Cloud Storage Channel Feature

Acentia Finds New Friend in Cloud Storage Provider StorSimple

By Carrie Schmelkin
TMCnet Web Editor

Aside from the general excitement that results from a company achieving unprecedented growth, IT challenges can arise with growth as well, particularly when it comes to how to scale with rapid growth, reduce storage costs and consolidate and integrate company acquisitions.

Such was the case when Acentia – a fast-growing provider of technology solutions for the federal government –experienced rapid organic growth and expansion through acquisitions. Accordingly, the company was soon tasked with how to meet the demands of the federal government and related commercial enterprise customers.

At the time, Acentia was relying on Dell (News - Alert) EqualLogic iSCSI SAN as primary storage, however, it could no longer support the growing storage demands, according to company officials. The Dell storage system provided a single tier of data so all data was treated equally but Acentia was in search of a storage solution that could support the company’s demands, scale to support its growth, provide a much-needed disaster recovery capability, reduce costs, and be maintained without expanding the existing IT staff.

Its quest led it to StorSimple, a provider of Enterprise Cloud Storage for Windows and VMware infrastructures. StorSimple offered everything that Rob Rhodes, director of IT at Acentia, was looking for in a storage system: tiered storage, de-duplication, disaster recovery, and integration with cloud storage to reduce costs. He was also looking for integration with VMware and Acentia’s key Microsoft (News - Alert) applications and StorSimple was the only solution he considered that was certified by both VMware and Microsoft.

“With StorSimple, I only had to purchase one appliance,” Rhodes said in a recent customer case study. “I didn't have to purchase multiple products for local storage, cloud storage, the movement of data between tiers, deduplication, or disaster recovery. The ability to grow dynamically, supporting cloud as a tier, and certification by both VMware and Microsoft, were critical factors for us.”

By being certified by both VMware and Microsoft, it meant that StorSimple’s appliance could seamlessly integrate into Acentia’s VMware environment and be a fully-supported component of its end-to-end IT infrastructure. Moreover, the VMware environment runs a range of Microsoft applications, such as File Servers, SharePoint, and Exchange.

While StorSimple offered a plethora of benefits for Acentia, Rhodes was still concerned however that using cloud storage would require changes to the applications. Moreover, security was of the utmost importance to the company particularly since its works closely with the federal government. StorSimple quelled both of these concerns as Acentia was already using an iSCSI San so the StorSimple appliance could provide an identical interface while including access to cloud storage. And, with regards to security, StorSimple assured Rhodes that the cloud storage provider encrypts data in-flight and at-rest.

After turning to StorSimple’s solutions, Acentia was able to save over $50,000 compared to other solutions, retire existing SAN, eliminate tapes which saved six hours per week and reduce costs with cloud storage. StorSimple also allowed the company to use one box for primary, archive, backup and disaster recovery, enjoy simplified management, experience disaster recovery for first time, and have the ability to scale for growth.

For more on StorSimple, click here.