Provider of DR-as-a-Service Bluelock Opts for Infinidat

Infinidat Ltd. announced that Bluelock, LLC, a provider of DR-as-a-service (DRaaS) for complex IT environments and sensitive data, has selected the InfiniBox storage system as its primary storage platform.

As the scale and complexity of DR projects have increased, the right storage solution has become essential for delivering DRaaS services that clients trust. With InfiniBox, Bluelock was able to gain a greater competitive advantage through a combination of performance, resiliency, security and cost, while also benefiting their clients through greater peace of mind.

“There is now a standard in the industry that storage should be encrypted at rest, therefore we have a baseline requirement for all our clients’ data of encryption at rest, which InfiniBox provides very reliably right out of the box,” explained Ken Newell, senior systems engineer, Bluelock. “In terms of costs, we can deliver the InfiniBox solution for far less than our previous arrays while getting better predictability, flexibility and performance. Because we serve clients from many different verticals on the system, the workloads vary, and we can handle those predictably and confidently. Additionally, our engineers are thrilled to be rid of the expensive operational costs that used to exist for on-boarding new clients and managing complex storage acquisition processes.“

Bluelock initially tested InfiniBox to replace its backup storage for a new product offering. As Bluelock tested and saw the InfiniBox’s resiliency and low latency, they made the decision to replace the current primary storage platform with InfiniBox to serve its clients. Bluelock was able to consolidate up to three pre-existing storage arrays onto each InfiniBox (F6230) saving them significant CapEx and OpEx.

“We conducted a test in which we did everything we could to stress the system and see where performance might dip, and InfiniBox performance was way above what we expected,” said Newell. “With InfiniBox, the latency remained low and never rose to the levels we see with other systems. InfiniBox delivered performance and resiliency that were exponentially greater than the existing systems running in our full production environment.“

Since implementing InfiniBox, Bluelock has reduced overall latency by 50%. In addition, it found that InfiniBox scales easily and predictably to handle growing client workloads and SLAs and has a flexible CoD (Capacity on Demand) licensing model.

“As a cloud provider, my clients’ workloads are always changing and have a tendency to exhaust the controllers on other storage arrays,” explained Newell. “InfiniBox is deployed with a full petabyte of capacity, and as my client storage expands to fill that, I still have all the performance I need to service all the workloads.“

Bluelock has installed the InfiniBox storage system in its two locations in Indianapolis, IN, and Las Vegas, NE. In seven months, the company migrated all its production storage to InfiniBox and is delivering its storage in a multi-tenant fashion.

“With InfiniBox installed, we can focus more on the rest of the environment and not worry so much about the storage,” said Newell. “We know that if a client has an issue, such as slow application performance, it’s not due to the performance of our storage system. The icing on the cake with the InfiniBox is that it performs so well. The fact that it came in as backup contender and won the front of the house is significant. It says a lot about the system.“

Scalable from 115TB to multiple petabytes of effective storage capacity in a single 42U rack, InfiniBox offers 99.99999% availability and delivers performance of up to one million IO/s at sub-millisecond latency. Reliability features include end-to-end data protection; triple redundant power and data paths; snapshots and replication; and hot swap upgrades. The storage arrays are also power-efficient, drawing a maximum of between 3-8KW at a peak load.

As a result of all its storage performance and efficiency capabilities, InfiniBox provides customers with low TCO.