Corporate Development Systems
StoreVault with VMware eradicates Corporate Development Systems’ storage issues
Customer Overview
Corporate Development Systems, Inc. (CDS) is a business solutions provider and technical support consulting company with over 20 years of hands-on experience in leading technology, and providing business solutions to small businesses and medium to large corporations.
CDS has implemented enterprise systems and provided technical expertise to an extensive nationwide client base with users ranging from 200 to 100,000 in various industries including Healthcare, Finance, Legal, Real Estate, Manufacturing, Multi-Media, Telecommunication, and Internet Hosting/Service Provider.
Customer Challenges
CDS has 3 full-time employees and utilizes the services of over 100 contract consultants. CDS’s IT environment has 3 Dell PowerEdge servers with 500GB direct attached storage and 17 virtual servers. Two servers are production servers hosting a variety of services such as video streaming, ftp, and databases. The third server runs VMware ESX server to host virtual servers and machines.
As a business solutions provider, CDS often tested a large number of different IT environments in-house before deploying these solutions to their customers. Testing scenarios demanded up to 12 physical servers, which were later replaced by a combination of 3 physical servers and virtual servers using VMware ESX server. Virtualization was used to reduce the number of physical servers and consequently reduce power and space utilization. Moreover, limited office space had forced CDS staff to share working space with hardware resulting in unmanageable noise levels.
Replacing older servers with newer hardware presented another issue. Direct attached storage on the servers was sufficient for some virtual servers and machines, but not the large amount of data generated by both testing and user files. Further, there was at least 15% data growth every year for which an in-house NAS solution, built from a spare server and hard drives, was deployed. Though it worked with VMware, it lacked the flexibility of supporting multiple protocols.
Apart from the in-house NAS solution, several external USB hard drives were being constantly swapped around to store testing data. Additionally, due to inherent storage constraints of this combination of exteral drives and direct attached storage (which was often running at 100% utilization), test configurations and VMs would often have to be deleted to make space for new testing configurations.
CDS’s backup strategy involved manually backing-up data from each server to a removable USB hard-drive, compressing it and transferring the drive off-site for disaster recovery. The process of data compression and transfer took over 5 hours.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Carl Smith, Business owner and President of CDS, saw the need for a centralized storage solution with multi-protocol support, support for VMware with low noise - all in a limited budget of $20,000. He considered solutions from HP and Iomega among others but concluded that none of them would address all his concerns. He even considered a NetApp FAS device before realizing that it was too noisy for his small office environment and was well above his budget.
Carl heard about StoreVault from an associate familiar with NetApp products. A perfect combination of features, price and performance ensured that StoreVault was a perfect fit for CDS’s IT environment.
CDS now has a StoreVault S500 with 12x250GB Drives configured with RAID-DP and hotspare. iSCSI provided a quick and painless way to setup VMware on LUNS. Less than a month later, Carl decided to purchase CIFS and NFS licenses. NFS volumes are now used for VMware and CIFS volumes to store both files and back up of Windows servers. With StoreVault snapshots, backups are efficient and scheduled daily for VMware and application servers. By having a central location for critical data and eliminating the need to backup each server’s data individually, the time to backup data for disaster recovery is now down to 2 hours.
Customer Experience
Carl says “There are so many measurable benefits and we are discovering more as we gain more experience every day.”
Impressed to no end with StoreVault, Carl is now a reseller for StoreVault products and is happily recommending StoreVault to his customers. In fact, he plans to offer his customers the option of storing their VMware configurations on CDS’s StoreVault for added safety. StoreVault’s relative lack of noise compared to other storage solutions made a noticeable improvement in the quality of the CDS staff’s work environment. Installation was also a breeze, taking only 20 minutes to deploy and configure.
Customer Benefits
With features such as SnapRestore, RAID-DP, multi-protocol support and excellent compatibility with VMware, StoreVault has allowed CDS to consolidate all its storage needs in one feature-rich device.
With StoreVault, CDS finally has that “warm and cozy” feeling they wanted out of their storage environment.
