TwinStrata’s Customer: O’Neil and Associates

O’Neil & Associates Inc. is in the documentation and product support industry.

Since 1947, it has grown their services to include paper,
electronic and web-based documentation, content management systems, e-learning,
diagnositic systems and integrated logistics support to customers in the
aerospace, consumer and defense markets. The firm is an
employee-owned company.

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, Inc., O’Neil & Associates
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, 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."