Russell Lands Selects TwinStrata and Veeam

TwinStrata, Inc. announced that Russell Lands, creator of
distinct recreational neighborhoods along the shores of Alabama’s Lake Martin,
has selected TwinStrata CloudArray to achieve the combination of data
protection with future-proof scalability, while reducing its management costs.

Russell Lands owns and operates 25,000 acres of land holdings
situated along more than 200 miles of shoreline on 44,000 acre Lake Martin;
four world-class marinas; Russell Crossroads, the town center including
restaurants and recreational facilities with thousands of acres of forest and
approximately100 miles of hiking, biking and equestrian trails; nine retail
stores including Russell Do-It and Russell Home Décor Centers; and Willow Point
Golf and Country Club. The company employs more than 500 people in numerous
locations.

Earlier this year, company management was challenged to keep pace
with growing storage demands, both onsite and offsite, for its many business
operations.

To meet DR objectives, Russell Lands used Veeam Backup &
Replication 6.0, and transferred data to an offsite co-location provider. The
company originally considered an expensive upgrade of its VMware servers to
increase storage capacity but instead took advantage of a special offer of a
Free CloudArray 1TB virtual storage appliance for Veeam users, and quickly
upgraded to an unlimited capacity CloudArray appliance. Deploying CloudArray
not only enabled them to bypass the costly storage capacity upgrade but also
the need for a co-location provider, resulting in a 75% reduction in offsite
storage expenses.

"Year after year, we had
to make the same decision. How fast will our data grow this year?"
said Cliff Grappe, Russell Lands IT director. "With the TwinStrata solution, we don’t have to guess any longer."

Grappe set the local cache size to several hundred GB, and
provisioned several TB of cloud storage space. With a cache large enough to
retain 95% of data that is accessed by Russell Lands employees, users do not
experience  loss in performance.

"With TwinStrata, we get
twin benefits. We still experience local performance because of the locally
cached data yet our data also sits at an offsite storage location with far
better DR provisions than we could ever afford before," said Grappe.

"With CloudArray, businesses
like Russell Lands can meet off-site backup and DR requirements with the
significant advantage of data growth on-demand rather than the endless cycle
and costs of traditional storage upgrades," said Nicos Vekiarides, CEO
at TwinStrata. "We’re proud to have
earned the business of Russell Lands, a company with a history of looking
toward the future, and pleased to have assisted them in their transition to
cloud 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, DR, and branch office storage
consolidation. CloudArray appliances are available from TwinStrata with
software appliances available for free download.