Non-profit Cloud Services Provider

United States

"We were pushing the limits of our legacy systems and knew it was time to upgrade from spinning disks to all flash and QSAN made high-throughput storage affordable for us"

Director of Could Operations

Company Biography

Founded in 2008, the company is based in Virginia Beach and offers nonprofit organizations tools to meet their missions. Customers like The Epilepsy Foundation and many large United Ways use the firm’s solution of business applications to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. Built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the solution is a client relationship management platform that empowers nonprofits to manage fundraising, constituents, marketing, and engagement.

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The Challenge

The company enables nonprofits to track all interactions with donors and stakeholders, such as emails, phone calls, and correspondence. The company delivers its solution to most customers as a hosted, cloud-based service, and the company stores and safeguards all these data in SQL databases at its data center. Some customers have as much as 15 years of history stored in the system, and the company must also duplicate the data in its cloud for backup. It relied on storage solutions from a major vendor, but while these systems were adequate when the company was smaller, they could no longer support its growth. The company must store five terabytes of data every week, and its differential backups produce another terabyte daily.

"Adding more capacity was no longer an option because our legacy systems couldn’t keep pace with SQL queries", said the director of the cloud operation. "Worsening matters, nightly backups were taking too long."

Additionally, the company’s datacenter is a co-location site three hours away in northern VA. “Not only did we need to upgrade to faster, enterprise storage, our solutions also had to be reliable and easy to manage remotely,” added by this director.

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The Solution

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The company initially purchased a QSAN XCubeFAS 2026D all flash array, fully populated with 26 Seagate Nytro 1.6Tb SSDs for 41.6 Tb of storage, as well as two Dell PowerEdge R630 servers to keep pace with the this QSAN system.
The company then purchased a XCubeDAS 5326D all flash expansion unit with 6 3.8Tb SSDs and XCubeSAN 3212D array with 12 4Tb HDDs, along with two Dell PowerEdge R640 servers and four Dell EMC S4128F-ON switches. The 10 Gb/s Dell switches replaced legacy one Gb/s systems.

Non-profit Cloud Services Provider QSAN Solution topology

The Benefits

By upgrading to QSAN all flash array storage, the company enhanced the performance of its SQL databases, delivering the responsiveness that customers demand. The firm also replicates data more quickly, improving its nightly backup windows.

The company also gained flexible capacity to support future growth by linking the XF2026D all flash array to a XD5326D all flash JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). The XD5326D ensures the firm’s storage needs will be met well into the future by offering nearly a hundred terabytes of additional capacity.

To accelerate backups, the company installed a QSAN XCubeSAN 3212D array with 4 Tb spinning disks. "We’re migrating 20 terabytes from our legacy systems to the XS3212D without impacting our operations.” The team of cloud operation in the company relies on the management application bundled with its QSAN storage systems to proactively configure, manage, and monitor the chassis from any browser.

"When your storage is in a cloud off-site, you require robust remote administration,” said the director “That’s what our QSAN solutions provide. Even better, our QSAN arrays have been utterly dependable, which is why we were comfortable buying more. We’ve done multiple firmware updates without a single failure or incident. These are the qualities we want in our storage platforms.”