IPR International Improves Storage Ops With Nexsan

Nexsan Corp. announced that IPR International, a disaster recovery and data protection service provider with headquarters in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, has improved its operations and efficiency by using Nexsan’s Assureon online disk archive and SATABeast storage systems.

Nexsan’s cloud storage solution has enabled IPR International to reduce the IT resources required to manage its archiving solution improve data accessibility for its clients and reduce storage infrastructure costs by doubling usable storage capacity.

IPR International offers a suite of solutions to protect, preserve, secure and make available client data at all times. IPR’s customers are especially interested in long-term archiving of email and require that this data be kept in an easily retrievable form for extended periods. As adoption of the company’s cloud archiving services grew, the volume of its long-term storage archives increased as well, resulting in the need for additional storage capacity to meet demand. The increasing size of the archives was impacting system performance and making the company’s existing infrastructure increasingly difficult to manage. IPR International needed a reliable but lower-cost archiving solution that would satisfy its clients’ operational, performance and compliance requirements.

After evaluating a number of solutions, IPR International deployed two Nexsan Assureon appliances at different locations, each with two SATABeast systems connected via 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel. The Nexsan solution retains two copies of customer data, one at each location, and each location is set to failover to the other. The Assureon appliances not only keep customer emails online and rapidly retrievable but also reduce the time required to back up current, active email.

Assureon has significantly reduced IPR International’s storage costs compared to its previous archiving solution as a result of the secure online archive’s advanced architecture. In addition to providing local replication, Assureon also has the ability to geographically separate a single copy data between two separate locations for the purpose of disaster recovery (DR). This compares to alternative solutions that require two copies of the data be stored at both the local and remote location so that four total copies are stored, diminishing capacity and driving up costs. As a result, IPR International estimates that Assureon has delivered a savings of more than 40% by doubling usable capacity.

"When we chose a replacement system, we were very impressed with the reliability and flexibility of the Nexsan solution," said Kathy Sennett, marketing communications manager, IPR International. "The Assureon appliance is delivered as a solution with the storage, and Nexsan remotely connects, monitors and performs automatic updates on the systems without involvement from our staff, which makes these systems exceptionally easy to administer."

IPR International’s clients receive other benefits from the Nexsan solution, including compliance-level privacy for their data storage that exceeds their service level agreements. Automated retention and deletion ensures that files are retained as required for regulatory compliance and deleted when their retention period is over.

"Nexsan has greatly reduced the IT resources required to manage our archiving solution and has improved our overall cost structure," said Sennett. "We are happy to have selected Assureon as our archiving platform and content with what it has delivered for us."