It’s not often you get to come to the rescue of a childhood hero. Imagine kids all around the world rushing home to watch their favorite show “The Power Rangers”, only today it’s not on. The SAN they used to store their latest episodes, had multiple drive failures. This might be a bit of fiction but the Saban Brands’ storage problem was quite real.

Saban Brands is an international entertainment, media and lifestyle investment firm that represents classic brands and franchises such as Paul Frank, Cirque du Solei Junior, and a personal favorite, Power Rangers. In early 2012 Saban Capital Group merged two of their divisions to create Saban Brands. To facilitate their new sub-division, a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was needed to manage their staff and properties. After much resource, Saban Brands selected Microsoft’s Dynamics AX as their new ERP.

While Microsoft Dynamics AX met their planning needs a new problem arose: their IT infrastructure. As Saban Brands began to scale their deployment of Dynamics AX, their infrastructure began to falter. An investigation found that their iSCSI QNAP NAS was underpowered. As their NAS begun to underperform, Saban Brands experienced a significant decline in write performance and data reliability. It was clear to Saban Brands that a new storage and back-up strategy was required for today and to scale in the future.

Saban Brands outlined six goals for their future storage strategy:

• Ability to scale performance and capacity to support three years of growth
• Tiered storage for performance and cost effectiveness
• Clustered high availability for constant uptime with mission critical systems
• Cost effective scalable modules of storage
• Lower annual software maintenance costs
• Enable cloud based disaster recovery

Tune in next blog to learn how DataON saved the Saban Brands and the Power Rangers.