Intraworks IT Management Chooses Gridstore

Gridstore, Inc.announced that Intraworks IT Management, an IT solutions provider north of Victoria, British Columbia, is the latest customer to embrace its storage virtualization offerings.

“We had been hunting around for some time looking for new storage technology to ease our data center requirements. We looked at expensive and complex to configure options including solutions from NetApp, EMC and DataCore,” said Phil Stiller, founder and president, Intraworks. “All of these options were complicated, limited in their ability to grow with a data center’s needs and prohibitively expensive. Then we found Gridstore and decided to test run its offerings.“

“Getting into new technology is stressful. We had to know what the Gridstore units were like in real life, so we gave them a work out – unplugged them, rebooted and the system never failed. They performed exactly as Gridstore said they would. The units were incredibly easy to implement. Redundant storage usually requires several days to get the software functioning on track. With Gridstore, the solution was up and running the same day. It was very impressive.“

After a thorough assessment, Gridstore provided the company with single site back-end storage to a server 2012 R2 SMB cluster. The SMB cluster provides storage to several Hyper-V clusters. The Gridstore solution allows Intraworks to manage a common storage pool for all of the company’s VMs – enabling the proper management and redundancy to Intraworks’ production servers, so customers’ systems are up and running all day, every day.

Intraworks found that the Gridstore functioned like ‘RAID across servers’ and that it was a solution that provided greater storage flexibility and less downtime when deployed. The company noted that with Gridstore in place it can now run its System Center 2012 and VMs instantly on any server. With expected storage growth, the scalability of Gridstore was another attractive and required feature.

Stiller added: “For us, the greatest savings realized when we moved to Gridstore, came in manpower. Gridstore provided us with the ability to deploy additional storage without interruption to production. For Intraworks and our customers, the prospect of no disruption is huge. Gridstore performed exactly as the team said it would.“