TwinStrata Deploys CloudArray at O’Neil & Associates

TwinStrata, Inc., a cloud-based data storage company, backup and DR
solutions, announced that O’Neil & Associates
Inc., in the documentation and product
support industry, has reduced its storage-related capital and infrastructure
costs by using TwinStrata CloudArray to link its local storage to the cloud.

As part of its DR planning, O’Neil & Associates had implemented CDP to a secondary data center. Unfortunately,
while eliminating the need for tape, that decision also increased demand for
costly remote disk storage and its associated rack space, cooling and power
requirements. The company needed a solution that could expand capacity without
the need for additional disk.

Since the company’s DR plan requires employees to access the
secondary data center by VPN, the organization typically has significant idle
Internet bandwidth. O’Neil & Associates recognized that its environment was
ideal for cloud storage adoption.

The company decided to adopt Amazon S3 cloud storage to alleviate
the demands of disk’s capital and infrastructure costs. However, it still
needed a way for that cloud storage to be available virtually as a local disk
so that it was accessible to the CDP solution. After trialing a CloudArray
virtual appliance from TwinStrata, O’Neil & Associates was convinced it had
found what it needed and purchased a CloudArray physical appliance.

"The time required to
provision new storage hindered our ability to meet our data retention
commitments," said Dave Stackhouse, director of information systems at
O’Neil & Associates. "With
TwinStrata CloudArray, storage provisioning is a trivial matter, not the
significant undertaking it used to be. We’ve reduced the provisioning time for
retention log storage by at least 90% and eliminated the complex and demanding
planning and commitment required of our IT group. TwinStrata CloudArray proved
to be exactly what we needed."

"Plug and play
integration, enterprise-class security and local performance enable
organizations to deploy CloudArray as a direct replacement for traditional
storage infrastructure," said Nicos Vekiarides, CEO at TwinStrata.
"O’Neil & Associates saw the
opportunity to offload their rapidly growing off-site storage capacity. By
integrating the CloudArray gateway solution into their DR plan, they are able
to scale their storage at a moment’s notice without the costs, complexity and
maintenance life cycle they would have faced if they continued to grow existing
capacity. We’re excited that O’Neil & Associates have been able to use
CloudArray to meet their objectives of simpler and more scalable enterprise
storage that meets their data retention needs."