We’ve been growing fast, and this has required us to upgrade our infrastructure to support this growth. We’re happy to announce that we’ve standardized on NEC D-Series SAN Storage, which offers us enterprise-class technology, strong encryption, full redundancy, and the ability to scale with our growth.

Here’s the low-down…

Challenges

• Unprecedented data growth
• Various complex storage systems
• Rising operational costs

Solution

• NEC D-Series SAN Storage (D4) with both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity
• Linux® 64-bit OS

Results

• Streamlined data growth
• Standardized on NEC D-Series SAN Storage
• Increased capacity & reliability
• Improved scalability
• Reduced complexity & costs
• Positive ROI

Storage Guardian specializes in data storage and online data backup solutions that ensure business continuity and reliable information-lifecycle management. Their innovative and cost-effective remote data backup and storage solution represents a superior alternative to tape-based data recovery systems. Used by small and midsize businesses, enterprises, and multiple-platform LAN computing environments, Storage Guardian safeguards clients’ critical business data in a secure location, and offers a remote backup service on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.

Challenges

Small, medium and large enterprises’ ever-growing data volumes and increasing need for foolproof business continuity has stimulated interest in outsourcing backup operations. While industries like financial services and healthcare may institute updates to their data backup solutions for regulatory compliance reasons, other businesses are motivated by the potential risk and impact of data loss. A single failure can be catastrophic for many organizations. Service-hosting companies are facing greater business risk from any failure, so it is imperative that they provide much stronger data protection for their clients.

In response to this growing demand, Storage Guardian developed an online and cloud backup service, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The company caters specifically to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), with an affordable, feature-rich online data backup and fast data recovery service that is distinguished by its easy-to-install, administer and use features.

“Without IT resources onsite, many SMBs don’t know what to do, or where to turn for answers and data protection,” said Omry Farajun, president and founder of Storage Guardian. “Many of our customers didn’t have any type of data backup previously—they rely on Storage Guardian to protect their data and ensure it’s available whenever they need it.”

Storage Guardian has experienced tremendous growth, with over 2,000 customers now using their storage service. “It is apparent that businesses are taking data backup seriously,” adds Farajun. “The surge in demand has also triggered unprecedented growth in the volume of data for Storage Guardian. The company scaled up to 100 TB of data storage in the last year alone.”

“Each client engagement is fully customized and scalable,” said Farajun. “In an effort to keep up with surging demand, Storage Guardian’s infrastructure became a complicated jumble of storage pieces and parts; they needed professional services to help get control of the data beast. We needed a way to streamline the growth of data, reduce complexity, and control operational costs.”

Solution - Scalable Performance

Storage Guardian chose NEC’s D-Series SAN storage solution to support the company’s extraordinary data growth. The D-Series SAN Storage solution provides high availability, scalability, as well as the 100 TB – and growing – capacity that Storage Guardian required. The solution’s advanced features and enterprise-class software – including snapshots, replication, performance management, multi-pathing, failover, energy conservation, and virtual storage partitioning for Quality of Service – deliver the performance and flexibility the company needs to grow on-demand.

“Storage Guardian chose NEC’s D-Series storage because of the superior quality of its components and migration methodology,” said Farajun. D-series has a proprietary algorithm that allows the solution to perform better as it scales. “The more NEC storage we use, the faster Storage Guardian has gotten. Not every storage vendor can deliver on that promise.”

The NEC D4 modular storage array provides both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity. A single D4 array can scale from just 300 GB to 288 TB of capacity by adding up to eleven 2U 12-drive expansion enclosures. Aggregate throughput of over 1,200 MB/s to hosts is provided through up to eight 8 Gbps Fibre Channel ports or up to four 10 Gbps iSCSI ports. These can be connected into a SAN or direct-connected as a simple and low-cost DAS configuration. The disk enclosures are connected to the controller via SAS wide-link connection for 48 Gbps bandwidth to each disk enclosure.

The system is fully redundant to protect against a single point of failure, with a battery backup unit for protecting the cache. Failed components are reported via alerts by either email or SNMP traps and in the management software.

Results - Growth & Positive ROI

Storage Guardian was completely satisfied with the deployment process. “NEC assessed our needs for adding capacity very quickly. You could measure it in hours, not days,” commented Farajun. “It was very quick. We can procure, ship, and install within a week and a half.”

NEC channel partner, West Coast Technology (WCT), was able to harness the Fibre Channel and deploy NEC’s D-Series storage very quickly. Storage Guardian now uses Linux® 64-bit OS, can scale reliably to more than 100 TB of storage, and grow even faster with NEC storage.

“As a business, being able to buy storage in smaller increments allows us to invest only as needed,” said Farajun This helps us improve our cash flow, and remain competitive and agile. We’ve been able to realize a positive ROI [return on investment] in a short period of time.”

Storage Guardian’s multi-tenant virtual, peer-to-peer, NAS environment has the ability to manage multiple network policies. The high-security environment ensures the highest levels of encryption. Standardizing on NEC’s D-Series storage has reduced the complexity of Storage Guardian’s operations, and enabled the company to streamline the growth of data. Cooling the subsystem has also helped to lower operational costs in the data center.

Farajun concluded, “It’s amazing to see how we can scale with NEC in less than a year. To watch the infrastructure scale and grow so simply is remarkable.”