YMCA of Fox Cities of Wisconsin With Exablox

Exablox Corp. announced that the YMCA of the Fox Cities of Wisconsin, a non-profit organization promoting youth, adult and family activities, stores its mission-critical information with its OneBlox scale-out NAS.

The YMCA was faced with two pressing challenges. The mission-critical applications protected by Veeam Software, Inc. require more storage each year, placing a burden on the data-protection infrastructure. The marketing department’s nearly insatiable appetite for multimedia production and archives additionally compounded the YMCA’s phenomenal data-storage growth rates.

With a limited budget and a focused IT organization, the YMCA needed a feature-rich, easily managed, scalable storage solution supporting storage demands that double every year. With OneBlox, the organization has an all-in-one primary, backup and DR storage solution. It enables to recover its mission-critical information at a moment’s notice and can also restore business operations in the event of a disaster with a remote replica of the organization’s mission-critical information.

“We desperately needed more capacity to support our business, as employees are storing more information and digital assets. With our aging server, we were faced with a painful migration,” said Lance Hietpas, senior system network administrator,YMCA. “With Exablox, I now have a seamlessly scalable storage solution that continuously protects my data. I can recover information in an instant, and OneBlox replicates my information offsite for DR. I will never be faced with a forklift upgrade again.“

YMCA Business Challenges
YMCA was using an aging server as its filer and was quickly running out of available storage capacity. Since a traditional RAID implementation limited scalability, the IT organization was forced to disrupt the business and push onto its users the burden of constantly deleting potentially valuable information to free up space for new content. Faced with the trade-off among risking the loss of historical data, having backup jobs fail, or being unable to support new primary content, IT looked to upgrade its server. That proposition would require an expensive forklift migration and cost even more in lost productivity due to business disruption. Furthermore, there was no guarantee that the currently affordable server and storage choices would support the organization’s requirements two to three years in the future.

Like many organizations, the YMCA found that accurately predicting its storage needs for the next three years is an impossible task, given its unpredictable growth rates. With this unpredictability, the organization was faced with the prospect of spending too much and over-provisioning storage or of spending too little and needing another painful forklift upgrade much sooner. The IT organization spent up to 80% of its time managing data; requesting the business to delete digital assets, which jeopardizes Veeam backup retention policies; and trying to find ways to keep operations moving forward. To remedy its problems, the YMCA selected an all-in-one storage, backup and DR solution that would support its unpredictable and dynamic business requirements for years to come.

“Historically, IT organizations have been faced with the difficult trade-off between an expensive, feature-rich storage solution that is complex to manage or an affordable storage solution that often doesn’t satisfy business requirements,” said Douglas Brockett, CEO, Exablox. “Exablox is focused on delivering a storage solution that delivers a rich feature set while seamlessly scaling to support rapidly growing business requirements. We’re delivering a solution that expands storage capacity at a moment’s notice, provides nearly instantaneous recovery of information from automatic snapshots and enables IT to recover information from remote sites in the event of a disaster, all in an elegantly managed way. In doing so, we’re giving IT administrators back the coveted time they desperately need to support the business.“

Re-imagining Storage
The operational benefits of OneBlox were apparent to the YMCA. Not only is the IT department now spending 50% less time managing storage than it did, but also it has eliminated the problem of continually hitting the storage-capacity ceiling. It enables the YMCA to grow its storage capacity without ever configuring a RAID volume or LUN. Consequently, attempting to predict long-term Veeam storage requirements and the YMCA’s digital-asset storage appetite is no longer a business requirement or constraint. The users and Veeam backup administrators have more storage capacity available instantly-and with zero configuration. With Exablox’s BYOD strategy, the YMCA can also mix and match commodity HDDs, taking advantage of real-time price declines to meet its of tight budget requirements.

The YMCA required a complete solution and found that OneBlox’s integrated scale-out architecture, complemented by CDP and remote replication, satisfied its many requirements. Now every digital asset is protected and preserved with continuous, automatic snapshots across the global file system. To augment its local protection capabilities, the YMCA is replicating the OneBlox to an offsite location for DR. Regardless of the recovery request or the severity of the disaster, the YMCA’ digital information and Veeam backup images are protected.