ETTE brings storage space and security to customers

Known for its responsiveness, expertise, and commitment to customer satisfaction, ETTE provides affordable solutions for hardware and software support, virtual server hosting and server migration, online backup, and 24/7 remote monitoring and maintenance.

Challenge: A cost effective, scalable and secure storage solution
ETTE is a vital provider of IT services to its customers. Its company “bio” touts itself as a technology fixer with the resources to make its clients IT pain points disappear: “We all love technology when it works. But some of us love it even more when it doesn’t. That’s us, and the chance to battle broken technology is what gets us out of bed in the morning. Why? Because for us there’s no better feeling than making a customer’s computer and technology problems simply go away.”

ETTE IT consultants guide clients in choosing broadband services, productivity and system software, backup technologies, and networking topologies. After over a decade of steady growth, ETTE began to see a looming data storage challenge -one that could have ultimately resulted in the lessened ability to provide cost effective storage to its customers.

ETTE had tried several solutions before Gridstore “...to little satisfaction, said Lawrence Guyot, President of ETTE. “Facing tens of thousands of dollars of SAN storage costs, Gridstore eliminated the need to purchase this expensive hardware.”

ETTE installed the Gridstore Building Block Capacity Solution, a 1U storage appliance attached to standard 1Gb or 10Gb Ethernet, in its data center. Each node contained all required software with unlimited vControllers and management.

Gridstore Building Blocks provided a cost effective and scalable storage solution to serve as ETTE’s primary VEEAM repository and for other storage that it deemed did not warrant SAN space. In one rack, Gridstore accompanied a three host VMware Enterprise Plus cluster, powered by a VNXe3300 SAN. In the second rack, it accompanied five physical hosts running Microsoft RDS, Exchange, domain services and virtual firewall applications.

The Gridstore solution filled in the gaps in three specific areas of ETTE- as a VEEAM backup repository, as a secondary destination for its Crashplan repository and as replication end points. As a result, ETTE gained valuable storage and multiple single points of failure while benefiting from a next- generation storage offering at one-third the cost of comparable standalone SAN solutions.

Solution: Gridstore solutions scale to meet ETTE’s storage needs
Once ETTE completed its move to the Gridstore solution, it began to scale its backup repositories in the multi-terabyte range- a feat the company was previously unable to do. The Gridstore solution allows ETTE to easily deal with rapidly growing capacity needs, delivering seamless capacity growth from 12 TB to 3PB with the addition of storage nodes on a pay-as-you-scale model. With Gridstore Capacity Building Blocks on board, ETTE now has the means to offer QoS within its Hyper-V test environment.

“We can perform larger VEEAM backups and maximise for in-line deduplication,” said Guyot. “Gridstore makes management much easier where in the past we had to limit our backup sets to 2TB and we were using DAS. We can now run to the Gridstore solution and have much larger LUN with similar performance.”

With the Gridstore Building Blocks, forklift upgrades and complex data migrations are eliminated, providing ETTE with the ability to quickly grow capacity, I/O and processing going forward.

Results: Exceeding performance and cost goals
ETTE realised several benefits in implementing the Gridstore solution:
A robust, fault tolerant solution that is easily scalable and is regularly being enhanced. Gridstore solutions fit naturally into Windows architecture appearing like local¨hard drives to the operating system and are the perfect storage solution for both performance (hybrid caching) as well as capacity storage.
Performance has increased an astounding 400-600% for ETTE since its move to Gridstore, translating to more consistent backup windows and a high ROI. Gridstore prides itself on accelerating application I/O up to 500% and beyond.
As ETTE’s business grows Gridstore can scale with the company to accommodate larger backup sets within a fixed backup window. As ETTE’s user data continues expanding, it will be able to easily add nodes into its data center.
A clear pricing model. There were no contractual surprises.â�¨For ETTE, the relationship with Gridstore was a key differentiator: “We selected Gridstore because we were extremely impressed with their willingness to work with us and to act on our suggestions and findings. It’s rare to find a vendor that is so open to end user feedback and that actually implements changes in a timely manner. That was the real selling point for us. After a few version upgrades we became very impressed with the performance we got out of the Gridstore solution.” âBut what’s most impressive is the improvement in performance: “As an MSP we constantly need to update our data protection infrastructure to accommodate our ever-increasing virtualised environment,” added Guyot. “Because Gridstore is a pay-as-you-scale solution, it has allowed ETTE to exceed its cost and performance goals. If backups start running long, we will simply add another backup server, and as our volume of data grows we can easily add Gridstore nodes to accommodate the growth.”