During a storage refresh, IT administrators must be able to forecast future data center needs, analyze and possibly implement new software and/or hardware and evaluate price-performance ratio.

American Logistics Company (ALC), a national passenger transportation management company serving transit agencies, school districts and the healthcare industry, faced sluggish backup and recovery times, the dread of purchasing more costly HPE or EMC storage and keeping up with the current storage trends in the industry.

After several proof of concepts (POCs) with HPE 1Gb ISCSI and EMC 8Gb Fibre Channel (8GFC) storage, ALC, eager to revamp its backup and recovery storage solution, opted to take a completely different route—Windows Storage Spaces and DataON Cluster in a Box (CiB).

According to Mary Branscombe in 2015, a freelance technology writer with ZDNET, “[Storage Spaces has] gone from an acceptable alternative to the kind of RAID systems you find in NAS boxes to competing with full-featured SANs using the Scale-Out File Server (SoFS) role on commodity servers and storage.[1]”

For many small and medium-sized data centers, Storage Spaces is a first line solution, not to mention the cost-savings and performance bump folks get compared to a traditional SAN (even more so for pre-existing Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2016 users).

ALC came to the same conclusion as many in the industry have, not only did they save money, but ALC could get 40x the IOPS performance. In fact, ALC’s was so satisfied with the Storage Spaces DataON solution that it’s currently testing business and mission critical silver and gold tier production loads on two more DataON CiBs running Storage Spaces in a Windows Server 2016 ReFS environment.

Stay tuned for the upcoming ALC case study to find out more!

[1] Branscombe, Mary (2015, January 1) “Why You Don’t Need a SAN anymore” [Web Blog Post] Retrieved from http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-you-dont-need-a-san-any-more/