SUNNYVALE, CA — (Marketwired) — 01/22/15 — , the award-winning company reimagining storage, today announced that the , a non-profit organization promoting youth, adult and family activities, now stores its mission-critical information with Exablox–s ® scale-out NAS. The YMCA was faced with two pressing challenges. The mission-critical applications protected by Veeam require significantly 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 desperately needed a feature-rich, easily managed, scalable storage solution supporting storage demands that double every year. With Exablox–s OneBlox, the organization has an all-in-one primary, backup and disaster-recovery storage solution. OneBlox enables the YMCA to painlessly recover its mission-critical information at a moment–s notice and can also restore business operations in the event of a disaster with a full 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 for the YMCA of the Fox Cities of Wisconsin. “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 disaster recovery. I will never be faced with a forklift upgrade again.”
The YMCA of the Fox Cities of Wisconsin 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 tradeoff 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 of the Fox Cities of Wisconsin 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 percent 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 disaster recovery 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 of 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.”
The operational benefits of OneBlox were immediately apparent to the YMCA of Fox Cities. Not only is the IT department now spending 50 percent less time managing storage than it did prior to installing OneBlox, but also it has eliminated the problem of continually hitting the storage-capacity ceiling. OneBlox–s scale-out architecture enables the YMCA to instantly 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 simply have more storage capacity available instantly — and with zero configuration. With Exablox–s BYOD (Bring Your Own Drive) strategy, the YMCA can also mix and match commodity hard drives, 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 fully integrated scale-out architecture, complemented by continuous data protection (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 disaster recovery. Now, regardless of the recovery request or the severity of the disaster, the YMCA of the Fox Cities– digital information and Veeam backup images are safely protected.
Exablox is the award winning company reimagining storage. Exablox solves businesses– runaway storage costs and information management nightmares by providing a cloud-managed, scale-out object-based solution that is affordable and easy to use. OneBlox is an inclusive storage offering that combines an elegant hardware architecture and integrated, enterprise-grade software, including inline deduplication, continuous data protection and disaster recovery. Founded in 2010, Exablox is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and backed by leading Silicon Valley venture firms. Visit Exablox online at and join the conversation at .
Renae Cazet
Trainer Communications
(925) 271-8228
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