1. CNF Takes High Road to Expansion
Hitachi Freedom Storage™
Lightning 9900™
Series Leads the Way
CNF Takes High Road to Expansion
Hitachi Freedom Storage™
Lightning 9900™
Series Leads the Way
“We couldn’t have asked for a smoother,
more seamless migration.”
COMPANY CNF Incorporated
INDUSTRY Global Supply Chain Management Services, Transportation
INFRASTRUCTURE Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning 9900 Series, Lightning
9960, Hitachi CruiseControl™
, Microsoft®
Windows NT®
, UNIX®
2. Vida Parandvash, Senior Manager of the Distributed Systems Group
at CNF, chose Hitachi Data Systems to supply the shipping and logistics
company with a flexible, fail-proof storage infrastructure.
CNF Makes the Right Moves to Cope with Growth
High-octane applications bring new
enterprise demands
CNF’s IT infrastructure consists of a hybrid
environment of open systems and mainframes
available to company operations worldwide.
Their increased involvement in supply chain
management necessitates the use of more
complex and computation-intensive applica-
tions. With these applications come increased
demands for maximum performance and
control—and zero tolerance for downtime.
“Our Oracle Financials®
accounts receivable
database, at over 600GB, is one of the largest
in the world, so we have to address large
reliability and performance issues,” explains
Parandvash. “And our Internet, e-commerce,
and supply chain management business initia-
tives continue to increase infrastructure
demands.”
A Reliable Storage Infrastructure is Critical to Retailer’s Rapid Growth
As a recognized leader in the trucking and air
freight industries, CNF Inc. collectively trans-
ports 25 billion pounds of freight yearly. As
a six-billion-dollar management company of
global supply chain services, they also assume
total supervision of their clients’ complex
transportation and logistics networks. Now
that CNF’s business encompasses their cus-
tomers’ supply chain processes as well as their
own, the company has found that the move-
ment of information has become as important
as the movement of goods and materials. In
both cases, efficiency is paramount.
Given the rapid expansion of their business,
CNF can’t afford to downshift to integrate
new systems or applications. They are con-
stantly evaluating IT requirements and
investing in technology to optimize effective-
ness and maintain their competitive edge.
Vida Parandvash, Senior Manager of CNF’s
Distributed Systems Group, knows the value
of non-stop operations better than most. With
almost 20 years experience on the infrastruc-
ture side, Parandvash manages CNF’s open
systems, Internet, firewall, and e-mail, as
well as their UNIX®
and Windows NT®
environ-
ments. And when the company needed a
flexible, fail-proof storage system to accom-
modate growth and enhance performance,
she called on Hitachi Data Systems.
3. CNF needed a storage system that could
accommodate and rapidly deploy large appli-
cations, provide scalability, and handle
capacity growth without disruption. Based
on her positive experience with the perform-
ance and installation of their Hitachi Freedom
Storage™
7700E, she decided to put Hitachi
Data Systems to the test once more.
“With all of our applications, increasing
storage capacity is a never-ending issue,”
says Parandvash. “It’s always a race for more.
We thought the capacity of the 7700E would
be enough two years ago, but at the rate
we have been growing, it turned out to be
insufficient.”
Parandvash decided to migrate from CNF’s
three-plus terabyte 7700E to the industry-
leading, bottleneck-free Hitachi Freedom
Storage Lightning 9900™
Series. The Lightning
9960 was the right fit for the open systems
environment CNF wanted to emulate. With its
switched-fabric Hi-Star™
architecture, large
up-front cache, Hitachi CruiseControl™
man-
agement software, and on-line data migration
feature, the Lightning 9960 capably handles
very large, active databases. And with over
six terabytes supporting Oracle Financials and
e-commerce applications, the Lightning 9960
provided the necessary storage space required
to handle CNF’s applications’ requirements.
“The Lightning 9960 delivered against all our
established criteria and performance objec-
tives, and proved to be a great solution for us,”
explains Parandvash. While she was confident
in her choice to migrate to the Lightning 9960,
she also needed to ensure that the migration
process itself would go smoothly.
We make upgrades a cinch
CNF’s involvement in supply chain manage-
ment doesn’t stop at the point of delivery.
Neither do their data processing needs. They
also gather and move information about
sourcing materials, managing returns, and
product distribution in order to help customers
address supply, demand, and fulfillment with
precision. The fact that CNF’s customers expect
this information online 24/7 means CNF can’t
afford downtime at any time.
“We needed to go from the 7700E to the
Lightning 9960 in a very short timeframe
in order to deploy our applications,” says
Parandvash of the transition. “Hitachi’s expert-
ise and attentiveness to our needs helped
make the migration process seamless, and our
success was the result of the excellent team-
work between us.”
Parandvash and her team were also pleased
with the Lightning 9960 in the open systems
environment. ”Lightning is a fitting name
for the box, given its performance so far,”
she adds.
Our availability guarantee leads
the industry
The Lightning 9900 Series is not just the
world’s leading storage. It’s the only enterprise
storage with a 100 percent availability guaran-
tee. That’s another reason why CNF builds its
business on Hitachi Freedom Storage solutions.
“The functional excellence of the Lightning
9960 has us taking so much for granted now,”
says Parandvash. “With its rapid recovery
feature, we’re not worried about incurring
downtime. And from a support perspective,
the Lightning 9960 allows us to concentrate on
managing our information growth. Before we
installed the Lightning, a majority of our time
was spent on firefighting day-to-day issues,”
she adds. “Now we can focus on improving our
systems environment.”
Hitachi Data Systems helps CNF grow
by keeping IT simple
Parandvash regards CNF’s Lightning 9960 as
one of several IT building blocks that will help
the company prepare for further consolida-
tion. They plan to merge storage presently
spread across Sun™
, AIX®
, MVS™
, and HP®
envi-
ronments to enhance their ability to share and
exploit information for present and future
applications, and to lay the groundwork for
implementing a storage area network.
“We’d like to take our infrastructure to the
next level and connect our 70-plus UNIX and
60-plus Windows NT servers to the same stor-
age solution,” says Parandvash. Ideally, we’d
like to centrally manage the network, thereby
reducing cost and complexity. With the
Lightning 9960 and future planned enhance-
ments, I think it’s more than viable.”
Her efforts are already paying off. With a more
intelligent IT infrastructure and more efficient
information management, more of CNF’s cus-
tomers are turning to them for streamlined
operations and greater economies of scale.
In turn, CNF can look to Hitachi Data Systems
for storage solutions that continue to benefit
their enterprise over the long haul. As CNF
keeps on trucking, they can count on the same
relentless service and commitment they’ve
come to expect from the world’s fastest grow-
ing, most reliable storage company.
Storage—No Limits
In today’s knowledge-based economy, information is central to the successful enterprise. Hitachi Data Systems
will help you build an intelligent information infrastructure to provide your enterprise with the availability,
scalability, and performance you need to transform data into knowledge. This bulletproof architecture com-
bines our industry-leading enterprise storage and software with Hitachi-developed solutions and strategic
alliances. We embrace industry standards and protocols, while capitalizing on advances in storage area net-
works and storage resource management. With our intelligent information infrastructure, our ability to deliver
the “Storage—No Limits” vision is fully realized. Where will it take you? You will acquire a powerful, truly
open alternative that allows you to enhance your business agility, improve capital utilization, achieve opera-
tional excellence, and minimize risk.
“Lightning is a fitting name for the box,
given its performance so far.”
