Storage optimization vendor Gridstore is driving into software-defined storage--and new customer empowerment through Technology & Education (ETTE) is going along for the ride.
Gridstore has a two-fold value proposition. On the one hand it claims it can speed the I/O of virtualized applications five-fold. On the other hand, Gridstore, which is now on version 3.0, offers data protection.
ETTE, now 11 years old, is a Washington, DC-based MSP, IT consulting and technical support shop that is increasingly hosting its services in the cloud. Like some other Gridstore clients, ETTE was already a heavy user of Veeam which provides backup software designed for virtual machines (thus the name Veeam as in VM).
ETTE was “challenged with finding a massively scalable and economical modular storage system for their Veeam disk-to-disk backup cloud service. After investigating competitive options, they chose six Gridstore 3.0 12TB capacity nodes for the backup-to-disk hardware component. Because of its seamless ability to scale, the solution will easily accommodate the anticipated +2TB growth per quarter,” Gridstore said.
As is increasingly customary, Gridstore essentially has usage or pay as you go-based pricing. “Because it is a pay-as-you-scale solution, it has allowed us to meet and exceed our original cost and performance goals,” said Lawrence Guyot, President, ETTE. “In the future, if backups start running long, we will simply add another backup server. As our volume of data grows, because of Gridstore's parallel performance scaling, we can easily add storage nodes to accommodate this growth without impacting perfomance.”
Behind Gridstore 3.0
The recently available Gridstore 3.0 is a software-defined storage (SDS) system that offers high performance and supports both physical and virtual systems such as VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. The company focuses largely on offering storage for Microsoft environments, those with Windows Server and the built-in hypervisor Hyper-V in particular.
The idea behind its technology is to make the application I/O operate at fast as possible, and deliver this function on a pay-as-you-go basis. And with its I/O acceleration Gridstore can offer what is called True Quality of Service (TrueQoS). The hardware was built especially to speed apps that run on virtual machines, and uses a so-called Server-Side Virtual Controller Technology (SVCT) that applies storage accelerators that actually adapt to your application’s patterns, and GridScale which applies parallel computing techniques to storage processing.
All this technology is not meant to be disruptive, but easy for IT and end users alike. For starters, the Gridstore system looks just like any hard drive to the user. And admins shouldn’t see a change either, as the scripts and current admin tools should continue to work.
Grappling with virtual machine storage is a big IT headache, a research house The Taneja Group can attest.
“It is well known by now that server virtualization plays havoc on traditional storage architectures, negatively impacting application performance. The industry has reacted with a variety of solutions, from modifying traditional architectures to all-flash arrays, and everything in between. Gridstore has taken a disruptive approach whereby they detect and sort IO at the VM level before committing data to storage. Combined with a Scale Out architecture they address many of the issues holding customers back from going wholesale into the software defined datacenter,” said Arum Taneja, Founder and Senior Analyst for Taneja.
MSP Today recently covered a customer where the Veeam and Gridstore technology really came together to solve a virtual bottleneck.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
