Florida Water Agency Turns to TwinStrata CloudArray

TwinStrata, Inc. announced that St. Johns River Water Management District has implemented its CloudArray for multi-site file sharing, offsite data protection and DR.

The St. Johns River Water Management District is one of five water management districts in Florida.

CloudArray is replacing the organization’s existing tape backup system. With 80TB of backup data sent to tape, the District was spending approximately $150,000 every year on the staff time, resources and external service providers required to manage, store, retrieve and maintain their offsite tape library. As a result of this transition, the district is recouping many hours spent on maintaining tape backups while also putting in place a more robust offsite data protection strategy to help protect it in the event of a disaster.

Prior to the selection of CloudArray, the IT team spent more than six months investigating different options, and found that:

• Hardware solutions that enable site replication required a large capital investment and were overall more expensive than the existing solution;
• Other cloud storage gateways they considered came with hefty upfront purchase costs or large cloud storage commitments that were priced on a per appliance basis.

Since the district needed at least four appliances – one for each of its three major service centers, as well as a field station – the costs for such a hardware-based strategy was multiplied.

The district has already begun to experience benefits from the new backup strategy. Backups that previously required a day-long manual process have been automated, freeing up a system administrator’s time – time that can be spent supporting and advancing the agency’s strategic IT initiatives.

The district has three major service centers, five field stations and the primary data center that share files across a single 10TB CIFS share. It takes nearly a week to backup.

By using CloudArray’s file-sharing capabilities combined with its sophisticated in-cloud snapshots, the district will not only retain read and write access to the files across its geographically distributed offices, it will also eliminate the need to backup its file systems to tape. By the end of the year, the organization anticipates that more than seven million files will be housed in Google Cloud Storage, accessible via CIFS and NFS through CloudArray.

QuotesKevin Brown, director, office, IT, St. Johns River Water Management District, said: “With CloudArray, our storage strategy is both simpler and more robust – we have greater redundancy and access to our offsite backups; we’ve minimized the time spent on storage maintenance, and we provide multi-site file sharing to our users. Having spent 6-8 months investigating multiple options, CloudArray was the best choice for the District’s needs.“

Nicos Vekiarides, CEO, TwinStrata, said: “Organizations like the District don’t just need cloud backup or file sharing – they need a comprehensive storage strategy that can evolve as their requirements change. We’re excited that the District has partnered with us to modernize their storage infrastructure to meet not only today’s needs, but also tomorrow’s.“

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