Northern Backup Replaces Hardware-Based Storage Systems with Nexenta Open Software Defined Storage

With traditional on-premises IT deployments, the cost, maintenance and restrictions of what was installed placed many limitations in the way organizations operated. It could be upgraded, but once again it would cost more without really doing anything about the limitations the infrastructure placed on future growth. Today’s digital environment requires companies to have the option of scaling in either direction in order to accommodate market conditions. Northern Backup Inc (NBI), a company that specializes in the design, implementation and management of information systems, has chosen the NexentaStor platform to improve its storage capability.

With so much digital being created today, the storage solutions service providers implement must take into consideration the always on and connected world we live in today.

As Northern Backup was experiencing exponential growth in the past several years -- by providing services to customers ranging from small companies storing an SQL database on a simple server to enterprises with large numbers of servers dedicated to sophisticated ERP systems -- it had to find a new storage solution.

Nexenta, the creator of NexentaStor, is a global provider of Open Source (News - Alert)-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS). According to the company, its solution delivered improved system performance of 300 percent, reduced systems latency by 50 percent, 100 percent uptime for NBI customers, and all this while still lowering data storage costs by 40 percent.

These improvements were responsible for meeting and exceeding the current requirements of the company, which enabled Northern Backup to start offering new services and further increase the growth it has been experiencing.

“The bottom line is that NexentaStor is the best alternative across the board today and going forward. As technology gets denser, we can increase density with any hardware vendor we choose. We’ll use the same Nexenta storage platform and it will easily adjust as content adjusts,” said Brent Thumlert, Chief Architect, Northern Backup.

NexentaStor has been deployed across a range of industries, including higher education, hosting, media and service providers. It delivers increases in performance that are exponential, while providing the flexibility and scalability that are critical for today’s centers to support growing data volumes.

The NexentaStor platform offers Unified File (NFS and SMB) and Block (FC and iSCSI) services built on ZFS for enterprise grade data integrity, scale and performance. This allows it to scale from 10’s of terabytes to petabytes with unlimited file system sizes. It also integrates seamlessly with VMware environments to address the virtualization services companies are now looking for to enable easy-to-scale multi-tenant file services.

Customers want availability, high levels of performance, security and a system that can be managed easily. If centers don’t have the storage technology to make this possible, their customers will find other providers.  By migrating to the NexentaStor platform, Northern Backup has future-proofed its infrastructure for some time to come.