Life-Science Innovations Installs Multiple Tintri All-Flash Units

Life-Science Innovations, LLC (LSI), a company that provides strategic guidance and support to affiliate life sciences and engineering companies, is keeping its backups running smoothly and on time after switching from NetApp storage solutions to Tintri, Inc.

For several years LSI struggled to manage a NetApp storage solution over two datacenters with a highly virtualized environment. Backups had to be run at night to avoid impacting production servers too much. Also, patch updates, although started in the evening, would often run into the next day causing servers to reboot randomly throughout the day.

“We tried to set up deduplication and replication between our two data center sites, but the NetApp arrays couldn’t keep up,” said Tim Starkenburg, LSI systems administrator. “There was so much I/O that we couldn’t run backups during the day without taking out our production servers. Our backups were often running at least one week behind, which made our DR efforts nearly worthless.“

Consultants recommended an expensive forklift upgrade to address the problem. Instead, LSI turned to Tintri.

Starkenburg and his team installed multiple Tintri all-flash units, covering the company’s main datacenter for production workloads and a remote site for DR. With Tintri, LSI is replicating 100% of its servers between both sites every night, keeping 14 days of snapshots on the production systems and two snapshots remotely.

LSI servers are backed up during the day instead of overnight. And Starkenburg no longer has to worry about high I/O workloads impacting production systems.

“By deploying Tintri, we are now able to keep our backups current,” Starkenburg said. “Since we have full copies of all of our data at the remote site from the night before, we don’t worry about disasters anymore. And because of the performance of Tintri snapshots, it only takes us a couple of hours to run backups.“

Also, LSI saves time and money by reducing the time it takes to manage backups. Before deploying Tintri, LSI storage administrators spent more than half of their time creating backups.

Backups and ongoing management are much faster and easier with Tintri, according to Starkenburg: “I only spend a couple of hours each week working on storage management now. On most days, I don’t even log in to look at the Tintri console. Since I’m not spending as much of my time doing backups, I can now focus on new and more useful IT projects like managing the productivity of our workstations. Adopting Tintri has been an excellent decision for our company.“

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