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Windows Server 2003 R2
Customer Solution Case Study
Flooring Manufacturer Links Hundreds of
Locations Using Branch Office Solution
Overview ―Using this technology, we can capture and control
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing—Durable
business-critical data with remarkable ease,
consumer goods bolstering our storage infrastructure for the
Customer Profile
opportunities that lie ahead.‖
Mohawk Industries is a provider of floor Leon Verriere, Infrastructure Consultant, Mohawk Industries
materials, including carpet, wood, and tile.
The company, based in Calhoun, Georgia, Mohawk Industries represents some of the biggest names in
has more than 37,700 employees working
residential and commercial flooring, including brands such as
at almost 500 locations.
Mohawk, Karastan, and American Olean. The company has
Business Situation
operations at nearly 500 locations, including retail outlets,
The company’s growth made it expensive
and time-consuming to back up all of the warehouses, and distribution centers—almost all of which generate
various data files being generated at the
a large number of unstructured data files. To gain more control over
enterprise’s geographically dispersed sites.
the management, storage, and backup of file data coming from its
Solution
many locations, Mohawk deployed a Microsoft® Branch Office
Mohawk installed a Microsoft® Branch
Office solution using the Brocade StorageX solution using the Brocade StorageX file storage application suite
application suite to streamline the
from Brocade, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. With the solution,
replication and backup of files created
across hundreds of remote locations. Mohawk has been able to consolidate and streamline the
management and backup of files from dispersed sites, save about
Benefits
Annual costs savings of U.S.$300,000 U.S.$300,000 annually, and cost-effectively scale IT resources to
Effective IT task management
assist in the company’s growth.
Scalable technology for company growth
Situation number of files across a highly dispersed
Mohawk Industries is a global producer and enterprise led the company’s IT staff to begin
distributor of flooring for residential and looking for a single solution to address its
commercial use. The company has a 120- data management challenges.
year history and today operates under four
divisions with brand names that include Mohawk initially used the Microsoft
Mohawk, Karastan, Ralph Lauren, Lees, Dal- Distributed File System (DFS), a component
Tile, Quick Step, and American Olean. of Windows Server 2003 that enables IT
Headquartered in Calhoun, Georgia, Mohawk administrators to group shared folders
has more than 37,700 employees working at located on different servers and present
almost 500 locations. The publicly traded them to users as a virtual tree of folders
company, which is listed on the New York known as a namespace. This helps simplify
Stock Exchange, reported U.S.$7.9 billion in file access and management. However, a
sales for 2006. significant part of Mohawk’s growth occurs
through mergers and acquisitions, which
This large and geographically dispersed means that new locations are being added
―In the past, the tasks organization generates enormous amounts of continually.
related to file and unstructured file data. This information
ranges from sales spreadsheets to client The company’s IT department realized that it
storage backups took up databases to Microsoft® Office documents to would need to enhance the Microsoft DFS
many IT staff hours each electronic images of carpet and tile patterns. namespace with a more scalable solution
Most of this information must be stored, that could aggregate files and centralize
day. Now, this solution backed up, and readily accessible on a daily namespace management as Mohawk
does it effortlessly in basis. assimilated newly acquired companies. The
goal was to enable centralized data backup
exponentially less time.‖ In the past, Mohawk used tape systems for and eliminate the need for local tape storage
Leon Verriere, Infrastructure Consultant, storing information at more than 100 of its at remote facilities.
Mohawk Industries sites, relying on local employees to manually
back up and store all files for safekeeping. Solution
This approach, however, created problems. Following discussions with Microsoft,
Mohawk decided to deploy a Microsoft
―We had to rely on non-IT people to do this, Branch Office solution based on the Windows
and too frequently data was not saved, which Server® 2003 operating system. Microsoft
jeopardized the availability of business- Branch Office solutions help enterprises
critical information,‖ says Leon Verriere, optimize and effectively manage information
Infrastructure Consultant for Mohawk. transfer and IT services to remote sites.
Microsoft suggested another key component
Mohawk also faced another issue. The of the new solution, Brocade StorageX.
company planned to implement a new point- Brocade StorageX is an integrated suite of
of-sale (POS) solution that would replace applications that aggregate distributed file
outdated green-screen terminals with data across dispersed storage environments
Microsoft Windows®–based PCs. The new and help automate data management
Windows-based PCs would share files with functions.
nearly 300 new servers running the Windows
Storage Server® 2003 operating system at The deployment of Brocade StorageX, new
retail store locations. The need to find a Windows-based servers, and Windows-based
secure backup solution for a rapidly growing PCs throughout the enterprise took about 18
months. By late 2006, Mohawk had several substantial benefits: It is saving
completely replaced its outdated terminals several hundred thousand dollars annually in
with the new PCs and had installed Windows- reduced hardware and software costs. The IT
based servers at approximately 300 department is able to effectively manage the
locations; the servers operate on Windows business-critical data that is distributed
Storage Server 2003 running on Iomega NAS across a large and growing company. The
appliances. technology also helps Mohawk with its
business growth model by helping the
The Brocade StorageX Global Namespace company easily assimilate new businesses as
feature provides Mohawk’s eight-employee they are acquired.
Systems Engineering Services (SES) team
with a comprehensive view of the company’s Annual Cost Savings of U.S.$300,000
file data. By early 2007, that was about 6.5 Mohawk is deriving a strong return on its
terabytes of unstructured data across the investment in the Microsoft Branch Office
geographically distributed locations. solution and Brocade StorageX application
suite.
―The annual cost Brocade StorageX also includes a Replication
Manager function and policies for replicating ―The annual cost savings have amounted to
savings have amounted data to a central backup location, which about $300,000, and the company
to about $300,000, and eliminates the need for Mohawk to maintain
a tape backup infrastructure at each location.
anticipates the savings to increase as the
company grows,‖ says Verriere. He says the
the company anticipates These policies enable file replications of any figure is calculated by the amount of money
the savings to increase size and any distance. saved by not having to install backup
hardware and software at each remote site,
as the company grows.‖ To protect corporate data, the Mohawk IT and by being able to reduce the number of IT
department runs a scheduled replication and administrators required to perform critical
Leon Verriere, Infrastructure Consultant,
backup routine each night. Mohawk uses the data backup tasks.
Mohawk Industries
Brocade StorageX replication functionality to
automatically replicate file shares residing on ―If we had to use tape backup systems at
the remote servers. Any new files or changes each of our locations, we estimate that would
to existing files at Mohawk locations are cost us up to $200,000, just to purchase and
replicated over the company’s wide area install additional systems along with what we
network (WAN) to servers running in already own,‖ he says. ―And that does not
Mohawk’s primary data center located about include the ongoing maintenance costs.
20 miles from corporate headquarters.
Because many departments within Mohawk ―Previously, we had four people on our IT
operate around-the-clock, administrators use staff in Georgia who handled backups, and in
technologies in Brocade StorageX, including the remote locations we had to rely on people
byte-level differencing replication and with no IT experience to change the tapes.
bandwidth throttling, to minimize the Now we have just one person who is
bandwidth that is consumed by the responsible for overseeing file backups and
replication activity. resolving any issues that might come up. This
allows us to redirect the other IT people for
Benefits different projects that can help deliver
By deploying a Microsoft Branch Office greater value to the company.‖
solution using the Brocade StorageX
application suite, Mohawk is achieving
Effective IT Task Management copy of their data in the central data center in
After it centralized control of its distributed the event of a branch office server outage. In
data, Mohawk eliminated the uncertainty and the worst case, the users have only lost data
inefficiencies of local tape storage by that was created since the previous night’s
removing the tape devices at its many remote backup.‖
sites. As the remaining remote locations were
upgraded to Windows Server 2003 R2 in The solution not only has helped the Mohawk
2006, Mohawk SES saw the opportunity to IT department to keep staffing at a constant
remove all remaining tape devices from its level as the company grows, but also has
facilities where it was running IBM xSeries made it possible for IT staff members to
hardware. This not only helped to cut costs, accomplish more.
but also improved the efficiency of the
company’s IT department. ―There would be no way that I could survive
with the few resources that I have if I did not
―The Microsoft Branch Office solution using think in terms of efficiency, which is what this
Brocade StorageX permitted us to streamline technology provides,‖ Verriere says. ―We are
―There would be no way our IT operations while protecting our vital constantly challenged to do more with less,
that I could survive with data,‖ Verriere says. ―By automating and the only way to do that is to standardize
processes, the solution greatly reduced the processes and use this type of solution to
the few resources that I time needed to back up and move files from simplify management of IT tasks.‖
have if I did not think in one server to another. In the past, the tasks
related to file and storage backups took up Scalable Technology for Company Growth
terms of efficiency, many IT staff hours each day. Now, this The solution is also helping Mohawk manage
which is what this solution does it effortlessly in exponentially its growth. Since the time it decided to deploy
less time.‖ the Microsoft Branch Office solution using
technology provides.‖ Brocade StorageX, the company has acquired
Leon Verriere, Infrastructure Consultant, In the process, Mohawk gained a more four companies—all of which were easily and
Mohawk Industries effective business continuity strategy. The quickly assimilated. In each case, Mohawk
Brocade StorageX Global Namespace and consolidated file storage in order to eliminate
disaster recovery policies provide a servers and implemented a Brocade
centralized, policy-based way for the Mohawk StorageX Global Namespace in the new
IT department to manage the failover locations. This strategy will remain in place as
process. On four separate occasions, the company continues to acquire
Brocade StorageX has transparently businesses.
redirected users to disaster recovery sites
within 15 minutes of a local server failure. ―With this technology, we have been able to
simplify and automate our migrations and
―Sometimes hardware in the field just fails—it consolidations,‖ Verriere says. ―Now when we
could be a broken fan, or failed drive, or a have to deploy any file server to a location,
RAID controller malfunction,‖ says Verriere. we can easily consolidate data on a single
―Now, instead of having to contract with a server.
premium-priced service provider to
immediately go out and fix the problem, we ―This kind of functionality helps ensure that
can have the Brocade StorageX system our new business assets yield dividends for
replicate data to other hardware and Mohawk as soon as possible,‖ he continues.
seamlessly perform failover. Brocade ―It also provides a solid foundation to
StorageX redirects users to the replicated efficiently manage the growing storage needs
For More Information throughout our company. Using this Windows Server 2003 R2
For more information about Microsoft technology, we can capture and control The Windows Server 2003 R2 family helps
products and services, call the Microsoft business-critical data with remarkable ease, organizations do more with less. Now you can
Sales Information Center at (800) 426- bolstering our storage infrastructure for the run your IT infrastructure more efficiently,
9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft opportunities that lie ahead.‖ build better applications faster, and deliver
Canada Information Centre at (877) 568- the best infrastructure for enhancing user
2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of- productivity. And you can do all this faster,
hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone more securely, and at lower cost.
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in For more information about Windows Server
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and 2003 R2, please visit:
Canada, please contact your local www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Brocade
products and services, call (408) 333-
8000 or visit the Web site at:
www.brocade.com
For more information about Mohawk
Industries products and services, call
(800) 241-4494 or visit the Web site at:
www.mohawkind.com
Software and Services Hardware
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio Iomega NAS appliances
− Windows Server 2003 R2 IBM xSeries servers
− Windows Storage Server 2003
Brocade StorageX
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published June 2007
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