C-Ways

Situation

C>Ways provides tailor-made IT solutions for companies that are highly technology reliant in both the public and private sectors, specializing in the education and local community/government markets. Offering a 24/7 operation, C>Ways needed to meet the demands of its customer while remaining cost-effective. For instance, education in the UK took a turn in the last century; more and more adults are taking up college/university courses online, which placed greater strain on the IT infrastructure of many C>Ways customers.

Through its R&D team, C>Ways realised that a secure and reliable disaster prevention solution was required. C>Ways looked to create an automated mechanism to move old or archived data to a cost effective storage system that was highly expandable and managed the data to prevent disks from being over burdened. C>Ways also recognised that backup windows were shortening. In their search for a fully reliable, scalable, secure and redundant SAN storage solution, C>Ways identified Dot Hill.

Looking for a low Total Cost of Ownership, C>Ways also required flexibility to expand the Fibre Channel disk space, while being capable of delivering sustained bursts of backup writes as the disk system acts as the primary backup staging area.

Solution

C>Ways opted to integrate Dot Hill's SANnet II SATA Special Edition (SATA SE) solution as the staging area for two data types. The first being infrequently accessed data files. The second data set bases the SATA SE as a staging area for virtual tape backup, with full backups being pushed to tape after the SATA space is used for incremental backups three times a day.

The SATA SE stood out amongst its rivals for its ability to stand alone, with its own controllers, or as an add on to the original SANnet II environment already in place. In addition, the SATA SE met the requirements of typical college applications. For example, small files of random access, multiple users, and sustained long-term backup of data bursts. It also came out top in price performance and technical support.

Results

Nick Jackson, managing director of C>Ways Commented: "Dot Hill's support is great, we can track problems online. Dot Hill systems are not proprietary, which allows the customer to integrate other technologies that other vendors tend to lock in. Dot Hill also helped solve problems in the integration stage with old firmware. While this was not a Dot Hill problem, it was solved with no additional cost to the customer or ourselves."

The migration from the old system to the new one was a smooth process, fully supported by Dot Hill. It has enabled outsourced offsite backup and the cost of disaster recovery has been dramatically reduced by up to 80 percent. Restore speeds are instant from the SATA SE disk system and the need for expensive Fibre Channel expansion has been removed, resulting in a greater ROI.

"The solution has been such a success with our customers that we intend to integrate further Dot Hill SAN solutions into our offering," said Jackson. "The system developed for our education market is based on Dot Hill's SATA SE at the centre. In a recent sales campaign, more than 70 percent of targeted organisations have shown interest in our managed data solution based on Dot Hill."

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