Pacific Coast Jiffy Lube--part of Jiffy Lube International, one of the largest franchisers in the fast oil-change and fluid-maintenance industry with more than 2,000 service centers located in 49 state--encompasses all outlets in California's Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. This franchise encountered--and solved--a problem experienced by other Jiffy Lube segments-the need for more network storage.

Currently, storage capacity needs are doubling every six to 12 months. Business continuity/disaster recovery, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and e-business efforts are requiring huge storage capacities, moving enterprises away from direct-attached storage, which does not allow data or capacity sharing between servers.

What are enterprises doing to solve their storage needs? Pacific Coast Jiffy Lube was looking for cost effectiveness, simplicity and speed. "The prospect of replacing our servers and workstations frequently made no business sense," offers Sean Porcher, its director of operations. "We wanted to implement a solution that could easily and cost-effectively scale along with our operation."

THE GROWING NEED FOR STORAGE

Enterprises are selecting data backup and storage solutions options that provide their users specific features for their particular networks. Pacific Coast Jiffy Lube chose network-attached storage (NAS), as did Aero-Metric in Sheboygan, WI. United American Insurance Co., McKinney, TX, upgraded its data backup and protection with a tape library. Systems & Methods Inc., Carrollton, GA, enhanced its system with backup and disaster recovery software. And pharmaceutical firm Apotex in Toronto settled on a storage area network (SAN).

At Pacific Coast Jiffy Lube, customer and inventory information stored at the corporate office is up dated nightly. Each service center must access this critical information 24x7 for day-to-day operations. A network infrastructure to store large amounts of continuously accessible data was needed.

"Adding servers would have been a very expensive alternative," according to Porcher. "Without a network administrator to manage our infrastructure, simplicity became very important. Last, we needed to improve the speed of our network, enabling faster data sharing between the corporate office and service centers. The qualities of network-attached storage fit ideally with our needs."

After a competitive analysis, the POPnetserver 2000 from the FIA Storage Systems Group, a San Clemente-based supplier of NAS systems, was chosen. "With a price of $895, the price-to-performance ratio was better than any other NAS system we evaluated," notes Porcher.

Overall storage capacity is 240 GB in the same 1U enclosure. The product was configured for the company with two 30-GB hard drives--and is expandable to a third--for a total capacity of 60 GB, and for RAID 1, or mirroring, which allows the second set of drives to duplicate the first set for maximum data protection.

"In 15 minutes and two mouse clicks, I had the system up and running," Porcher says. "The POPassist software, a Windows-based user interface for system administration, allows quick and easy configuration, and lets us remotely monitor and manage storage resources in real time." The POPnetserver is currently used across all Pacific Coast Jiffy Lube's departments, providing high-capacity storage for numerous workstations, and running the company's extensive inventory management system and accounting database.

"The speed and functionality of our entire local network has been improved," says Porcher. "Since the NAS system relocates storage onto its own independent platform and separates file sharing from application serving, file-server bandwidth was freed up and overhead on our existing application servers was reduced.

"The networks speed has increased drastically, saving up to two hours a day in network wait time. For a cost of approximately 1.5 cents per megabyte of network-attached storage, the system's value proposition is strong."


Check out tape library

When United American Insurance Co. (UAIC) analyzed its storage needs, protecting data--its lifeblood-was an important consideration. New imaging systems, database stores of mainframe information, Web-based Internet and intranet information, and company growth were taxing existing data protection methods. Losing data meant losing time and money.

UAIC, a Torchmark Corp. subsidiary, specializes in life and supplemental health insurance products in 49 states, the District of Columbia and Canada through a large network of independent, as well as 2,700 exclusive, agents and 500 home office employees. UAIC stored files include policyholder information for 680,000 accounts, home and branch office business records, agents' support files, and traditional sales and marketing reports. Most company employees depend on the network. All corporate users phone in, e-mail with questions or access information through both Internet and intranet systems.