Woodland Park Church
StoreVault provides long-term solution to Woodland Park Church’s storage needs
Customer Overview
Founded in 1926 at Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Woodland Park Church District (WPC) has grown from having just twenty six adults and one youth to having two thousand regular attendees. WPC seeks to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ through “Magnifying Jesus Christ, Maturing His People, and Making Him Known”.
Customer Challenges
The Woodland Park Church District has deployed 45 client machines (35 are desktops and 10 laptops) and four Dell PowerEdge servers. The servers were configured with either RAID 1 or 5 arrays to provide data redundancy.
WPC had 300GB of data distributed among the existing Dell PowerEdge servers as directly attached storage. A vast amount of this data, almost 90%, comprised of audio and video files used for archiving of weekly sermons and services. With the steady increase in the amount of data being generated, archiving such data became imperative.
A limited budget compounded WPC’s storage woes. As a non-profit, religious organization, WPC was cash-strapped with a total IT budget of merely 40,000$. With more employees, new premises and an expansion in IT infrastructure, increased expenses became inevitable. Procuring new servers with the added expenses of ensuring dedicated RAID arrays for each server thus became cause for concern. At this juncture, the need for a consolidated storage system that would reduce the cost for future servers became pressing.
Four servers were deployed wherein two were domain controller servers, and the other two were an Exchange and an application/file sharing server. The sole application server was also used as a file server as a compromise, due to budgetary constraints. Consequently, whenever the application server needed updates or had issues, the entire file-sharing system was crippled.
WPC’s IT team used Symantec Backup Exec for all backups, using three external hard-drives as the main backup solution. A full backup was performed weekly, with differentials every night.The most recent backup was taken offsite every week for disaster recovery. The current process had a large, 24 hour window and there was a pressing need for a more efficient system.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Robert Miles, IT Director at WPC, had to find a storage system to solve his problems within his budget. Storage solutions like the Dell/EMC AX 150I had no NAS features and other competing solutions were either economically out of bounds or could not meet expectations
customer success stories
StoreVault provides long-term solution
to Woodland Park Church’s storage needs regarding various features. Moreover, while researching StoreVault, Robert was surprised to discover that StoreVault featured iSCSI SAN capabilities which he had assumed to be beyond his budget. This made the decision to go for StoreVault even easier.
Robert now has a StoreVault S500 with 6x250GB hard drives with RAID-DP (3 usable, 2 parity and 1 hotspare). After integrating StoreVault into the IT environment, WPC now has five servers deployed (two domain controllers, Exchange, an application server and a Virtual server with five virtual machines).
The CIFS NAS capability on the S500 allows Robert to centralize the main file storage system effortlessly, without overloading an already overworked application server while also providing a two-fold increase in network-application performance. With the S500’s SAN capability, WPC could eliminate RAID 5 in the Exchange server by porting Exchange logs and databases to StoreVault on iSCSI LUNS.
Robert now depends heavily on StoreVault’s SnapRestore features, which replaced his earlier, inefficient backup system. Though weekly backups are still performed for disaster recovery, StoreVault’s snapshotting feature has eliminated the need for Robert to perform nightly differentials. Though he has yet to find the need to restore a snapshot he believes the knowledge that a restore is just minutes away is well worth the money.
Customer Experience
Robert says, “Being a non-profit organization, I never imagined we would be able to afford a feature-rich system like the StoreVault S500. However, God was gracious, StoreVault worked with us to get within our budget, and now we have a system that meets not only our current needs but also future needs for years to come.”
Data migration happened in a snap and Robert was able to finish the migration, create shares and configure the SAN in just a few hours. Doug Lynch at ModernTech, Inc. was the VAR. Doug was a great help in the decision-making process. He was indispensable to Robert for forwarding questions about the S500, setting up the system within budget, and making sure WPC had all they needed to have a functional storage environment.
Customer Benefits
StoreVault has allowed WPC to consolidate and centralize its storage strategy, allowing for a quick and painless storage upgrade path. Moreover, features such as RAID-DP and SnapRestore also ensure the highest level of reliability. Backups are quick and efficient and data can be recovered in a matter of minutes.
Additionally iSCSI SAN capability at a very competitive price point was icing on the cake. StoreVault has proved to be a blessing for Woodland Park Church District’s IT environment.
