Printing Pay Dirt: VARs Put Storage Solutions To Work

Printing companies must be able to handle a lot of large files quickly and efficiently, said Brad Wenzel, president and CEO of Wenzel Data, a Stillwater, Minn.-based VAR.

A typical customer file might be 50 Mbytes in size but can easily range up to 1 Gbyte or larger, said Wenzel. However, he said, one key difference between the printing industry and other verticals is that customers may bring in multiple files related to a single print job which, after manipulation, can quickly increase the amount of data needing to be stored.

"Customers bring in project-dependent data," said Wenzel. "They may have five to 16 different files, and say they want X number of catalogs, scan this, print that. A job could end up with 300 Gbytes [of data]. And it can change from day to day."

Solution providers tackle these requirements with strategies ranging from simple archiving of files on tape to full-blown content management solutions. While some printing companies are satisfied with archiving files to tape once a job is done, others are working with their solution providers to implement life-cycle management strategies. These strategies enable easy management of files as they move from a state of frenzied changes to one of long-term storage for modification or reuse.

Due to this need to handle large print jobs immediately and then keep the data available for reprints, a large part of a printing company's business and storage needs are cyclical in nature, said Merrill Likes, president of UpTime, an Edmond, Okla.-based solution provider. Printing companies can expect to cycle from peaks in storage demands when there is not enough capacity to valleys when they have too much.

But even though Likes' customers could use an outside storage service to handle their needs, they prefer to store everything in-house. "I've never seen [outsourcing] work correctly," Likes said.

UpTime offers a hierarchical storage management solution based on NAS appliances from Network Appliance, Sunnyvale, Calif. Files that come in for immediate manipulation and printing are stored on NetApp FAS 900 series Filers and are migrated to slower NetApp R200 Filers or to arrays from lower-cost vendors after the job is completed. Eventually, those files are moved to tape for long-term storage, he said.

Also important is keeping print jobs available online. That need is leading Cleveland-based Chi to develop relationships with content management software vendors, said Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing.

The goal, he said, is to make jobs available for printing as needed. "Such customers need to access [their jobs] without IT guys going to tape," he said.

That strategy comes from Chi's experience in the photo print business, where its clients use Fibre Channel arrays to keep photos available for printing on demand and lower-cost arrays such as Los Angeles-based Nexsan's ATAbeast to handle the back-end storage, Knieriemen said.

Keeping those print jobs available for future use is a primary concern, said Wenzel. "If I'm a printer, a customer might come in and say, 'Run another 1,000 business cards for me,' " he said. "And I'm thinking, 'I haven't seen you for three years. Can't do it today, but come back tomorrow.' "

This capability was made possible by the availability of cheap hard-disk storage, which allows customers to get 4 to 5 Tbytes of capacity for about $12,000. Often, hard-disk storage is all that is needed, and setting up a life-cycle management program is not always the best solution, Wenzel said.

Wenzel estimates that 60 percent of customer files are cycled off high-cost arrays to lower-cost disk arrays, making hard drives act more like a data cache than a storage device. "[Printers] can keep the files for three to four years online, and not just for a week like before when they couldn't afford it," he said.

Using low-cost storage to keep files online instead of a hierarchical storage management scheme also helps printing companies deal with the unpredictable.

"You can't preplan for where data resides," Wenzel said. "The industry is more of one where you are constantly putting out fires. Someone comes in, they need to get the job done right away."