Northern Backup Improved Systems Performance by 300%, Reduced Systems Latency by 50%, Delivering 100% Uptime for Its Customers, while Reducing Data Storage Costs by 40%.
SANTA CLARA, Calif.— September 22, 2015 — Nexenta (@Nexenta), the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS), today announced that leading IT and data center provider Northern Backup Inc (@NorthernBackup) has chosen NexentaStor to ensure the highest levels of service, performance, agility, capacity, and redundancy. Northern Backup Inc (NBI) is a firm that specializes in the design, implementation, and support of information systems, using sound business principles, leading practices, and proven technologies. Using NexentaStor allows Northern Backup to deliver four times greater performance of IT application and data delivery at 60% of the price. Nexenta not only helps Northern Backup to meet and exceed current requirements, but also enables the company to offer new services and chart a path to greater growth.
Over the last several years, Northern Backup has experienced exponential growth. Customers range from small companies storing an SQL database on a simple server to enterprises that employ large numbers of servers dedicated to sophisticated ERP systems. Northern Backup identified the ability to dynamically provide storage according to specific user needs while ensuring high levels of performance, security, and ease of management as a critical requirement for customers. Companies use the data center and professional services provider to ensure their critical applications run at optimal levels and their data remains secure and accessible.
Prior to moving to Nexenta, Northern Backup used traditional SANs from Hitachi, Dell and HP. Their practice is run on the leading server virtualization platform, VMware vSphere. As their needs grew, they were forced to buy a large batch of storage every six months, yet they were also forced to retire SANs after 28 months due to restrictive storage hardware licensing and support cycles.
“While we were able to meet our customers’ needs, we felt like were weren’t in control of our own destiny when it came to storage,” said Brent Thumlert, Chief Architect, Northern Backup. “We knew there had to be a better way, so we started evaluating alternatives. Software-Defined Storage was rising in popularity, and gave us the flexibility not to be locked into anyone’s hardware so we investigated further. We found that not all SDS is created equal. In fact much of SDS looks a lot like old school storage.”
Northern Backup evaluated several storage alternatives based on storage capacity, performance, agility, reliability, ease of manageability and deployment. They wanted the flexibility and performance of SDS coupled with the freedom and cost effectiveness of off the shelf commodity hardware. The Northern Backup team evaluated VMware vSAN, Nexenta, Simplivity and Nutanix. The company selected NexentaStor after it clearly out-performed all the options.
“With NexentaStor, we not only control our own ecosystem, but we’re seeing impressive performance improvements. For example, we measured performance using Microsoft SQL IO tool, a read/write-intensive application and the most demanding query for that application. It is a random write to a bunch of disks in small increments. We saw 27K IOPS performance with NexentaStor compared to 2K IPOS for our previous systems. This translates into faster delivery of data-intensive applications such as SAP reports and CRM application use. Writes and the speed of writes are done at an incredibly fast rate and Nexenta doesn’t affect the backend at all. Overall we’re seeing a 50% average write latency coupled with a four times performance improvement,” added Thumlert.
Northern Backup also compared each alternatives’ cost per terabyte. Compared to their typical SAN installation and the current alternatives, NexentaStor delivers these improvements at a 40% savings. Nexenta reduces the cost per terabyte by $100 yet increases performance and Northern Backup’s footprint. NexentaStor also provides the level of continuity required of high availability customers including instant hot disk replacement of any failed disk. This allows customers to set metrics for failover times.
“The bottom line is that NexentaStor is the best alternative across the board today and going forward. As technology gets denser, we can increase density with any hardware vendor we choose. We’ll use the same Nexenta storage platform and it will easily adjust as content adjusts,” concluded Thumlert.
NexentaStor has a proven track record of successful deployments across a diverse set of industries, including higher education, hosting, media and service providers. Customers have realized millions of dollars in cost savings, exponential increases in performance, and the improved flexibility and scalability required to support growing data volumes. Additional features of NexentaStor include:
- Unified File (NFS and SMB) and Block (FC and iSCSI) services
- Built on ZFS for enterprise grade data integrity, scale and performance
- Scales from 10’s of terabytes to petabytes
- Unlimited file system sizes
- Inline data reduction for additional storage cost savings
- Unlimited space optimized snapshots and clones
- Periodic asynchronous long distance replication
- Seamless integration with VMware environments
NexentaStor 5.0 integrates with NexentaFusion and VMware vCenter to deliver dramatically simplified deployment, configuration and on-going management of Software-Defined Storage infrastructures, large and small. NexentaStor’s new, built-from-the-ground-up, high performance management framework provides an easy to program, self-documenting REST API for new levels of orchestration and integration with end-user and partner ecosystems. This REST API eases the overall management of large storage configurations through the introduction of a new UI (user interface), simplifying the support of additional arrays, and a powerful new CLI for automation and configuration management. For VMware environments, NexentaStor builds on its existing VAAI Block support with a new vCenter Plug-in, enabling multi-tenant management of NexentaStor systems, deployed on physical hardware or in virtual machines for easy to scale multi-tenant file services.
Tweet this: .@NorthernBackup chooses @Nexenta over other storage for highest levels of service, performance, agility & redundancy. http://bit.ly/1FqKAwD
About Nexenta
Nexenta is the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS) with 6,000+ customers, 400+ partners, 33 patents, and more than 1,200 petabytes of storage under management. Nexenta uniquely integrates software-only “Open Source” collaboration with commodity hardware-centric “Software-Defined Storage” innovation. Nexenta OpenSDS solutions are 100% software-based; and 100% hardware-, protocol-, and app-agnostic providing organizations with Total Freedom protecting them against punitive vendor lock-in. Nexenta provides organizations with the "true" benefits of Software-Defined Everything-centric Cloud Computing – from data centers to end users; from the infrastructure to apps. Nexenta OpenSDS enables everyday apps from rich media-driven Social Living to Mobility; from the Internet of Things to Big Data; from OpenStack and CloudStack to Do-It-Yourself Cloud deployments – for all types of Clouds – Private, Public, and Hybrid. Founded around an "Open Source” platform and industry-disrupting vision, Nexenta delivers its award- and patent-winning software-only unified storage management solutions with a global partner network, including Cisco, Citrix, Dell, HP, Quanta, SanDisk, Seagate, Supermicro, VMware, Western Digital, Wipro, and many others.
For more information, visit, www.nexenta.com, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. Also, download the newly published Nexenta Special Edition Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) for Dummies eBook.
Nexenta, NexentaStor, NexentaConnect, NexentaEdge and NexentaFusion are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nexenta Systems Inc., in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks and company names mentioned in this document are properties of their respective owners.
# # #
Media Contacts:
Allison Darin
Director of Communications and Public Relations, Nexenta
831-359-8208
pr@nexenta.com
Permalink: https://nexenta.com/company/media/press-releases/leading-it-managed-serv...