Cloud Storage Channel Feature
StorSimple Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery Solutions Tapped by Non-Profit Foundation
When a non-profit organization observed a demo of StorSimple’s cloud storage solutions at the Microsoft (News 
- Alert) Technology Center in Mountain View, it quickly knew it needed to get its hands on the offering.
The non-profit, an organization with a limited budget, is involved in ocean conservation, with 450 staff and 1,200 volunteers. Its challenge was to find a new SAN for file server data and discover a solution capable of increasing the amount of data that can be backed up in a specific time window. Its quest led it to StorSimple, a provider of Enterprise Cloud Storage for Windows and VMware infrastructures. According to the nonprofit, StorSimple “could accomplish all of these goals,” with a single StorSimple device, and “triple their storage capacity at the same cost.”
Not only was StorSimple able to help the organization achieve these goals but it was also able to reduce the need for tapes, cut labor by five hours per week, reduce backup times by several hours and have a means of testing for disaster recovery.
“The security is there with AES-256 encryption, the performance is certainly above average and we didn't have to rewrite any of our applications,” said the non-profit’s director of Information Services. “We are already seeing reduced costs after just going live.”
The foundation currently stores 10 TB of data which is expected to grow over time. “With this StorSimple deployment,” StorSimple officials say, “the customer has retired three legacy Fibre Channel SAN storage systems and eliminated tape.”
StorSimple officials explained that one of the drivers of the project was that there are only so many hours in the day and with tape the foundation could only backup 7.5TB per night, and with
With StorSimple, all 10TB of data is backed up on a daily basis. The non-profit also reported reduced tape management labor time by one hour per day.
Summing up their reasons for going with StorSimple, the organization noted that the option of buying one integrated appliance, as opposed to three separate devices with different management consoles and interfaces, was compelling.
“Ask yourself the direct question, ‘Do I have the resources to maintain all of my servers, applications and data on premises?’ If you can't say “Yes,” much like the answer I gave myself, then you need to use the cloud,” the Director of Information Services noted.
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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Carrie Schmelkin
