keep up with the needs of its customers, Harte-Hanks required a
storage system that could process information quickly but also
cost-effectively.
By Rick Cook
Harte-Hanks, Inc.'s business is other people's customers. The
Austin, Texas-based company specializes in customer relationship
management (CRM), from outsourcing call centers to providing tools
for analyzing customer data.
It's a billion-dollar-a-year business for Harte-Hanks, according to
Scott Hopkins, vice president of IT systems and operations, and
storage is a major part of it. "Storage is a critical component of
our solution set," Hopkins says. "The name of the game is data, and
it's the prudent management of that data, storage and backup that is
critical to our business."
This is especially true at the company's Billerica, Mass.-based unit
that specializes in running data marts of CRM data for Fortune 1000
companies. "We provide a suite of software services and intellectual
property on how best to do marketing activities," explains Hopkins.
To speed up access to that data, Harte-Hanks installed high
performance RAID storage, FlashDisk OpenRAID disk array, from
Winchester Systems, Inc., a Burlington, Mass. maker of storage
devices. The result, Hopkins says, is fast, cost-effective data
access for Harte-Hanks and its customers.
Harte-Hanks ran squarely into one of the problems of modern database
processing: how to make relatively slow storage keep up with the
ever-increasing processor speed without dropping a bundle. On modern
database systems, the ability to access information quickly is
usually more of a bottleneck than the ability to process it quickly.
While storage has made tremendous advances in speed, processor power
has leapt ahead even faster. Winchester Systems says that processor
power has increased perhaps 100-fold in the last six or seven years,
while the mechanical speed of disk drives has only tripled.
Although mechanical performance of disk drives hasn't increased
much, vendors like Winchester Systems can get around the problem by
a combination of clever design and making maximum use of new
technologies to speed throughput. In turn, that implies that in a
data-intensive operation such as data warehousing, increasing the
performance of the storage system is likely to give a much bigger
overall performance increase at a lower cost than throwing more
powerful processors at the same system. This is especially important
because service businesses, like Harte-Hanks make money by providing
services cost-effectively.
Hopkins says the specific problem was to find disk storage systems
that were affordable as well as fast. "Disk can be expensive and we
were looking at utilizing our financial resources effectively. We
looked for a company that could provide high performance and low
cost. Through our testing and continued use we found Winchester
Systems has a quality product that performs well and
cost-effectively. We needed that cost-effectiveness."
Expandability was another important factor in the decision.
"Typically we work with the customer on how big the database is
going to grow. If it's a significant change in database volume we
work with Winchester Systems to preconfigure the environment, get
approval to buy it and get it here typically within four days," says
Hopkins.
Data marts are specialized databases that try to bring together all
the information in a company in a specific area. In the case of
Harte-Hanks' clients that area is customer data. By consolidating
customer data, analyzing it and running various models against it,
companies can gain a much better understanding of what works and
what doesn't. "What our customers are trying to do as they analyze
their data is to look for trends," Hopkins says. "Based on those
trends they will generate a campaign. That can be direct mail, e-mail
or other things. The campaign is then analyzed in terms of return on
investment as to whether the model and the trends they identified
were effective."
"They also look at things like customer retention and how they can
provide additional services and products for their existing customer
base," Hopkins says. "Depending on what market you're in, the data
marts are all tweaked differently in what you look at."
Data marts are separate from the production databases that run the
customers' day-to-day operations. Unlike the production databases
they are specially tuned for analysis -- which usually means running
fairly complex and usually ad hoc queries against them rather than
supporting transactions. In the case of the Harte- Hanks CRM data
marts, the databases are rebuilt as often as every couple of weeks
with updated data. Rebuilds are very I/O intensive, Hopkins says,
and involve a lot of sorts and matching. "It requires a high
performance disk subsystem and for the price Winchester Systems
beats everyone else," Hopkins says.
"Locally the company has in excess of 135 servers with over 30
terabytes of storage," Hopkins says. Because of security concerns
many customers have their own servers and storage. Typically
Harte-Hanks uses Sun enterprise servers from the 4500 to 6500 model
range.
Hopkins says Harte-Hanks settled on the Winchester Systems' products
after extensive testing over a period of about 24 months. "We ran
through a series of benchmarks, looked at such things as reliable
performance, ease of scalability, ease of management, and the
overall reliability of the architecture and technology. We found
Winchester Systems to be one of the premier cost-effective solutions
for us in our data storage areas," Hopkins says.
For additional information about Harte-Hanks, visit their Web site.
For additional information on Winchester Systems, visit their Web site.
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