Large Houston Manufacturing Company Uses CloudArray to Improve Recovery Capabilities over Tape
New technologies and solutions always promise to deliver better performance, greater efficiency, optimization, cost reduction or other alluring metrics to attract the attention of IT professionals. Many times, the decision to adopt these solutions typically depends on intensive ROI analyses or tedious TCO calculations. Yet, once in a while, a solution emerges that makes perfect sense for IT to adopt without the need for extensive consideration. Cloud storage is one such solution. Companies of all sizes are leveraging public clouds to satisfy their data protection and disaster recovery needs today.
A large manufacturing company, based in Houston, TX was looking for an off-site backup solution that would provide better recovery capabilities than they had with tape today. After investigating their options, they identified cloud storage as a viable solution for their business system data. The company readily understood that tape-based backup is rapidly giving way to less expensive, less cumbersome, and more reliable cloud-based solutions - solutions that don’t depend on employees taking tapes home at night. When the decision was made to use a public cloud storage model for backup, the company turned to ATT Synaptic for high performance and cost effective cloud storage.
It quickly became apparent that their existing Linux, Windows, and VMware systems were not going to easily connect to and interface with Synaptic storage without a significant programming effort and neither resources nor budget were available to do specific cloud API programming. ATT recommended the company look to TwinStrata for its CloudArray® virtual appliance, a data protection accelerator and cloud storage enabler. CloudArray’s built-in ATT Synaptic connectivity and plug-and-play iSCSI front-end eliminated the need for programming or APIs and gave the company instant access to the pay-as-you-go storage platform. The CloudArray deployment took less than an hour and established an immediate, seamless, and secure extension of the company IT environment in the cloud.
Before the combined solution could prove its full value, however, the company also needed to resolve its backup software situation. Their existing backup software did not perform very well with VMware and posed too many recurring operational problems. So the company turned to Veeam, a superior backup solution that proved more reliable and stable on VMware. CloudArray, which easily connected to Veeam, was configured with a generous local cache, and IT quickly provisioned an initial 200GB volume for their off-site full and incremental backups. The results were immediate. Backup windows were reduced by 25%, saving time (no changing tapes) and money (no added infrastructure). CloudArray’s intelligent and dynamic caching helped to accelerate data transmission, automate the offsite data protection operation, and rapidly and reliably recover data from Synaptic cloud storage.
“We are very pleased with the way CloudArray has automated our off-site backup process. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it process that allows us to focus our energy and resources on the core aspects of our business and it has taken away a daily concern that kept us up at night. Using ATT Synaptic, we now have confidence that our data is securely protected and, equally important, that we can get to it anytime and from anywhere. It’s nice to have peace of mind.” - IT Director, Large Houston Manufacturing Company |
The combined solution of ATT Synaptic Storage as a Service and TwinStrata’s CloudArray has proven to be a very dependable and economical solution for this Texas based manufacturing company. So dependable, in fact, that the company has identified archive and email data as the next candidates for storage in the cloud.