An Entertaining Storage Solution

Solution Provider
Aria Data Solutions, Los Angeles

Customer
Entertainment Partners, a Burbank, Calif.-based payroll and production-services provider for the entertainment industry

Concept
To ensure the availability and protection of critical customer data without major cost increases.

Challenge
Entertainment Partners is required to save customers' financial data for years in order to meet regulatory guidelines. With storage requirements growing 10 percent annually, the company recently reached 7 terabytes and needed help reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) for servers.

Solution
Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation and Portable Data Container (PDC) technology enabled the quick migration of data from Unix to IBM xSeries servers running Linux without additional copies or information movement.

Result
Entertainment Partners has reduced TCO for its server systems by 40 percent and virtually eliminated storage-related application downtime.

Key to Success
"Aria brought in as many resources as they could...It was important that we saw IBM taking us in the direction we wanted to go. Symantec was embracing the direction we wanted--two partners embracing [one] direction makes you feel very comfortable."
--Michael Wojtowicz, IT manager, Entertainment Partners