Estes Mitigates Risk with IBM System Storage

Estes Express Lines, founded in 1931 has grown to be a one and a half billion dollar company with locations in 46 states, 13,000 employees, 30,000 pieces of equipment

and one clear goal -- to please the customer.

The trucking industry today requires that the systems be available around the clock, 365 days a year, so that the terminals can provide our customers with the best service possible.

This is not an option. This is something that is demanded by the nature of the business.

When an unexpected flash flood poured 4-5 feet of water into their data center,

Estes Express Lines relied upon IBM FlashCopy, IBM System Storage Global Mirror, and IBM System Storage DS8000™ to provide the solution.

With IBM's DS8100 disk systems, Estes Express Lines was able to mitigate and manage risk while lowering costs.

For a business that has a requirement to run 24 by seven, it's imperative that we have a way to recover from a disaster, either a disaster that we are anticipating or a disaster that's actually happened.

Since we went through a real disaster, we know very vividly how important it is to be prepared for that.

And for this reason, we have been able to justify the expense of having a disaster recovery site along with the necessary hardware to make this ... to put this into place.

The solution? IBM's FlashCopy with the built in hardware capabilities of the IBM System Storage DS8000™ to manage storage with ease.

So with this in place, the system that I ... each night has a process that it kicks off on a third system that causes the flash copy to be executed onto storage.

And what happens, when this process kicks off, the production data is flash copied to a second set of data.

Four terabytes of storage is flashed in about four seconds. So it's a very fast process.

Users like this, because now they don't know that this process is taking place. They can continue doing what they need to do while I'm doing what I need to do.

Estes takes advantage of IBM's ability to reduce complexity by virtue of its disk systems combined with IBM Global Mirror to mirror data between the two systems.

Risks are minimized and peace-of mind is maximized.

The DS-8000s give us the ability to attach two systems ... two DS-8000s together in the two diverse sites.

We do that with a communication network.

With the global mirror that we currently have executing between Richmond and Phoenix, as the sector changes in Richmond, it's immediately sent to Phoenix to be written to the storage out there.

Right now, it's a one for one. If we have five terabytes of storage in a production system, we need five terabytes for the flash copy.

And with the space efficient flash copy, that will reduce it to a percentage that we would designate, like 20, 30 percent based on how much of the data actually changes in a day.

So that's very, very key to us, to have space efficient flash copy in place. We're looking forward to that.

Don't forget another benefit - IBM FlashCopy Space Efficient contributes to energy efficiency and to a greener environment because it will use fewer resources and less energy.

And, that translates to lower cost.

Every customer that has a flash copy process in place will use space efficient flash copy, because it just makes the operation a lot less costly.

IBM's Total Storage solutions reminded Estes that IBM was more than just a hardware vendor.

They sell solutions, not hardware. And we can depend on them ... if we have a requirement, we go to them and the business partner.

And between the two, they come up with solutions that fit our needs.

And it's not ... sell it to us and then walk away. They're here with us as we implement it.

And if we have additional needs that are uncovered after we begin the process, they're there to be sure that the requirement is fulfilled fully.

And the end product is something that we had requested.