Rockford Construction Has Selected iSCSI IP SAN From Hifn

Hifn announced that Rockford Construction has selected its Swarm 3200 Series iSCSI Storage Appliance to eliminate offsite storage data protection risks and lengthy restore times while ensuring maximum flexibility and availability of critical data.

Founded in 1987 to provide comprehensive real estate delivery services to the West Michigan region, Rockford today employs more than 200 people and builds in more than 450 cities throughout 20 states. The company is committed to providing clients with a “one-stop shopping” construction experience by managing every detail, from design to completion, including services for land purchase and development, site and municipal approvals, financing assistance and selection of subcontractors and suppliers.

Rockford relies on a Microsoft infrastructure comprised of Microsoft Server 2003 servers supporting its Exchange email system, SQL database and SharePoint 2007 collaboration system. With a growing number of construction projects, data related to contract information, site plans and project management correspondence was rapidly overtaking server storage capacity. As a temporary solution the company began to take large amounts of data offline to conserve existing server storage. This presented company-impeding data access problems for employees that needed instant access to data that had been moved offline.

“Restoring data as it was being requested was taking valuable time away from other critical IT tasks,” said Shawn Partridge, Vice President of Information Technology, Rockford Construction. Hifn’s iSCSI IP SAN is Foundation for Virtual Server Implementation at Rockford Construction “Moving to a SAN was a top priority so that we could bring offline storage back online and reduce the risk of physical data loss. I used a Swarm SAN in my previous company and was impressed by its easy installation and management. It was once again my No. 1 choice based on price, performance and flexibility. We are now realizing huge savings in both hard costs and time. But, even more importantly, our critical data is now both reliably protected and continuously available for employees to access right when they need it most.”

Partridge consolidated the Rockford environment from seven servers to two virtual servers using Virtual Iron software. The company selected a Hifn Swarm 3200 Series iSCSI IP SAN configured with 7.5TB of storage to deliver the power and flexibility it needed to bring its volumes of offline data back online for easy access and protection. With the Swarm, Partridge can easily perform backups directly from the SAN and now has the assurance that the data is protected and available 24×7.

The Hifn Swarm Series of iSCSI storage appliances provides an ideal IP SAN storage alternative to complex and costly Fibre Channel products with up to 9.75 terabytes of RAID-6 protected storage along with a full suite of storage services, including encryption, replication, point-in-time copy backup used for Windows Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS)-consistent snapshots and multipath I/O for high availability active-active configurations. Swarm IP SAN solutions are available now starting at $8,995.

Hifn

Rockford Construction