Cloud Storage Channel Feature

StorSimple Provides Cloud Storage to Meet the Needs of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte

By Kerry Doyle
Contributing Writer

A disaster affecting your company can have wide repercussions that can influence every area of your business. For small and mid-sized businesses, a company’s health often depends on strong business continuity operations.

Power outages, server crashes, storage failures, malware, and natural disasters can affect your infrastructure and workforce, and they continue to be real dangers. If critical operations are adversely affected, what can be done to provide services and to remain competitive? Recently, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte (PPMM), the largest Planned Parenthood affiliate in the U.S., required a comprehensive storage upgrade. However, the available solutions were prohibitively expensive. That’s when StorSimple, the enterprise cloud storage company, stepped in with its unique storage tools.

For PPMM, internal and secondary storage, deployment capacity, security, uptime, and upgrade costs were all critical elements that needed to be addressed by a new system. By combining the fault-tolerant design of StorSimple with cloud storage reliability, PPMM acquired more than adequate storage with near 100 percent availability at reduced costs. The one-box appliance solution provided a wealth of options, such as on-premise easy file/data access, a reduced storage footprint, automatic tiered archiving, and cloud clones for disaster recovery.

These solutions enabled PPMM to eliminate their existing SAN that was inadequate for handling the millions of files that required processing and storage. The new cloud storage also allowed PPMM to meet state and federal requirements for retaining information for long periods of time.  StorSimple supplied a second appliance at an off-site location to provide disaster recovery capability. In terms of adopting effective disaster recovery (DR) procedures, careful planning and management support is necessary. StorSimple offered a robust solution that improved upon the current strategy at PPMM of using on-site mirrored volumes combined with online backup through a service provider.

The one-appliance solution implemented by StorSimple saved PPMM time and money that would have spent on housing additional hardware, processing software and systems management to provide all the capabilities the company required. Due to a projected growth in medical record storage, PPMM required a scalable solution to meet their needs. With a traditional storage purchase the infrastructure must be purchased up front and estimates and projections must be accurate. For PPMM, the 40 terabyte requirement for file storage would have quickly been used up. The StorSimple solution could scale to support the expected growth and PPMM would only pay for as much cloud storage capacity as it actually utilized. This alternative offered a solution that was a fraction of what might have been spent had PPMM adopted a traditional SAN upgrade

Cloud-based technologies have been increasingly employed by all types of companies and these solutions are gradually changing the landscape of DR. They are making disaster recovery more affordable for all types of businesses. Solutions exist at every level. Disasters that occur can have wide repercussions that can influence every area of an organization. A company and its IT department need to be prepared to effectively deal with the scale of these problems, whether simple or complex. StorSimple was a cloud-storage provider with exactly the right kind of solution to help a complex organization such as PPMM find a storage upgrade that was both unique and effective.