Value-Tier Enterprise NAS Solves Data Growth Challenges

An insurance company based in OHIO has been operational since 2009. It has become quite an established and well reputed insurance company among others. Their clientele have been increasing every year, and as a result client data has been growing in volume while data management has gotten complex.

Challenges:

Data Growth, Compliance & Simplified Management

The company had an in-house storage infrastructure previously but their client data was growing at a pace that made it difficult for their legacy infrastructure to keep up with.

In order to accommodate the growing volume of client data, they needed a capable enterprise-level storage solution. However, they had budget restrictions. And they needed to comply with industry regulations because of the nature of data their organization dealt with. Moreover, they wanted a storage that made scalability simpler in anticipation of future data growth.

“We had a number of challenges. We had a limited budget. We needed to comply with industry regulations. And we wanted to make sure that our storage infrastructure wasn’t vulnerable to virus attacks or ransomware attacks because they’re fairly common” – noted Carl the IT administrator of the insurance company.

That wasn’t all. They didn’t want to deal with the complexities of the storage infrastructure because their core operations focused around financial services. Therefore, they wanted the freedom that came with an easy-to-manage data storage solution.

After a Q & A sessions with our technical experts, we suggested our value-tier file storage solution: VSO™ NAS.

Solution:

24-bay 4U 3.5” VSO NAS Appliance (VSO-240R)

The insurance company chose our VSO-240R-i7. At the time of purchase, they chose to populate 16-bays with 16TB 7200RPM 3.5” SAS while the remaining bays were left unpopulated for future expansions. With the current number of drives, they configured a total of 256TBs of file storage space.

Results:

Budget-Friendly, Highly Scalable and Easy-to-Manage NAS Solution

The VSO NAS appliance delivered the future-proof file storage space the company needed at the cost that they were happy with. Additionally, compliance wasn’t a challenge anymore because of the integrated data services that StoneFly StoneFusion™ offered.

Besides the additional storage space challenges, data management concerns were also resolved.

“This appliance and its management interface make it look easy. We can manage all of our files and folders using a single web GUI. What I really like is that if we decide to include cloud storage, we don’t need anything else. The appliance has a built-in cloud connect feature and StoneFly has storage in a number of clouds too. It’s like everything in a box” said Carl.

The Additional Value StoneFly Value Scale Out (VSO) NAS Delivered:

Integrated Data Services & Features:

• Erasure Coding (Software RAID)
• Automated NAS Tiering
• Support for Enterprise SAS & SSDs.
• Support for Hybrid NAS Storage Deployment with Built-in Cloud Connect to Public Clouds, such as Azure or AWS, and Private Clouds.
• Single Centralized Management GUI.
• Delta-Based Snapshots.
• Replication (Synchronous & Asynchronous)
• Encryption (AES 256-bit & SSL/TLS Tunneling)

NAS Clustering for Additional Redundancy & High Availability :

Our NAS storage also facilitates users to deploy NAS clusters for additional redundancy and high availability.

Service providers, such as this insurance company, processes sensitive data and compliance regulations require them to make sure they never lose this data. Similarly, in order to effectively compete with other service providers, they need to deliver faster and reliable services. In other words, the service type business models cannot tolerate disruption or downtime.

Anticipating such requirements, we build our NAS capable of supporting NAS clusters. Just by adding another NAS appliance and leveraging the pre-configured software management solution, our clients can easily configure and setup NAS clusters.

Redundant, Modular & Hot-Swappable Key Components

StoneFly appliances are purpose-built to deliver the enterprise-level experience to our customers. This means that we are poised to make hardware maintenance and management easier for IT staff too.

Our appliances have redundant, high efficiency, and hot-swappable key components such as power supplies and storage drives. Adding or replacing a power supply or a storage drive is a simple process and can be done within minutes.

Therefore, the requirement of the insurance company to have the freedom to work without having to deal with the complexities of storage infrastructure was effectively fulfilled with our VSO NAS.