Media Provider now leverages StorONE for NAS and VMware as well
StorONE, the company that developed the only software-defined Enterprise Storage Platform, announced that America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) has expanded its use of StorONE for NAS and VMware.
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“ATK is an excellent example of our typical customer journey. They start with backup or archive, and then as other workloads emerge or old systems reach the end of life, they move them to the StorONE platform.”
ATK is where curious cooks become confident cooks. A media and publishing company based in Boston, ATK produces unique and original content for television, video, websites and podcasts, and printed magazines and books. When ATK needed help archiving and protecting their extensive library of media assets, they turned to StorONE’s S1:Enterprise Storage Platform.
“When evaluating our content requirements and how best to protect and archive our most critical assets, I didn’t want to get locked into a storage solution that could only store backups, or that could only be used as an archive,” said Dustin Brandt, Director of IT at ATK. “StorONE enables us to archive and consolidate 20+ years of digital assets, use it as an automated backup target, serve up storage for virtualization development, and provision on-demand storage shares for project development. We’re doing this at a price that is dramatically less than competing, single-use systems, and for the types of files and content that we deal with, we’ve even found storing our backups on StorONE to be less expensive and more accessible than putting them in the cloud.”
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ATK has been using StorONE for over two years and continues to leverage its flexibility to support multiple use cases. ATK initially used StorONE to migrate away from tape library archives and provide a better, overall administrative experience for dealing with long-term, cooler storage. Shortly after implementation, ATK began leveraging StorONE’s built-in NAS capability allowing users direct access to archive their old projects. StorONE provides them with better insight into what exactly is in their archive and has eliminated the need for a tape library.
“Our journey with StorONE continues to evolve,” Brandt explains, “as we build our layers of archival storage and begin using it in a primary storage capacity.”
Within the first year, ATK began using the same StorONE system as an NFS archive for its Rubrik backup appliance. In this scenario, ATK uses StorONE as the target for its automated backups and lifecycle policies of production virtualization and NAS systems. As Brandt indicates, “The flexibility of the system and ease of use of StorONE allows us to stay responsive to the company’s needs and quickly devise and provision new solutions.” Using their StorONE in this way, ATK is able to balance its archive strategy and reduce the company’s dependency on any single public cloud provider and their associated costs. In 2020, ATK began using StorONE as a storage host for development virtualization workloads, and in 2021, they are beginning to move some of their production NetApp NAS workloads to StorONE as well.
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“StorONE rewrote and collapsed the legacy storage IO stack to deliver a unique storage solution that has the flexibility to meet a wide variety of storage use cases from a single storage platform,” said StorONE CEO, Gal Naor. “ATK is an excellent example of our typical customer journey. They start with backup or archive, and then as other workloads emerge or old systems reach the end of life, they move them to the StorONE platform.”
At ATK, StorONE runs on a highly available storage controller with internal flash drives, which provide rapid data ingest. Connected to the HA storage controller are 2PBs of hard disk storage for long-term storage. StorONE automatically tiers data, as it ages, to the HDD tier for faster recall performance. StorONE’s volume isolation technology enables ATK to fine-tune how each workload will use the flash tier. Some VMs are dedicated to flash-only, while the archive and backup workloads mostly use hard disk capacity. ATK uses StorONE snapshots to increase data retention and protect against accidental user deletion or ransomware.
Brandt summarized his StorONE experience by saying, “Storage has always been a challenge for us – the volume and types of media files we work with make it imperative for us to respond quickly to the business’ needs. I just need it to work, and StorONE makes storage simple. I continue to be amazed that this one solution can support many use cases without switching storage hardware.”
StorONE’s Enterprise Storage Platform enables customers to solve very tactical challenges like backup, archive, or tape replacement and then add production-class use cases to the platform at their pace. The initial tactical project turns into a long-term storage consolidation strategy.
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