Hewitt Associates LLC is a global management consulting firm specializing in human resource solutions. Headquartered in Lincolnshire, Illinois, Hewitt services more than 2800 clients from 65 offices in 28 countries and has over 6000 employees.

Hewitt’s business is growing, and with it the need for disk space to house critical data related to its customers’ HR, benefits, compensation, and actuarial strategies. Government audit reporting requirements further increased Hewitt’s disk space demands, due to the need to duplicate programs and data.

Hewitt Associates uses over 250 GB of disk space on 128 drives. To accommodate the growing demand, Hewitt was regularly buying more disk drives as well as juggling data to and from a high-capacity tape device. Retrieving data from this device took significant time, since the process required operator intervention and the tape device could be busy servicing other requests.

Instead of continually adding more disk space, Hewitt decided to implement Solution-Soft’s SafeCapacity and use its automatic in-place compression feature to save space on the existing hardware. In addition to virtually eliminating out-of-disk-space events using automatic migration, SafeCapacity’s policy-driven compression feature significantly enhances the efficiency of using existing disk space. Both features are controlled by user-defined policies and operate transparently to system users.

Hewitt configured SafeCapacity’s policy files to compress test files that had not been accessed for two weeks and other files that had not been accessed for a month. During the months of October through January, demand for disk space increases. During this peak period, Hewitt uses SafeCapacity’s automatic compression feature to compress additional files in order to free even more disk space.

According to Art Payne, HP 3000 System Manager at Hewitt, SafeCapacity’s online archiving of infrequently used data has been a lifesaver for both users and system administrators. SafeCapacity regularly saves 50 GB of disk space. Not only has Hewitt’s use of SafeCapacity reclaimed more than 20 percent of its HP 3000’s disk space, it has slowed the rate at which additional disk space must be added. In addition, SafeCapacity sped up system backups. The speed of some backups has more than doubled, while dramatically reducing the number of tapes. This is because compressed files are much smaller and transfer to backup more quickly than uncompressed files.

Art Payne continues, "[SafeCapacity, formerly called e-Space] is truly a ‘set and forget’ product, which is perfect for a busy System Manager like me. SafeCapacity has not only decreased our backup window, saved us thousands of dollars in hardware purchases, and freed up our operators from juggling disk space, it has greatly reduced our need to service user requests because users can always find the data they need online."

In summary, Hewitt’s use of SafeCapacity has recovered more than 50 GB or 20% of disk space, reduced storage hardware purchases and installations, increased online availability of data for system users, increased backup speed and reduced backup media usage.