Posted by Ian Howells on Fri, Dec 17, 2010 @ 04:45 PM
Rockford Construction Operates in 43 States with nearly half of its employees remote. Rockford Construction knew that IT would be a core way that it could differentiate itself from its competitors. They selected SharePoint as the way to give their many field representatives access to all information about projects in real time while on site and to provide a repository for archiving based on a ten-year retention policy.
Shawn is widely quoted in the press on his experience in the construction industry, experience of storage, use of SharePoint and the cloud - See Network Computing, Network World, SNSEurope, searchcio-midmarket, SearchStorage, StorageSolutions, ecmconection
In this interview style video see Shawn discuss the following questions:
Shawn, Can you tell me a bit about your background and Rockford Construction?
Can you tell me about the situation and the business challenges that drove the project?
The construction industry is one of the most sophisticated users of content management. Can you tell me about what is specific about managing content in the construction industry?
Can you tell me the areas you are using StorSimple in and in particular about SharePoint scalability, archive data and video?
What interesting technical challenges did you experience? Did this change the way you think about storing content?
Can you discuss the scale of the storage for these projects, the approaches you had to use before and what you can do now? How has this affected your approach to archiving and disaster recovery?
Can you discuss the platforms you are using. What were you using before StorSimple and what problems were your having?
Hear more next week from Shawn in this blog about:
- How Rockford evaluated private cloud, public cloud, Iaas, PaaS and SaaS
- Why they chose Storsimple
- Lessons learnt for others in IT and the Construction Industry
Posted by Ian Howells on Thu, Dec 09, 2010 @ 06:11 PM
StorSimple hit the headlines this week. The company announced the immediate availability of the StorSimple 1000, 5000 and 7000 series of application-optimized cloud storage appliances. Deployed on-premise, these devices utilize an innovative “cloud-as-a-tier” architecture to dramatically increase the performance and greatly extend the storage capabilities of business-critical Microsoft applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft File Servers and Virtual Machine libraries.
Here's a summary of quotes and articles:
Mark Gilbert, Gartner, in Network Computing - "StorSimple lets organizations use Microsoft SharePoint more efficiently, says Mark Gilbert, VP in the research group of Gartner. "[SharePoint's] a vacuum cleaner that nobody changes the bag on, sucking up docs and information," he says. "Nobody wants to be the janitor and figure out what they can throw out." Consequently, it's common these days for companies to have SharePoint installations of 1TB or more, which can amount to more like 7TB to 10TB including backups, he says. Gilbert adds that StorSimple reduces this with deduplication and archiving to the cloud."
Twitter was buzzing about StorSimple with pages and pages of tweets.
Here is a summary of the press coverage :
December 9, 2010 - Enterprise Storage Forum - StorSimple Changes Perception of Cloud Storage
December 8, 2010 - Sandhill.com - Leaders in the Cloud - Hybrid Cloud Storage
December 8, 2010 - Enterprise Storage Forum - Cloud-As-A-Tier Extends Storage Capabilities
December 8, 2010 - CIOL - StorSimple brings SSD performance to cloud
December 7, 2010 - eWeek - StorSimple's Cloud Storage Appliance Optimized for Microsoft Apps
December 7, 2010 - Network Computing - StorSimple Backs Up SharePoint to the Cloud
December 7, 2010 - Channel Register - StorSimple Wheels Out Head-In-Cloud, Feet-On-Premise Solution
December 7, 2010 - CTOEdge - SSD Performance in the Cloud
December 7, 2010 - The451 - StorSimple launches cloud appliance, gives SharePoint a scalability boost
December 7, 2010 - Surfbits - StorSmple Wheels out Head-in-the-Cloud, Feet On-Premises Solution, Cabinet has Portal at Back to Infinite Storage Narnia
December 7, 2010 - Storage Newsletter - StorSimple 1000, 5000 and 7000 Series
December 6, 2010 - eWeek - StorSimple's Cloud Storage Appliance Optimized for Microsoft Apps
December 6, 2010 - TMCnet - Predicting the Future for Cloud Storage
December 6, 2010 - Cloud News Daily - StorSimple Releases Application Optimized Cloud Storage Appliances
December 6, 2010 - On Windows - StorSimple Optimizes Cloud Storage
December 6, 2010 - Network Computing - StorSimple Dedupes Application Data to the Cloud
Quotable Quotes:
Shawn, Partridge, Rockford Construction, Network Computing - "Rockford uses the product for two purposes: archival data and for its 300GB of Microsoft SharePoint data, which Partridge expects to increase with the new device. "We'd been having performance problems with 300GB," he says. "That's no longer an issue." While the system is too new for Partridge to know whether he is saving on operational expenses, it cost about half what it would have cost to buy a new, larger SAN, he says."
Mike Vizard, CTOEdge "for Windows-centric applications, StorSimple is trying to redefine the way we think about storage in the enterprise regardless of where it might actually be physically located."
Ryan Dengate, Pine Rest, On Windows - “We’re using StorSimple for backup and recovery, Microsoft Exchange archiving and migrating file share data to SharePoint 2010,” said Ryan Dengate, IT manager for Pine Rest Health Services. “As its name implies, StorSimple takes the first step of BLOB externalisation and marries it to backup really easily. It took very little time to get up and running and creating business use cases.”
Read more about the 1010, 5010 and 7010 appliances
http://www.storsimple.com/products-0/appliance/
Watch how the appliance is installed in 10 minutes
http://www.storsimple.com/products-0/appliance/
