O'Neil & Associates Reduce Cost, Complexity of Continuous Data Protection with TwinStrata CloudArray and Amazon S3

NEW YORK, June 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Cloud Computing Expo, Booth #339 --

• TwinStrata CloudArray deployed in conjunction with Amazon S3 cloud storage has minimized the cost of disk storage and virtually eliminated data provisioning overhead.
• TwinStrata-enabled cloud storage takes advantage of existing underutilized resources required by O'Neil & Associates' disaster recovery plan.

TwinStrata, Inc., the leading innovator of cloud-based data storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions, today announced that O'Neil & Associates Inc., a global leader in the documentation and product support industry, has dramatically reduced its storage-related capital and infrastructure costs by using TwinStrata CloudArray® to link its local storage to the cloud.

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As part of its disaster recovery planning, O'Neil & Associates had implemented continuous data protection (CDP) to a secondary data center. Unfortunately, while eliminating the need for tape, that decision also increased demand for costly remote disk storage and its associated rack space, cooling and power requirements. The company needed a solution that could quickly expand capacity without the need for additional disk.

Since the company's disaster recovery plan requires employees to access the secondary data center by VPN, the organization typically has significant idle Internet bandwidth. O'Neil & Associates recognized that its environment was ideal for cloud storage adoption.

The company decided to adopt Amazon S3 cloud storage to alleviate the demands of disk's capital and infrastructure costs. However, it still needed a way for that cloud storage to be available virtually as a local disk so that it was accessible to the CDP solution. After trialing a CloudArray virtual appliance from TwinStrata, O'Neil & Associates was convinced it had found exactly what it needed and purchased a CloudArray physical appliance.

"The time required to provision new storage hindered our ability to meet our data retention commitments," said Dave Stackhouse, director of information systems at O'Neil & Associates. "With TwinStrata CloudArray, storage provisioning is a trivial matter, not the significant undertaking it used to be. We've reduced the provisioning time for retention log storage by at least 90 percent and eliminated the complex and demanding planning and commitment required of our IT group. TwinStrata CloudArray proved to be exactly what we needed."

"Plug and play integration, enterprise-class security and local performance enable organizations to deploy CloudArray as a direct replacement for traditional storage infrastructure," said Nicos Vekiarides, chief executive officer at TwinStrata. "O'Neil & Associates saw the opportunity to offload their rapidly growing off-site storage capacity. By integrating the CloudArray gateway solution into their disaster recovery plan, they are able to scale their storage at a moment's notice without the costs, complexity and maintenance life cycle they would have faced if they continued to grow existing capacity. We're excited that O'Neil & Associates have been able to use CloudArray to meet their objectives of simpler and more scalable enterprise storage that meets their data retention needs."

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About O'Neil & Associates Inc.
O'Neil & Associates Inc. is a global leader in the documentation and product support industry.  Since 1947, O'Neil & Associates has grown their services to include paper, electronic and web-based documentation, content management systems, elearning, diagnositic systems and integrated logistics support to customers in the aerospace, consumer and defense markets.  O'Neil and Associates is an employee-owned company.

For more information about O'Neil & Associates products and services, visit www.oneil.com.

About TwinStrata CloudArray
CloudArray virtual or physical appliances take minutes to configure and integrate public cloud, private cloud and local or remote storage devices into flexible "Cloud SANs" that provide unlimited storage, continuous data protection, tapeless offsite backup, instant disaster recovery, and branch office storage consolidation. CloudArray appliances are available from TwinStrata with software appliances available for immediate free download at www.twinstrata.com/CloudArray-download. 

About TwinStrata, Inc.
TwinStrata is an innovator in enterprise-class data storage, data protection and disaster recovery/business continuity solutions using cloud storage. With TwinStrata CloudArray®, companies of all sizes can simply and economically leverage the scalability and efficiency of cloud storage while maintaining the availability, performance and security of local storage. CloudArray software and hardware solutions support all file and operating systems, and deliver substantial advantages over traditional off-site storage solutions, including a pay-as-you-go model, unlimited elastic capacity, local performance, in-cloud snapshots and disaster recovery, dynamic caching, automated policies, AES256 encryption, and continuous access to data. For more information visit TwinStrata.com or call 508-651-0199. 

Contact:
Mark Smith, JPR Communications
818-884-8282, ext. 22
[email protected] 

SOURCE TwinStrata, Inc.