Intraworks I.T. Management implements Gridstore company-wide

Intraworks also provides a variety of innovative hardware solutions from industry leading manufacturers including its own line of Proximity servers and workstations.
Challenge: Providing a wide array of IT services to a niche customer base meant downtime was not an option, even for a storage upgrade.

Intraworks delivers a technological lifeline to its niche customer base, the SMBs on Vancouver Island and other regional businesses in the lower mainland. As the largest IT solutions provider north of Victoria, British Columbia, its 5000 square foot data center makes available to it clients access to a fully secured, environmentally controlled and power redundant data center with 100 mbps fiber and Internet access. Intraworks prides itself on reliable IT offerings to its clients and service without disruption.

Intraworks constantly monitors its virtual machines and disk arrays on multiple servers and it needed a redundant storage solution for its critical applications and cloud services. With a steadily growing client base, ease of scalability was of utmost importance to Intraworks. And there were budget considerations, as well.
“We had been hunting around for some time looking for new storage technology to ease our data center requirements. We looked at expensive and complex to configure options including solutions from NetApp, EMC and Datacore. All of these options were complicated, limited in their ability to grow with a data center’s needs and prohibitively expensive,” said Phil Stiller, president of Intraworks. “Then we found Gridstore and decided to test run its offerings.”

After evaluating Intraworks’ needs, Gridstore provided the company with single site back end storage to a server 2012 R2 SMB cluster. The SMB cluster provides storage to several HyperV clusters. Gridstore allows Intraworks to manage a common storage pool for all of the company’s virtual machines – enabling the proper management and redundancy to Intraworks’ production servers, so customers’ systems are up and running all day, every day.

Intraworks found that the Gridstore functioned like “RAID on servers.” and that it was a solution that provided greater storage flexibility and less downtime when deployed. “For us,” said Stiller, “the greatest savings realised when we moved to Gridstore, came in manpower. Gridstore provided us with the ability to deploy additional storage without interruption to production. For Intraworks and our customers, the prospect of no disruption is huge. Gridstore performed exactly as the team said it would.”

Solution: Gridstore – the ultimate in plug and play
Once on the ground at Intraworks, Gridstore was put through its paces. “Getting into new technology is stressful. We had to know what the Gridstore units were like in real life, so we gave them a work out- unplugged them, rebooted and the system never failed. They performed exactly as Gridstore said they would.”

Intraworks noted that with Gridstore in place it can now run its System Center 2012 and virtual machines instantly on any server. With expected storage growth, the scalability of Gridstore was another attractive and required feature.

“The units were incredibly easy to implement. Redundant storage usually requires several days to get the software functioning on track. With Gridstore, the solution was up and running the same day. It was very impressive, so much so we said let’s invest as a partner and help get the word out and grow Gridstore in Canada.”

Results: Confidence in the Gridstore solutions leads Intraworks to become a partner
Intraworks IT Management realised several benefits in implementing Gridstore:
· Even though Intraworks was looking for “RAID on servers,” the Gridstore installation goes beyond the ability of RAID-5 and RAID-6 that handle 1 or 2 disk failures, Gridstore handles failures of entire storage nodes, network connections and disks. It protects against any number of failures up to one less than half of the total nodes with no data loss or disruption- of utmost concern for Intraworks.
· Intraworks now has a common storage pool for its virtual machines. Performance and redundancy to its productions servers is stable and dependable.
· As Intraworks’ storage needs increase Gridstore will scale with the company providing high availability and minimal to no downtime.
· Gridstore provided optimal results, even though its acquisition price point was significantly lower than other comparable solutions.
· As a member of Gridstore’s Partner Program, Intraworks now provides resources and experience needed for a solution that addresses the virtualisation I/O blender problem. With Gridstore’s software defined storage solutions, Intraworks provides a virtualisation offering that is easy to manage and enables simple scaling while reducing I/O bottlenecks.

“There’s nothing like Gridstore out of the box,” said Stiller. “It works exactly as the Gridstore team said it would. It was up and running the day we received it.”