InReach Continuing Education Solutions Chooses ioFABRIC Vicinity Software

ioFABRIC Inc. announced that InReach Continuing Education Solutions has chosen ioFABRIC’s Vicinity for its storage infrastructure.

InReach has been helping professional associations, educational content providers, non-profits, and businesses bring continuing professional education and training online for more than a decade. As a Software-as-a-Service provider, the company hosts content for streaming webinars, events, conferences, and even exams for clients primarily in the legal, healthcare, and financial sectors. As such, performance and reliability of its underlying storage system is critical to InReach and its customers.

The company was trying to optimize IO/s and performance to support virtual environments critical for testing and development of its software and had employed a two-unit Synology, Inc.‘s NAS solution. In an effort to improve the performance of its NAS rather than replace it, they looked for a way to extend the life of its storage infrastructure easily and cost-effectively.

“I spent a great deal of time trying to get the most performance out of the NAS units,” said Donald Lopez, IT manager, InReach. “I started looking at other options for our storage needs. ioFABRIC Vicinity was extremely simple, very easy to deploy and use. That was a really nice plus for me.“

As a ‘SAN Extender,’ Vicinity helps companies like InReach add more performance, more capacity, and new features to their current storage solution, building on what they have, without a costly and time-consuming rip-and-replace project. They can add resources to their existing storage devices, such as flash, inexpensive HDDs, or overflow to cloud storage. All systems and applications remain available and centrally manageable. It automatically maintains application QoS levels, utilizing the appropriate storage, monitoring performance, optimizing capacity, and managing data protection. Additionally, Vicinity maintains service levels, adapting in real-time as demands and workloads change.

Vicinity was deployed in InReach’s test environment, which consisted of a couple of infrastructure servers for Active Directory and file sharing. The test environment had heavy SQL performance needs with databases requiring significant IO/s.

Setting Vicinity up on a dedicated server, Lopez said that it was ‘pretty nice’ to be able to have different options for various LUNs or lines he had attached to the NAS units he had while being able to modify the performance of each individual storage device.

“If I didn’t have ioFABRIC Vicinity, I’m not sure how well I would have made it through all of that while keeping the company running,” said Lopez. “Once I set the configuration for the performance-based environment, I didn’t have to do anything else.“

Vicinity is being utilized to provide the optimal performance needed for testing a mixed environment of domain controllers, Active Directory, and file servers before deploying them into production.

In addition to the performance and easy deployment of Vicinity, Lopez said he was impressed with the solution’s documentation, reporting and management dashboard, and the support he received from ioFABRIC.