COREVAULT AND BLUE ARC TEAM UP TO DELIVER HIGH PERFORMING DATA BACKUP & PROTECTION IN THE CLOUD
SUMMARY
In today's business environment, no asset is more valuable than a company's data. Every organization needs a backup system that ensures maximum data protection and security and protects the company against potentially crippling data loss. CoreVault is a pioneer in providing cloud-based solutions for data backup and protection, serving a wide range of customers who entrust the company with their most valuable assets. To earn that trust, CoreVault must deliver a stable, secure, state-of-the-art solution. When strong company growth began testing the limits of its existing storage solution, CoreVault knew it had to move quickly to install a storage platform that delivered higher performance, richer features, enhanced flexibility, greater ease of use and more scalability. In turning to BlueArc networked storage, CoreVault not only solved its existing storage challenges, it built a foundation to expand its business into a wider range of hosted managed services.
THE COMPANY
CoreVault helps customers in more than 34 states identify, manage and protect their growing critical data. Their product lines include backup, recovery, hosting, virtualization and first-rate customer care. Since its inception five years ago, CoreVault has become a pioneer in providing cloud-based data backup and protection, offering a managed service in various markets with special emphasis on three key verticals: Financial, Legal and Healthcare. Recognition has been swift: In both 2009 and 2010 CoreVault was named one of the Metro Top 50 privately held companies by the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.
That growth, however, was accompanied by a few challenges. CoreVault's existing data storage solution was unable to deliver consistent performance, scalability or the flexibility vital to support its rapidly expanding customer base. In January 2010, CoreVault turned to a BlueArc Mercury 100 networked storage solution which delivered optimal performance and positioned the company to take on significant new business opportunities.
THE CHALLENGE
CoreVault's value proposition is based on the premise that data is the lifeline of every company and no precaution should be spared when it comes to securing that lifeline. The company's managed services solutions provide both online and nearline capabilities, enabling customers to outsource all aspects of data backup, data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity.
One of the challenges is the breadth of CoreVault's customer base - some customers have relatively small data storage requirements, while others have multiple terabytes.
"With a feature-rich platform such as BlueArc's Mercury 100, we can handle our growth expeditiously and economically. CoreVault is now able to accommodate customer data expansion in either small or large increments, without necessitating expansive changes to existing systems. We see hosting services and applications playing a major role in our cloud-computing future.
We will expand our services and offer customers layered solutions to their need for true dedicated virtualization," says Raymond Castor, Sr. Vice President of Information Technology at CoreVault. "Another important element is our partnership with BlueArc: They are proactive leaders and have proven themselves to be forward thinkers by adapting products to current technologies like virtualization. Thanks to BlueArc, we are confident that CoreVault's customers will reap significant benefits."
THE SOLUTION
Realizing that CoreVault's storage platform wasn't performing optimally, "We reviewed all available products on the market, ran a comparison, and selected two key leaders we felt offered the features and functionality we were looking for," says Castor. "We brought them in for evaluation, developed a formal test plan, utilized both products and ran a comparative analysis. At the conclusion of testing, BlueArc was the uncontested winner."
There were four key elements to the test plan:
- Performance
- Features and functionality
- Ease of use
- Scalability
Why did BlueArc win our business? "On performance, the number of IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) was significantly higher than our current platform," Castor says. "We had a test tool that simulated client activities we were able to run against the storage. BlueArc outperformed its predecessor. On features and functionality, it came down to flexibility and ease of set up, maintenance and management of storage. We were also impressed with the reporting capabilities of BlueArc. On ease of use, we liked the speed with which we could set up storage partitions and make incremental growth add-ons. BlueArc is definitely ahead of the game in its user interface. On scalability, BlueArc excelled at providing an ability to grow and maintain, even gain performance as you grow. We've found that the more storage you add to the BlueArc platform, the better its performance."
CoreVault now uses a dual-node Mercury 100 network storage solution with SAS drives exclusively. The solution is being used for the company's production site with plans to expand BlueArc to other sites as existing storage solutions reach their end-of-life cycle.
Castor was extremely pleased and impressed with the rollout of the solution. "I was impressed with the BlueArc management team and their knowledgeable technical staff," Castor says. "I've never seen a group that was more responsive. We worked with them to bring the system into a solid platform state, we replicated the data from the previous system to the new system, we sent our technical staff to training so they could be efficient at operating, managing and maintaining the system, and we brought it into production.
The BlueArc management and technical teams kept a very close eye on performance and operations for at least three months. It's a solid partnership and they did an awesome job of providing great service."
THE RESULTS
"Having a solid, stable storage system that performs reliably so customers can access their systems without problems, is absolutely critical," Jeff Cato, Vice President of Marketing at CoreVault, says. Another major benefit has been scalability. "When you buy a storage platform you want to ensure it can handle an expanding storage capacity as you move forward, and BlueArc meets the challenge," Castor says.
THE CONCLUSION
Secure in the performance, stability and scalability of the BlueArc solution, CoreVault is now positioned to explore new business expansion opportunities. In addition to offering data backup, data protection and storage solutions for its customers in financial, legal and healthcare, CoreVault is evolving so that it can provide a full range of cloud-based hosting services, enabling customers to selectively outsource IT operations to CoreVault. "CoreVault is developing new product lines, and will soon offer cloud hosting services. BlueArc will have a role in that as well," Cato says. "We see hosting services and applications playing a major role in our future. We are going to provide a wider array of choices for our customers, and we will have the solution if they need a true dedicated virtual machine." Castor says, "In doing that we will be able to take advantage of the virtualization features of the BlueArc solutions. And that's another important element in our partnership with BlueArc: They are proactive in remaining leaders in the technology world. They have proven themselves to be forward thinking in adapting products to current technology, such as virtualization. As the technology evolves, with BlueArc we are confident that we will be able to keep pace and provide the same type of leadership for our customers."