Reduce power use significantly…
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Thompson’s Bloom’n’Care, a leader in lawn and garden care products for consumers and professionals with a growing chain of patio-and-garden stores, was facing the consequences of recent success. The existing IT infrastructure had been expanded piecemeal during a period of corporate expansion in the past decade, and now with hundreds of branch locations and almost 60 retail locations, support and maintenance of remote file and print servers was increasingly costly and inefficient . A new approach was needed to both meet the change of pace in a dynamic market and set the groundwork for future business expansion. In addition, consolidation would ensure the monitoring and backup of mission-critical data, reduce support costs through economies of scale, and more easily meet established data integrity service level agreements.
As in any large corporate-wide technological change, there was resistance from the field as plant, distribution center, and store managers all voiced concerns about delayed response times for file retrieval and print requests. Working with their IT partner in the implementation of the new wide area network to address these quite valid concerns, it was settled upon that a total storage capacity of 5000 TB would provide LAN-like performance over the WAN. With that storage goal as the target, the search began for the hard drive offering the highest operational efficiency and lowest energy demand.
 Once the problem was defined, the solution basically presented itself. Of the three 1 TB drives Thompson’s considered, one offered the greatest energy savings as well as a low initial price, the GreenPower™ 1 TB WD RE2-GP hard drive. Their 5,000-quantity array requires 34,625 W/year total power, compared to a competitor’s 58,225 W/year drive, saving 40% on power costs. That caliber of savings made going with GreenPower an easy decision for Thompson’s, because even if you’re the expert at making flowers bloom, your money doesn’t grow on trees.
Scenarios are based on standard applications within the industry and do not represent actual company data.
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