National Lloyds & American Summit Insurance Deploys TwinStrata CloudArray and Reduces DR Backup Costs by $2,600 per month

National Lloyds & American Summit Insurance, a Waco, Texas-based insurance company in business since 1948, was accustomed to using a Storage Area Network (SAN) to store and protect its department and employee folders, along with images used by its policy and claims administrators. However, the company found itself needing to replace its SAN device three times within five years on top of spending $3,300 a month to perform disaster recovery (DR) backups. National Lloyds, like many companies, grew tired of the expense and hassle associated with traditional SANs, and began the search for a simple, affordable and flexible cloud storage backup solution for its DR needs.

In going about its search, National Lloyds & American Summit Insurance had the following goals:

1)      Find a flexible solution that was simple to implement and use.

2)      Replace its existing fixed SAN device with a software-based file storage solution that could run under VMware ESXI and use Amazon cloud storage.

3)      Simplify its DR backup strategy.

4)      Decrease the costs associated with storage and DR backup.

5)      Find a solution that would allow for DR backup of all systems to the cloud and provide near unlimited storage without being locked into proprietary hardware.

After looking at more than 20 different solutions, National Lloyds chose TwinStrata’s CloudArray virtual appliance, which provided a secure and easy-to-use backup solution for its VMware infrastructure and delivered immediate, “like local” access to Amazon cloud storage.

Leveraging its existing SAN infrastructure, National Lloyds was able to break its traditional storage array lifecycle by deploying a Cloud SAN using TwinStrata’s CloudArray storage gateway and gain access to an unlimited tier of data storage without requiring frequent or costly hardware upgrades. Additionally, the company was able to move its images and department and employee folders to the cloud, which resulted in an immediate savings of $2,600 a month in DR costs.

“TwinStrata’s CloudArray has enabled us to truly simplify our DR backup strategy, while allowing us to increase the overall quality and flexibility of our storage environment and decrease our operational costs,” said Joe Kempenich, vice president of Information Technology for National Lloyds & American Summit Insurance. “SAN upgrades, which used to take multiple weekends and required precious resources to complete, are now a thing of the past. We are no longer tied to proprietary hardware, we require less on-site disk storage, and we no longer worry about running out of disk or not having access to data because of a disk failure.”