LA Unified Shool District Deploys TwinStrata CloudArray

TwinStrata, Inc.
announced that the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the largest
public school system in California and second
largest public school district in the U.S., has deployed TwinStrata CloudArray in
fifteen remote locations to provide continuous data protection.

The deployment
allows for a replacement of primary storage, tape and backup software while
providing disaster recovery to any location globally.

With
TwinStrata CloudArray, LAUSD is able to backup primary data to an Amazon
Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud by placing CloudArray virtual appliances,
which take daily snapshots in the S3 cloud, for all fifteen remote locations
across the district. Previously, each site required either Backup Exec or
homegrown archiving scripts to back up a file server and then write to tape or
ship the data across the WAN to a central location.

"We were at a crossroads in our search to
replace some failing hardware in the individual sites and didn’t want to
continue purchasing storage, tape and file servers," said Steve
Saitman, senior systems specialist for LAUSD. "After a fairly lengthy evaluation process, we chose TwinStrata over
competing solutions because the combination of performance, ease of use, and
storage array feature set provided everything we were looking for from
traditional storage arrays and backup software for far less cost without the
added maintenance overhead."

LAUSD was
able to deploy each site in less than 4 hours, and once all data was
synchronized to the cloud with disaster recovery capabilities to any one
of its other sites. Just as important as quick setup, pay-as-you-go storage and
like-local access to data were the cost savings. As a result of deploying
TwinStrata CloudArray, LAUSD estimates it will save $283,000 over five years by
eliminating tape and using lower-cost commodity servers.

"Moving to the cloud has not only reduced the
cost and burden of maintaining the multi-site infrastructure, it has eliminated
the need for future data migrations and costly upgrades," added
Saitman. "Our upgrade plans now are
to simply purchase new servers every three years."

Available in
both virtual and physical appliance configurations, the TwinStrata CloudArray
cloud storage gateway connects customers’ applications and backup
infrastructure to the cloud, enabling them to enjoy limitless storage capacity,
escape the cost, complexity and risk of off-site infrastructure or tape, and
recover data instantly to any location. CloudArray supports the
ecosystem of public and private cloud storage providers including AT&T,
Amazon, EMC Atmos, Mezeo, Nirvanix, PEER1, and Scality. Other features ares
dynamic caching, in-flight/at-rest data encryption, deduplication, bandwidth
optimization, in-cloud snapshots, high availability and ability to access
restored data from anywhere.