National Seating & Mobility With StorTrends

StorTrends, the storage division of American Megatrends, Inc.(AMI), announced that National Seating & Mobility (NSM), a custom mobility, rehabilitation, and adaptive seating systems provider headquartered in Nashville, TN, has deployed its storage in order to boost storage performance and ensure data protection, HA and DR.

Prior to implementing the StorTrends’ solution, NSM had experienced frequent disk failures that caused backup windows to run much longer than desired. This was due in part to the growth of the organization over the past 30 years from five locations to a national network of over 1,000 professional assistive technology providers serving clients, therapists, and physicians across the US.

Of necessity, the IT environment expanded as well to include 75TB of data, supported by 20 HP and Dell physical servers, 50 Hyper-V virtual servers, Dell and Cisco network switches, two SQL Server databases, 100 MySQL databases, a custom built ColdFusion based in-house CRM, and a 2010 Exchange server with 1,000 users all running in a Windows 7 and 8.1 environment.

With this data growth, NSM knew that its previous solution, a homegrown SAN consisting of multiple older disks for backup, would not suffice long-term. After researching various options, the IT department selected StorTrends storage. StorTrends’ compatibility with Veeam Software, Inc. for onsite production backup combined with high-speed replication capabilities to an offsite DR site were among its many selling points. This NSM took advantage of immediately by deploying a dual controller StorTrends SAN at its primary datacenter in Chattanooga with a mirror StorTrends SAN in Nashville to ensure fast and accurate backup and DR.

“We immediately felt the impact of having a solid backup system in place,” said Nathan Buck, NSM’s network manager. “StorTrends has definitely been a ‘set it and forget it’ kind of device. In the past we had disks that would frequently fail. StorTrends provides consistent performance.“

Buck cited additional benefits to using the solution as well, including the fact that the StorTrends’ device is multi-purpose. While NSM is using it for a backup to disk solution, the organization could use it in the future as traditional SAN, or to run it alongside its existing backup system. Buck also credited StorAid, the StorTrends technical support division, as part of the success of the solution.

“The service and support experience has gone extremely well,” explained Buck. “Any time questions arise, they are there to answer our questions quickly and accurately.“

“The StorTrends solutions are a perfect fit for the tiered data management structures in today’s enterprises, as NSM quickly discovered,” said Justin Bagby, director, StorTrends. “These solutions offer management ease, with the high performance and reliability required to serve mission critical data. Moreover, StorTrends is the right solution for the future, giving National Seating & Mobility the flexibility to grow their storage environment how and when they need to – whether its all-flash, hybrid flash or spinning disk, based on their own application and budgetary requirements.“

National Seating & Mobility clients are often severely physically challenged. The majority are pediatrics with diagnoses of birth defects, Cerebral Palsy, Muscular Dystrophy, and Spina Bifida. NSM also serves teens, adults, and seniors challenged with severe trauma, disease, and skeletal disorders.