Moonwalk at TWINING one year on

Phenomenal saving in primary storage

Wednesday, 23 August, 2006

Milton, Australia

Since 1706, Twinings has been at the forefront of the tea trade - blending and innovating; improving the design and packaging; and introducing new products and new ways of doing business.  In 2005 Twinings once again demonstrated its willingness to innovate with the deployment of a new data management technology - Moonwalk.

Like most other organisations in the world, Twinings is experiencing an explosion in the area of filestorage data and elected to make a move to address the problem.
According to Martin Attfield, IS Technical Project Manager, "In 2004 we implemented phase 1 of our storage strategy which involved upgrading the legacy storage infrastructure with a new tiered solution. During 2005 we selected Moonwalk & EMC Centera to fulfill the archiving tier within phase 2 and aimed to reduce the TCO of the rapidly growing filestorage data.

"Moonwalk provided an elegant solution that allowed us to cap the capacity that was on expensive disks & move historical files offline without our IT Customers even noticing a change."

The ROI delivered by Moonwalk becomes evident immediately. According to Nick Dean, Network
Operations Supervisor, Twinings have already achieved a "phenomenal saving of 45% for filestorage data
over 1 year old or individual files over 20MB on home directories". The combination of Moonwalk and EMC Centera translates into a 65% reduction in primary storage.

Moonwalk is a non-intrusive technology that just loads and runs. Martin Atfield once again:
"The installation was done for us by Moonwalk within no time at all and with no downtime. Two days were allowed for this exercise and during this time a utility was used to demonstrate the potential savings. We applied a configuration file change on our Data Protector backup solution to prove that the files didn't get unarchived during the backup process.

A technical issue was realised with our Cluster name using characters that Moonwalk didn't understand, but the Moonwalk developers impressed us with an overnight (UK time) fix that resolved the problem the next day.

We deployed the solution over a cautious few months by explaining to each department what we were going to do and then by applying an immensely simple rule to Moonwalk that archived any files that hadn't been used for the last year. The savings that we saw were immediate and we had no issues raised."

And, most importantly, "Nobody has noticed a thing since."