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Mizuno USA Supports Growth with Storage Solution

6/13/2014
Mizuno USA, a manufacturer of premium, high-performance sporting goods, including select equipment, apparel, and footwear, implements Tegile Systems’ hybrid storage architecture to manage and protect its information assets.

“Tegile provides us the perfect storage platform to address these collaborative applications,” says Keith Neely, VP of Customer Support and IT, Mizuno USA. “As we evaluated our options for a next-generation storage system, the Tegile IntelliFlash architecture really impressed us with its intelligence to automate storage management tasks and provide a hybrid storage solution for accelerated performance and capacity scalability.”

Mizuno USA, the Atlanta area-based subsidiary of Mizuno Corporation Inc., is a global company in the sporting goods industry. In the Americas region, the brand focuses on multiple sports categories, including running, baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer and golf. Building a strong business with year-over-year growth for the past decade, Mizuno USA was challenged to find a storage system that could address data growth, included multi-protocol flexibility, and support business continuity across two data centers.

Before selecting Tegile hybrid arrays with its IntelliFlash architecture, Mizuno USA evaluated other storage systems that appeared to make sense from a price and performance perspective. However, these alternatives required added cost and complexity when including multi-protocol capabilities. Tegile’s hybrid approach aims to provide flash memory to accelerate performance for heavy transaction workloads and seasonal business spikes, while large-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) accommodate a growing amount of large product image files and historical content currently maintained online.

Tegile’s system also delivers data protection with deduplication and compression to conserve storage capacity and achieve faster transfers to a remote site, generating additional savings from reduced network bandwidth requirements. Prior to the Tegile implementation, full backups had grown beyond the backup window, but now Mizuno USA is able to execute full backups once a month, synthetic backups on weekends, and incremental backups every night – which complete in less than an hour on the arrays. As the Mizuno USA IT team prepares to transition to a new data center in late 2014, Tegile’s SAN replication will be used to test target devices and selectively move data sets and volumes.

“Our backup and deduplication efficiencies keep improving over time, and we can tell each volume what kind of compression to use for even greater capacity optimization,” says Neely. “Tegile provides us the network connection flexibility to run multiple file system protocols and multiple SAN protocols for a true future-proof storage solution. This has real business value for Mizuno USA as we can now use the same storage longer without upgrades or replacement for an attractive ROI.”
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