Breckenridge Group
StoreVault serves up the perfect storage solution for the Breckenridge Group
Customer Overview
The Breckenridge Group, Inc. has been in business for over 30 years as a management firm specializing in the development, operations and on-going support of various restaurant and hotel locations throughout the western United States.
Customer Challenges
BGI’s IT environment is comprised of 150 workstations and 250 PC-based point of sales (POS) terminals in the field. In addition, there are 80 workstations, 14 physical servers and 12 virtual servers located in their main office.
With over 4TB of data distributed over the existing physical servers as directly attached storage, the task of archiving, accessing and backing up became much more difficult while growing in critical nature. All of the remote restaurant and hotel sites sent critical information related to sales, payroll, email and other such information to the main office daily.
Although only a limited amount of data was exchanged between remote sites and the main office, it was extremely critical data and essential to the day-to-day operations of BGI. The most basic data loss, even of one day’s information, could have a seriously damaging impact for operations and on overall, companywide productivity.
Backups were performed on a nightly basis, using Symantec Backup Exec and disk to disk to tape (D2D2T) mechanism with three tape drives, including an old DAT drive and two IBM Ultrium LTO2 drives. The backup process involved manual upkeep of schedules and monitoring individual tape drive connections to each of the dedicated servers. Explaining the process to new recruits in the BGI IT team was extremely time-consuming. And, to complicate matter, the company had an ever increasing growth rate, resulting in over 500GB of data growth annually. Managing the tapes required to backup critical data was “getting out of hand,” according to one IT member. Furthermore, the disaster recovery plan and restoration time required for the 20+ tapes was too manual and in need of a serious overhaul.
Rapidly growing server and storage requirements became an increasing burden on resources from both a management and deployment side. Limited options inherent to direct attached storage restricted opportunities to advance in areas of efficiency, virtualization and effectiveness. The team knew they need a new strategy to optimize some of the strategic and logistical hurdles.
Solution: StoreVault
James Gantes, Chief Information Officer with the Breckenridge Group, Inc, was in need of a storage system to solve his storage challenges. But, with a limited budget of $15,000 for server purchases what were the options? On a grand scale, the IT team’s budget wassubstantial, but only this little amount was allocated to server room upkeep. With a vast number of options considered, ranging from Dell/EMC, to solutions from other storage vendors, and “sky high” price points, the hope for a enterprise class system at an affordable price seemed dim.
Enter the StoreVault. Though the StoreVault unit Jim ordered slightly overshot his original budget of $15,000, Jim observed that solutions from other vendors started at a minimum of $17,500. Furthermore, these products only offered a limited number of interfaces, such as “iSCSI only.” Extensive research revealed that when the S500 was placed side-by-side with any other similarly configured competitor’s solution, the price tag started at over $35,000! At present, Jim has a StoreVault S500 with 12x500GB drives with RAID-DP and a hotspare. Both CIFS and NFS volumes are used as file shares and nightly backups. On the SAN side, iSCSI is used to support VMware through VMFS on several LUNS. Lastly, Jim’s team has enjoyed coupling some of his critical Windows 2003 server machines with the capabilities of the new SAN for quick, reliable and expandable centralized storage.
With the StoreVault, BGI’s backup process underwent dramatic change. The StoreVault presented a wealth of options, allowing Jim and his team to take advantage of some basic technologies which have drastically reduced file and system backup and restoration times. With an implementation of Acronis Trueimage Server taking daily snapshots and writing to the S500 on CIFS volumes, system and file recovery is a snap. A similar procedure is followed for Linux servers, using NFS. And, now with SnapRestore, data restoration requests are no longer the stuff of nightmares! Jim is so impressed with his StoreVault that he plans on purchasing another StoreVault and using it for replication and disaster recovery. He also has plans to add additional tape backups utilizing NDMP and the S500’s add-on SCSI card for tape drives.
Customer Experience
Jim says, “We can’t afford downtime. One day of productivity loss would eat us alive if our CEO didn’t. I feel good about having the StoreVault behind me to back that statement up.” According to Jim, StoreVault’s performance has been exemplary at BG, impressing Jim to no end. Benchmarks revealed 400-500Mbps over NAS and 700-800Mbps over iSCSI, even in an un-optimized environment. Installation also was a breeze and took 30 minutes. The reseller, CDW, was always helpful and lined up several meetings with StoreVault to address Jim’s queries. StoreVault also sent an engineer to get an overview of BG’s environment.
Customer Benefits
StoreVault has allowed BGI to consolidate its storage strategy. With the combination of StoreVault and VMware, there is now a quick and painless storage and server upgrade path. StoreVault has also replaced BGI’s earlier inadequate backup system with a highly reliable and available solution. SnapRestore makes recovering data from backups quick and painless.
Support for various protocols (CIFS, NFS and Samba) as well as iSCSI SAN features off the shelf, at a price unmatched by competitors, made StoreVault the ideal choice.
