Moonami Learning Solutions With Zadara’s VPSA Storage-as-a-Service

Zadara Storage Ltd, a provider of enterprise storage-as-a-service (STaaS) announced that Moonami Learning Solutions (Moonami, LLC) has achieved time-savings and competitive advantage by leveraging the Zadara VPSA enterprise storage as-a-service (STaaS) solution in concert with compute resources at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

By eliminating its use of GlusterFS storage and deploying Zadara’s enterprise-grade NFS and CIFS storage co-located adjacent to AWS East 1, Moonami is saving approximately 20 hours of IT time each week – nearly half of a full-time administrator’s role – from the daily headaches of managing the storage resource. This is extra time that Moonami’s small, but savvy IT team is allocating to more business-impactful activities. The move also lowered Moonami’s total storage costs by 45%.

The Zadara VPSA also enabled Moonami to take advantage of low-cost object-based storage capabilities for backup, via Zadara’s Backup to Amazon S3 (B2S3) feature – an automatic, snapshot-based, continuous, incremental backup. With increments as frequent as once a minute, B2S3 allows any Moonami customer who accidentally deleted files to request a backup copy saved within the past hour, instead of within the past day. This enables heightened customer peace of mind and allows Moonami to deliver even better service to their customers.

“Once we discovered the elasticity and scalability that Zadara offers, our entire IT infrastructure was easier to manage – an advantage that translates directly into even better service to our customers,” said John Porten, president, Moonami LMS, based in Indianapolis. “With Gluster it could take weeks or as much as a month to re balance a disk when you added capacity. This was wasted time that impacted our customer service. Now we can devote that time to running and managing our business.“

“Having hourly backups has also been especially valuable for us,” Porten continued. “Our customers often ask us to restore their site to how it was a few hours ago. Previously, the best we could do was a daily restore. Now, with B2S3 we can do hourly point and restores and it doesn’t take up any of our Zadara disk space – which is even better.“

Zadara’s Backup to S3 (B2S3) makes recovery quick and easy, with instant access to backed-up volumes. Data backed up via B2S3 can also be restored to any storage medium from any vendor, including Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – avoiding vendor lock-in and providing customers with backup flexibility.

“We are proud to provide Moonami with storage that matches the functionality, sophistication and flexibility of AWS compute,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO and co-founder, Zadara. “As CIOs and IT executives struggle to meet their elasticity, scalability and economic goals, Moonami Learning Solutions’ experience showcases how the right technology is enabling smart, nimble enterprises to gain a competitive edge.“