Sandy Alexander, US Graphics Communications Company, Chooses ClearSky Data

ClearSky Data, Inc. announced that Sandy Alexander, Inc. (Sandy), a 450-employee graphics communications company that serves the Fortune 500, has replaced its physical on-prem storage systems with its enterprise storage-as-a-service.

Sandy is one of the largest independently owned, high-end commercial graphics companies in the US, providing its clients with design and production services for everything from catalogues and point-of-sale materials to billboards and digital content. Sandy’s IT team must not only manage and store very large digital files that are changing daily, but also needs to ensure they are accessible in its multiple office locations.

Justin Fredericks, IT lead, Sandy, was looking for cloud-forward services that will reduce storage costs and the amount of time spent managing backup and on-prem systems. Even when conducting incremental backups, the user was writing multiple terabytes of file changes to backups daily, which took hours to complete, and restoring data from backups likewise took far too long. Given that Fredericks IT staff is limited, he didn’t want to spend resources deploying, configuring and managing on-prem equipment.

Initially, he considered moving storage to the cloud, but its inherent latency meant he would not be able to get the performance it needed, especially for such large media files. While AFAs could provide performance, managing the equipment and ensuring access anywhere would have been too expensive and cumbersome.

“We decided we needed to push our data not to the cloud but to the edge, which would free us from managing on-prem gear and still deliver the performance we require for our large and constantly growing digital files,” Fredericks said. “ClearSky’s service gives us the best of both worlds: the resiliency, infinite capacity and redundancy of the cloud, and the very low latency of the edge. The service is simple to manage, performance is excellent, and we now have fast access to the data we need on-demand. Best of all, our data is automatically protected, so we don’t have to spend hours every day babysitting backups.“

He was able to decommission its SAN, backup systems and offsite DR, all of which are included in the ClearSky service. Sandy manages a single copy of its data, which the ClearSky service optimizes across its lifecycle, giving the company limitless data access, complete with flash performance protection, encryption in transit and at rest, and simplified data management. 

“Organizations like Sandy want to get out of the business of managing storage equipment and backups,” said Ellen Rubin, CEO, ClearSky. “We are making this dream a reality by leveraging both the edge and the cloud to provide a high-performance service that can replace the entire storage stack, dramatically reducing costs and simplifying management so IT teams can devote more time and resources to the strategic projects that add value to the business.“