TwinStrata Blog » Customer Use Case

Hosted Solutions Announces Stratus Cloud Storage & CloudArray

Nicos Vekiarides — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:22:00 +0000

Yesterday, Hosted Solutions formally announced its Stratus Cloud Storage offering as well as integration with TwinStrata CloudArray to facilitate access to cloud storage without programming. With SAS-70 Type II data centers in North Carolina and Boston and ability to replicate between the data centers, the combined solution is a great fit for applications/organizations that need to specify location of data to meet performance objectives, availability objectives and regulatory compliance. TwinStrata’s solutions portfolio enables companies to solve a variety of business problems with Hosted Solutions, including:

Off-site backup using existing backup software
Growing archival data that requires online access
Real-time data replication for disaster recovery

Of course, we like nothing more that to hear customers themselves describe the value of our combined solution. As stated by Robb Bryn, vice president of operations at Cape Fear WebMasters, Inc: “We have tested CloudArray and Stratus Cloud Storage with Solution Specialists at Hosted Solutions with impressive results. This solution gives us the ability to store our backup data in the cloud without increasing our backup window, control our costs, and scale our system. With this solution, we are able to greatly reduce our local storage requirements.”

Learn more about Hosted Solutions Stratus Cloud Storage here.

Cloud Storage That Solves Business Problems — Customer Proof Points

Nicos Vekiarides — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:13:54 +0000

This weekend, I was glancing through a blog by George Crump entitled “When To Use Cloud Storage?” George concludes “Cloud storage providers and ISVs should focus on solving the business problem, not on the value of putting a bunch of data out in the internet.” We couldn’t agree more with that statement.

You may have seen our press announcement today regarding two recent customer wins through our partner Tricore Solutions. Let’s look closely at the customer use cases: Color Kinetics, a division of Phillips, is using CloudArray to improve their Oracle RMAN backup process. Tape costs disappear, backups complete faster and restore speeds improve. Tanya Creations, a large jewelry manufacturer is using CloudArray to enable Microsoft Exchange 2010 off-site replication and recovery, providing enterprise-class availability for their email system; all without the capital and administrative burden of building and managing a secondary site.

The message from these customers goes a lot deeper than removing cloud storage adoption hurdles to create a new tier of data storage. At the end of the day, CloudArray enabled business solutions that improved the operation of each respective enterprise. The cost savings over traditional off-site storage solutions makes the case even stronger.

It’s no secret that IT departments that were once technology-driven have become more and more business-driven. While cloud storage technology may or may not be a business priority today, compelling solutions for protecting and enhancing access to business data certainly are.

More to come…

Cloud storage / CloudArray Customer Use Cases – Significant Cost and Operational Benefits (Video)

Robert Infantino — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:30:02 +0000

Customers are leading the charge in how CloudArray and Cloud storage are getting deployed and discovering their benefits. We captured two customer use cases in a video (link to video provided below) using CloudArray software together with Cloud storage. There are not may documented Cloud storage use cases on the Web for mid-sized and global companies, so this video and its contents should provide interesting data points for those of you considering to augment your current application infrastructure with Cloud storage. The focus of these customer use cases are more on the impact of applications as opposed to using Cloud storage for file/print or as a specific tier of storage.

The video also gets into the reasons why companies need an IT infrastructure that is dynamic and can respond quickly to changing business needs. The video outlines several categories of business applications that are driving rapid data growth and require a more dynamic storage infrastructure to accommodate this growth.

Topping the charts, we see data protection, DR and collaborative applications impacting storage growth the most. Some analyst firms predict rapid data growth in the coming years and companies need to not only plan for today’s requirements, but the demands of tomorrow.

Many arguments can be made that Cloud storage indeed reduces the amount of on-premise infrastructure needed to accommodate growth for data protection and DR applications. The facts are the facts. Leveraging Cloud storage reduces necessary capital for IT expansion. And it drives efficiency and reduces operational costs.

The video describes an high level overview of CloudArray software. It shows how CloudArray enables businesses to seamlessly integrate in-house applications to Cloud storage without any changes to applications or programming to Cloud storage APIs. A list is provided of the host virtualization platforms it operates on such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. CloudArray supports public cloud providers such as Amazon, AT&T and EMC. The hosts that are supported are Windows, Linux, Mac and HP-UX.

One of the key points of the video is that CloudArray presents iSCSI block storage to applications in the form of data volumes. This means any existing in-house application can seamlessly integrate with Cloud storage. The video describes the policies of CloudArray volumes in that they are user-definable for caching and replication.

Enjoy the video – of course comments welcome.

Video: CloudArray software overview with Use Cases