Posted by Marc Farley on Wed, May 30, 2012 @ 08:51 PM
Terry Barbounis was asked to help the First Church of Christ, Scientist and The Christian Science Monitor come up with a plan to reduce their infrastructure costs through the use of cloud technology. As he analyzed the potential for cost cutting, one of the things he found was the relatively large amount of unstructured data that was not being accessed.
As he investigated further he found out about StorSimple's products that were designed to bring efficient management to something that is a an overlooked mess in most organizations. Not only that, but they were able to setup multiple accounts for the various departments, which meant they could charge back the costs of storage with much more accuracy than they ever had before.
Terry told his story at the Amazon Web Services Summit in New York back on April 19th. I recorded his presentation with a voice recorder, edited it and added the presentation slides from a couple different versions to make this video. If you ever get the chance to see Terry in action, I highly recommend him. He brings a lot of energy and humor to his presentations.
Posted by Rick Freedman on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 @ 11:03 AM
Sundance Institute was in need of more storage capacity and the IT team was challenged trying to keep up with backing up the existing storage. Compounding this was the annual Sundance Film Festival during which the staff doubles, storage needs become much greater, and festival logistics ramp-up to support the 40,000 attendees.
Justin Simmons, Associate Director of Technology Services, wanted to find a solution providing on-premise storage, de-duplication to reduce their total capacity requirements and using cloud storage – to provide the scale to support peak demands as well as lower storage costs. When Justin found that StorSimple could provide all of these capabilities in one box, he knew that it would be an ideal solution and a huge timesaver.
“We no longer need to do backups now that it all backs up straight to the cloud,” said Justin. “And, we freed up a lot of storage in the datacenter by moving the archives to the cloud as well.” In addition, Sundance Institute had previously relied on disk-to-disk backups, with no off-site storage. Now the cloud provides a secure off-site storage and has eliminated the tedious efforts required for the disk-based backups.
To learn more about StorSimple at Sundance Institute and their experiences, please see the video at: http://youtu.be/lUCrCz-nIOU or the full case study at: http://www.storsimple.com/testimonials/sundance-institute/
Posted by Rick Freedman on Thu, Jan 05, 2012 @ 05:23 PM
BMC, a $2 billion software company, maintains over 13,000 VMware images and templates and that number continues to grow. The majority of these VMs don’t need to be on expensive storage but they all need to be online. The sheer volume of VMs makes backups challenging. In addition, their existing data center was reaching its limits in terms of power and cooling capacity.
Gus Chavira, Enterprise Architect at BMC, considered options such as purchasing additional SAN storage, storage tiering, or other archiving solutions, but each would have required more data center power and cooling capacity. Gus selected the Cloud Integrated Enterprise Storage solution from StorSimple, which is certified by both data center platforms he uses today - VMware and Microsoft. StorSimple allows BMC to maintain on-premise storage while automatically tiering large volumes of inactive data (and inactive VMs) to cloud storage - freeing up valuable datacenter resources and mitigating the need to build a new datacenter.
“We initially looked at StorSimple for archiving, but realized that we got backup and disaster recovery built into the single appliance”, stated Gus. The solution eliminated his concerns about fitting in available backup windows and provides almost instant access to archived VM images (near-zero RTO)
To learn more about BMC Software’s deployment of StorSimple and their experiences, please see the case study at: http://www.storsimple.com/testimonials/bmc/
Posted by Rick Freedman on Mon, Dec 12, 2011 @ 10:00 AM
StorSimple today announced support for the OpenStack ecosystem and specifically for Rackspace Cloud Files. (Click here to view the press release)
OpenStack provides an expansion of the options available to customers for cloud storage. The open API enables vendors to quickly and easily offer services to the growing number of cloud service providers. Besides Rackspace, major enterprise vendors such as Dell and HP have announced their plans to deliver cloud services based on OpenStack. The HP Cloud is currently is beta (www.hpcloud.com) Other key indicators that suggest the mainstream adoption in the enterprise in 2012:
Adoption of vSphere 5 with the Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) features:
Availability of Hybrid Cloud Storage appliances that seamlessly connect these cloud storage services to enterprise data centers. StorSimple is still the only vendor that offers such a solution that is certified with key applications, such as VMWare Ready and Microsoft Server, though others are likely to follow.
As a result of these and other factors, expect to see cloud storage a significant part of enterprise datacenters in the coming year.
Posted by Rick Freedman on Mon, Nov 28, 2011 @ 05:55 PM
MedPlast, a leading medical devices company, was challenged when their existing backup targets were becoming full and backup windows were getting longer and longer. Instead of throwing more and more disk (and money) at the problem Dan Streufert, IT Director, started evaluating cloud storage to fix the problem and provide a long-term solution.
“We looked at all of the vendors in this space”, said Dan, “and I reached the conclusion that StorSimple had the most fully baked product of the various choices out there and they seemed to have the most enterprise class product and organization. When you are talking about primary storage and backup it is one of the most critical parts of your infrastructure and you need to really have confidence in that vendor. Even from the first impressions of hardware you can tell its enterprise class.”
Implementing StorSimple allowed MedPlast to dramatically lower their storage infrastructure costs, eliminate the use of tapes for backup, provision (and pay for) capacity as needed and provide disaster recovery for the first time. StorSimple is a new way of thinking about storage. It provides primary storage, Snapshots and Cloud Snapshots in one box. You can “set it and forget it” and it just runs on schedule.
Link to case study: http://www.storsimple.com/testimonials/medplast/
Posted by Ian Howells on Thu, Sep 01, 2011 @ 12:11 PM
VMworld 2011 was a great event and the cloud was center stage.
StorSimple was named "Best of VMworld 2011 Finalist in the Business Continuity and Data Protection" category and was the only Storage System finalist showing the ever growing importance of cloud storage.
Guru Pangal, Co-founder and President received the award on stage and is pictured here:
The award looked at:
- Product
- Use and Manageability
- Filling a Market Gap
- Functionality
- Performance
- Value
The submission described the product as follows:
The appliance instantly integrates into an existing environment and can be used for VMware Ready Enterprise Cloud Storage as follows:
- Backup - Instant Restore with Cloud Data Protection
- Disaster Recovery - Replace Tape with Cloud DR from any Location
- Primary Storage - SSD Performance with the Cloud-as-a-Tier
- Automatic Archival - Live Archives with Cloud Elasticity
Specific VMware deduplication optimization reduces storage requirements by up to 90% and the appliance integrates directly to storage vMotion.
More can be read about the product at our new VMware resources page:
Customer validation was a key part of the submission. StorSimple hosted a customer dinner at the event and the latest customer video of Dan Streufert, IT Director, MedPlast can be seen at:
http://www.storsimple.com/customers/medplast
If you are interested in seeing a demo of the VMware Ready Enterprise Cloud Storage just go to:
http://www.storsimple.com/cloud_storage_demo/
Thanks to the VMworld community for your overwhelming support and thanks to TechTarget and SearchServerVirtualization.com for this honor.
Posted by Ian Howells on Fri, Aug 26, 2011 @ 06:03 PM
StorSimple will be showcasing its VMware Ready Enterprise Cloud Storage at VMworld in Las Vegas, August 29th to September 1st on stand # 671.
On the stand you will be able see:
- StorSimple's award winning Enterprise Cloud Storage - Live demo
- How StorSimple puts some vMotion into your cloud - Storage vMotion integrated to StorSimple
- Talk to customers who are using StorSimple with VMware, vSphere and vCenter
- Checkout the latest MedPlast case study and live video interview - Dan will be at VMworld
- Checkout the new VMware Resources page
- and last but not least checkout the video below that puts some Vegas into VMworld
See you there
