DEMAND GENERATOR: Keith Norbie, Nexus Information Systems

Data backups that should have been completed overnight were taking almost three days, and the Minneapolis-based company's crown-jewel marketing data was at risk. But after toying with in-house fixes, local solution provider Nexus Information Systems rescued the data management system by showing Marketing Architects' IT staff a solution they hadn't even considered.

"They had an outage based on Exchange, and they really hadn't networked their storage or done a ton with backup and recovery," said Keith Norbie, business solutions manager at Plymouth, Minn."based Nexus. "They had just recently renewed their Veritas [Software] license and felt they were OK with Veritas."

But Norbie saw serious limitations in the in-house crafted system, which was used to archive 14 Tbytes to 16 Tbytes of digital audio-data files annually, and did a needs assessment. As Norbie saw it, his client needed scalability, data security and data visibility. So he proposed a completely new SAN and NAS solution built around EMC Clariion CX300 SAN servers and CommVault Systems data management software.

Dan Gronseth, CTO at Marketing Architects, said Norbie was referred to him by an acquaintance. "He started talking about storage solutions that were available that I didn't even know were out there," Gronseth said.

When regular nightly data backups began taking 70 hours and key data files were at risk of being lost, Gronseth turned to Nexus for help. "They came back to the table with two players: EMC and CommVault," he said. "Literally one month earlier, we had just spent $20,000 to renew our Veritas license."

In his presentations to top Marketing Architects executives, Norbie convinced the company to throw out that investment and build a completely new, comprehensive storage system from scratch with EMC and CommVault. He proposed a long-term solution that not only promised to solve the immediate problem but that also could serve as the foundation for expanded marketing services at the company.

In the process of deploying the solution, Nexus wrestled account control away from Dell. "We were all in-house IT [before Nexus] and a complete Dell shop," Gronseth said.

He said Dell proposed the same EMC storage hardware that Nexus ultimately installed, but there were too many integration issues that Dell engineers couldn't resolve. "It's just too tough to do over the phone with Dell," Gronseth said. "And Dell wasn't about to jump on a plane and come out here and check all of our servers for capacity. I like having someone in front of me who knows what they are talking about."

Gronseth said what impressed him most about Nexus was that the solution provider told him what he needed to know instead of what he wanted to hear.

"They could have come back and said, 'Clean up the data and add a couple more drives here and there, and you're good to go for another year. And you like Veritas, and it works, so just keep it,' " Gronseth said. "But instead they came back and threw what we had out the window and told us that they wanted to plan a growth structure for us for at least two years where we wouldn't have to address backup and storage issues."

Norbie added, "The important thing was to validate the business case and explain to them why this particular solution made sense for their business."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Share your own success stories about how you shaped product and technology selections for specific customers by e-mailing to [email protected].