Kiesling virtualizes applications and migrates to SAN

Kiesling Associates LLP is a multi-service accounting and financial consulting company providing assistance to individuals and businesses across all industries. Recognized as an annual winner of the prestigious Best of the Best CPA Firms award by INSIDE Public Accounting (IPA), the company operates five offices throughout the Midwest and Colorado, serving more than 400 clients.

Key operational systems, like the Exchange email system, had grown 300 percent over the past few years and its storage system could no longer handle the workload. It also struggled to support rapid and continuous database access and searches. Kiesling’s IT team was constrained by a legacy architecture with EMC storage systems supporting an all-physical server infrastructure. The legacy architecture required over provisioning storage, translating into significant additional capital equipment expenses, including bigger and more powerful servers.

Kiesling decided that transitioning to virtualized applications and a SAN architecture would solve its issues. The company put in place a proof-of-concept test in order to find the best storage for its current workload with room to address future business requirements, including an expansion of the archive system. Kiesling’s evaluation included EMC, Dell and Tegile.

“The Tegile system had the most complete data management suite and the best IOPS/latency performance for all workload application scenarios tested,” said Micah Cope, network administrator at Kiesling. “The alternative storage vendors didn’t offer a lot of room for growth. The Tegile solution actually provides more performance than we currently need, which is a happy problem. We are definitely protected with a future-proof storage solution as we continue to expand capacity and launch more VMs.”

The successful evolution to this new SAN and virtualized infrastructure with Tegile enabled Kiesling’s IT environment to cut CapEx and OpEx for an incredible cost savings while delivering improved SLAs to its user community. Total storage capacity was limited and consistently running near full with EMC. The new Kiesling SAN benefits from Tegile’s compression and deduplication for a 42 percent storage space optimization.

“Maintaining our legacy storage environment was a constant fire drill as our physical servers were constantly in jeopardy of running out of disk space,” said Cope. “Once we transitioned to a SAN virtual machine environment with a Tegile array, we never had that problem again.”

Tegile’s advanced hybrid storage arrays combines high-performance DRAM and Flash SSD with less-expensive hard disk and a comprehensive set of data management and protection features to deliver both speed and capacity at an affordable price. Tegile’s arrays balance high performance, high capacity, features and price making them the ideal solution for a wide range of industries and applications.

The Tegile array has a system dashboard for ease in configuring and monitoring the health and overall status of the storage environment. It enables the Kiesling IT team to quickly view the overall capacity utilization, and dashboard analytics help model and plan for future capacity needs. This additional monitoring can be done at a granular level to see what type of storage traffic or VMs are growing the most, and which application workloads are using the most storage resources over time.
Kiesling utilizes Symantec Backup Exec to protect its data environment across five office locations. Kiesling uses disk and tape as a part of its backup strategy today, and plans to incorporate the Tegile storage solution for its overall data protection and business continuity strategy in the future. According to Cope, the Kiesling IT strategy is to virtualize the Madison office and then set up replication to the data center in Des Moines. This will enable a disaster recovery (DR) environment that automates the protection of all information assets.

The success of the Kiesling business model is due in part to the professional quality of the tax and financial consulting provided by the Kiesling partners to its clients, including mobile access to caseware and associated applications from desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, resulting in added productivity when researching cases and when meeting with clients. The high performance and low latency of Tegile storage delivers the responsiveness remote users expect.

The investment in Tegile has saved on large capital expenses for new servers. With less capacity required, Kiesling is able to host more virtual desktops for a lower investment in storage and network infrastructure – without compromising performance.