Talon Fast Providing Distributed File Storage Dolutions for GEI Consultants

Talon Storage Solutions, Inc., in software-defined storage solutions enabling distributed enterprises to centralize and consolidate IT storage infrastructure, announced that its Talon FAST is providing distributed file storage solutions for GEI Consultants, a Massachusetts-based engineering and environmental consulting firm.

GEI has installed Talon FAST, to provide version control to files, including data-intensive CAD files, shared across the company’s fleet of offices in the US.

GEI has two data centers and each of the company’s 39 offices has its own file server. One office would make changes to a file and another office would make copies, but those might not be the most-up-to-date revisions. GEI was experiencing issues with latency and version control that needed to be addressed.

FAST helps enterprises solve the challenges associated with distributed file storage by centralizing corporate file data into traditional datacenters, private or public clouds while maintaining enterprise control and security.

“What I really liked was that Talon utilized our existing infrastructure. There were no hardware migrations or additional costs.  Talon FAST was cost-effective and makes it feel like information is on your local file server, even when it is not,” said Kevin Mugford, VP and IT director, GEI.  “Ultimately, Talon is leading the way for GEI to eliminate some of our servers to store data files as it facilitates collaboration between our offices nationwide.”

“We’re so pleased that the Talon FAST installation at GEI has gone to plan,” said Andrew Mullen, SVP at Talon. “Talon FAST, in this case, brought version control and put 39 branch offices on the same page with their file sharing and data centralization. GEI’s success is a great example of what we do for distributed enterprises that want to eliminate backups, and storage complexity.”

“We have a cloud plan and our vision is to eventually utilize the cloud for more than just intra-office ‘housekeeping’ needs,” added Mugford. “We would like to have a cloud system in place where we utilize it as a main repository for our projects. Our first steps toward the cloud would include Talon on the front end for caching, to facilitate collaboration, and further eliminate the need for the 39 file servers to we currently have to store our data.  It’s a vision that is off into the future, but it’s one of our goals.”

Case study