National Lloyds & American Summit Deploying TwinStrata CloudArray

TwinStrata, Inc. announced that National Lloyds & American Summit Insurance, a Waco, Texas-based insurance company, has chosen TwinStrata CloudArray to provide an extension to cloud storage for its DR backup needs.

Using CloudArray, National Lloyds is able to deploy a cloud SAN by combining cloud storage with its existing SAN infrastructure for increased storage capacity and ‘like-local’ access to cloud data.

National Lloyds & American Summit Insurance had been using a SAN to store and protect its department and employee folders, along with images used by its policy and claims administrators. When the company found itself needing to replace its SAN three times within five years, on top of spending $3,300 a month to perform DR backups, National Lloyds began the search for a simple, affordable and flexible cloud storage backup solution for its DR needs. It chose TwinStrata’s CloudArray virtual appliance, which provides a secure gateway between its VMware infrastructure and backup software, delivering immediate, ‘like-local’ access to Amazon cloud storage.

"TwinStrata’s CloudArray has enabled us to truly simplify our DR backup strategy, while allowing us to increase the overall quality and flexibility of our storage environment and decrease our operational costs," said Joe Kempenich, vice president of Information Technology for National Lloyds & American Summit Insurance. "SAN upgrades, which used to take multiple weekends and required precious resources to complete, are now a thing of the past. We are no longer tied to proprietary hardware, we require less on-site disk storage and we no longer worry about running out of disk or not having access to data because of a disk failure."

Since deploying its CloudArray-powered cloud SAN, National Lloyds has been able to move its images and department and employee folders to the cloud, which has resulted in a savings of $2,600 a month in DR costs.

CloudArray iSCSI storage gateways make remote storage as fast, safe and easy to access as local storage. CloudArray virtual or physical appliances take minutes to configure and integrate public cloud, private cloud and local or remote storage devices into flexible cloud SANs’ that provide unlimited storage, CDP, tapeless offsite backup, instant disaster recovery, and branch office storage consolidation.

CloudArray appliances are available from TwinStrata with software appliances available for free download.