Southwestern Michigan College Selected StorSimple Appliance

StorSimple, Inc.
announced that Southwestern Michigan College
(SMC) has selected StorSimple’s appliance to manage its entire VMware environment for primary,
archival, backup and offsite disaster recovery across both of its campuses.

According to U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra, three industries can realize the most
benefits from the cloud: healthcare, education and energy; StorSimple is
currently working with customers across these industries and beyond.

Southwestern Michigan College is a learner centered college
with programs in nursing and the automotive technology. The institution
educates 3,000 students across two campuses in Dowagiac, Mich. and Niles, Mich.
With a rapidly growing student base, SMC looked for a storage solution that
could simply and cost effectively support the growth of data and provide robust
disaster recovery for its VMware and
file share environments. Security and the need to minimize migration time and
cost were key concerns during the evaluation process. After a review, SMC selected StorSimple for its simple deployment and enterprise
support.

The college initially implemented StorSimple to facilitate an offsite disaster recovery plan. Extensive usage of the system revealed
the suitability of the appliance to support the complete SMC VMware environment across primary,
archival and backup as well as offsite disaster recovery across two campuses.

Before any data is written to the cloud, it is encoded with
military grade encryption, which adequately met SMC’s security requirements. In
addition, SMC had previously spent months migrating data, but now instant thin
provisioning, deduplication, compression and automatic tiering removed the
painful need for migration and archival due to lack of storage space.

"Organizations
are afraid of losing control if they move to the cloud, but our experience
shows that with an on-premise appliance that auto-tiers storage you get
control, high performance and high-availability," said Don Magee,
systems architect for Southwestern Michigan College. "The StorSimple solution had a huge impact, enabling us to manage Big
Data without spending months on migration and providing reliable, integrated,
primary storage, archival, backup and disaster recovery."

"Data migration
and disaster recovery are especially a challenge for organizations with
multiple sites and expanding data requirements," said Ursheet Parikh,
StorSimple CEO. "An effective cloud
integrated enterprise storage solution can support changing needs and grow with
an organization, as we’ve seen with Southwestern Michigan College. Educational
establishments are looking for secure, cost effective alternatives to the
traditional storage treadmill. More and more users are seeing Cloud Integrated
Enterprise Storage as the solution to control VMware sprawl and growing Windows
infrastructures."