ECMD Chooses Two Infinidat 249TB F2230 Enterprise Storage Systems

Infinidat Ltd announced that ECMD, Inc., a builder and distributor of finely crafted millwork, has upgraded its storage infrastructure using its solutions.

The Infinidat F2230 enterprise storage systems installed in each of the company’s 2 data centers have enabled ECMD to exceed its SLOs while lowering the cost and complexity of its storage operations.

When ECMD made the change to Infinidat 2 years ago, it sought to upgrade from the IBM XIV storage system it installed in the early 2010s. After seven years using XIV, ECMD needed a higher-powered storage system that would scale with its business needs and provide a greater degree of reliability.                      

“We wanted a storage solution that was reliable and high-performing enough to run our entire infrastructure on,” said Steve Brown, VP, MIS, ECMD. “However, we also needed a solution that is extremely easy to manage on a day-to-day basis, because we have a small staff and can’t afford a dedicated person to manage storage. Infinidat fit the bill perfectly, and best of all was affordable and provided capacity on demand, allowing us to grow the solution to our needs.“

ECMD runs its key business applications on VMware with Infinidat storage. Its IT architecture consists of 8 VMware ESX hosts running approximately 120 VMs.

Applications running on VMware’s VMs include custom-written applications for internal and external operations, hosting for the company’s public websites, numerous mission-critical SQL server databases, Exchange hosting the entire corporation’s email, and internal and external mobile applications for employees, partners and customers.

In addition, ECMD employs a DR methodology consisting of VMware SRM and Infinidat’s low-latency asynchronous replication to protect and meet the business and customer needs in the event of any crisis.

ECMD set up the system for HA replication to its DR data center, enabling quick recovery of major services in the event anything happens to interfere with operations. The two F2230 systems came with 249TB of available storage space after data protection and before any data reduction technologies such as compression. ECMD purchased the capacity that it needed at the time, holding open the option to upgrade its capacity at any time in 10TB increments.

ECMD worked with business partner Dynamix Group, Inc. to investigate storage options, settling on Infinidat for its performance, reliability, and ties to VMware for features and functionality like integrated snapshots and SRM.

“When we switched from IBM blades to Cisco UCS for compute power, we found that some batch jobs ran 30 minutes faster, and when we switched the storage from XIV to Infinidat, our longest running batch job ran two hours faster,” said Jakob Carstensen, technical support team manager, ECMD. “Infinidat’s performance continues to impress us, even two years later.“

The InfiniBox enterprise storage array delivers faster-than-all-flash performance, HA, and multi-petabyte scale for mixed-application workloads.

“When ECMD set out to build its industry’s premier technology program, it turned to Infinidat to create a true enterprise-grade storage infrastructure, capable of expanding as business requires,” said Brian Carmody, CTO, Infinidat. “With InfiniBox, customers with vision, like ECMD, can exceed their storage-level objectives while lowering the cost and complexity of their petabyte-scale storage operations.“

“Infinidat helps us compete with and win against much larger competitors,” added ECMD’s Brown. “It has provided us with the mission-critical performance and reliability customers expect from a global millworking powerhouse.“