Freight Company H&M Bay With X-IO Clustering Solution

X-IO Technologies (Xiotech Corporation) announced freight company, H&M Bay Inc deployed its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) storage with Active-Active Mirroring technology to ensure its business operations run continuously 24/7/365.

With an owner/operator network of over 10,000 independent carriers, H&M Bay picked X-IO’s clustering solution to ensure continuous availability for its mission critical operations.

H&M stores and transports frozen and refrigerated less-than-truckload (LTL) goods, such as meat, seafood, prepared foods and deli goods for manufacturers, retailers and distributors across the US. The company’s operations rely on its SQL database, which plays a fundamental role in the day-to-day running of the company.

When looking to modernize its SQL database, the team at H&M Bay found its existing SAN solution could not offer the performance required to support virtualization. It researched the market and after assessing a number of flash and legacy storage providers, picked two of X-IO’s ISE 730 hybrid storage systems with Active-Active Mirroring to deliver a solution to underpin its SQL Server environment virtualized with vSphere.

X-IO’s ISE 700 series hybrid storage arrays match the needs of data heavy database applications because they can provide performance for transactions, queries, analytics and reporting cost-effectively.

Active-Active Mirroring provides BC capabilities to H&M Bay, adding an additional element of resilience to its existing infrastructure. It allows the company to pair two ISE Hybrid Storage Arrays in a cluster so that they appear to server workloads as a single ISE. All operations on either side of the pairing will be replicated before the operation is acknowledged ensuring the safety of the data.

John Walker, IT manager, H&M Bay, said: “We couldn’t rely on local disk-based storage because there was no BC capability in the event of failure. X-IO was very understanding of this situation and ensured the installation and implementation of the solution was a painless process for us. The sales process was very good and X-IO came up with a solution that met our cost and performance requirements.“

Gavin McLaughlin, VP of WW marketing, X-IO, concluded: “The new and improved Active-Active Mirroring capabilities of the ISE solutions will revolutionize the BC capabilities for end users. H&M can enjoy the BC any growing business requires in a cost effective manner. The company has peace of mind even during seasonal peaks in demand.“