Matrix Design Group Customer of Datacore

DataCore Software now includes Matrix Design Group, a planning, environmental and engineering design firm headquartered in Colorado, among its many multi-site, disaster recovery (DR) customers – courtesy of authorized partner, TelosIT. With a focus on large scale interdisciplinary projects, Matrix spans the design spectrum from planning to environmental remediation to hard core infrastructure design. They have a large number of state and government contracts served from seven locations throughout the US.

 
“The DataCore solution implemented by TelosIT not only centrally pools our data storage resources, but it automatically replicates data between our offices in Colorado Springs and Denver – for a fraction of the cost of renewing our single site SAN equipment lease.” said Eric W. Smith, vice president, Matrix Design Group. “Additionally, with DataCore and Virtual Iron in place both administration and management were simplified greatly and I was able to further reduce my IT spending.”
 
TelosIT saw the opportunity to achieve large cost reductions while addressing Matrix’s storage expansion and remote DR requirements.  As Kevin Carlson, CTO at TelosIT tells it, “We jumped on the opportunity to replace Matrix’s existing EMC SAN, due up for renewal with Dell, with a much more comprehensive approach based on DataCore SANmelody software. It was clear that the switch meant tens of thousands of dollars in savings.”
 
The EMC system alone took up half a rack of space for just barely 1 TB of storage and required a lot of cooling in the company’s server room according to Mr. Carlson. “In order to renew the equipment, Matrix Design Group was looking at having to shell out $60,000.”
 
TelosIT came in ‘way under’ $60,000 for a remotely replicated DR configuration consisting of 8 TBs of storage as opposed to the no frills 1 TB EMC SAN. Carlson and his team were also able to reduce the rack space requirement down to a fourth of what the EMC equipment was using.
 
During the next budget cycle, Matrix’s corporate headquarters located in Colorado Springs will be upgraded to a full high-availability SAN by incorporating another copy of DataCore SANmelody software in a synchronously mirrored HA configuration.   
 
Achieving Business Objectives:
Meeting Storage Requirements, Providing Redundancy
and Ensuring Integrity of the Data
Matrix Design Group now has two 8 TB SANmelody licenses in production. The data migration away from EMC only took 48 hours to complete. The biggest business objective that DataCore meets for Matrix Design Group is fault-tolerance and data integrity. It also simplifies expansion.
 
Interestingly, TelosIT initially proposed 4 TBs of physical drive space and quickly had to double it after Matrix determined that their stricter back-up requirements would chew up more disk space. “We had to literally increase the storage overnight,” said Carlson. “A new PowerVault disk array came in overnight stacked with disk drives. Within twelve hours, we had doubled the active SAN without having to do any major overhaul.” 
 
Bottom-line – A Day in the Life After
In addition to purchasing and deploying the necessary SANmelody licenses, Matrix Design Group has also migrated onto Virtual Iron server virtualization software per the recommendation of TelosIT – further minimizing the company’s ongoing costs. Now that the DataCore solution is in place, the staff at Matrix Design Group noticed that the software increases performance by increasing the effective read/write speed to the disk pool, thereby making file access much quicker.
 
Perhaps the ultimate advantage for Matrix lies in the flexibility DataCore has ushered in to meet future requirements. According to Mr. Smith, “Designs are going 3D and that means even more storage will be required – and who knows what advances will happen going forward. With DataCore, I’m not locked in by the hardware, I can incorporate new storage technologies or capacity when needed to meet growth demands easily and cost effectively.”