Mosaik Solutions Protects 14TB of Data Using TwinStrata Cloud Storage Gateway

Memphis, Tennessee-based Mosaik Solutions, formerly American Roamer, maintains the largest mobile network coverage catalog in the world. It provides telecommunications coverage patterns, wireless spectrum depth, network configurations, and licensing data delivered through geospatial, analytical, creative and web solutions that help clients acquire and retain customers, make sound business decisions and execute with a solid information base.

Mosaik Solutions’ Data Storage and Backup Challenges

Mosaik Solutions has 14TB of geospatial data, employee desktops, virtual machines, and vector graphics, all of which they were backing up using an older tape array. Only one backup job could be performed at a time with base back-ups generally taking seven days. As a result, they were always doing incremental backups with few opportunities to take tapes off-site.

“We were archiving historical data to optical and hard disks due to storage cost and backup capability constraints,” said Mosaic Solutions systems administrator, Daniel Bozeman. “Any data we could store off-site was generally two to four weeks old.  Backup recovery was slow and required manual tape-juggling.”

Weighing Alternative Backup Storage Solutions

Mosaik Solutions considered the following options to solve their data backup dilemma:

  • Tape backup – Upgrade to a modern 1.6GB tape array
  • D2D Backup – Replace tape with a 20TB disk-to-disk backup appliance
  • SAN Replication – Stream data from their on-premise SAN to an identical SAN in an offsite facility
  • Cloud Backup – Backup to Amazon S3 cloud storage via a TwinStrata CloudArray iSCSI storage gateway

The Cloud Storage Decision

Mosaik Solutions chose cloud storage because the equipment costs were 2x less than the next least costly alternative (tape backup upgrade) and 8x less than the most expensive option, SAN replication. In addition, cloud storage provided the following advantages over the others:

  • Real-time backup to cloud
  • Granular snapshotting
  • Recovery to vendor datacenter or cloud
  • No need to swap or transport tapes
  • Automatic backup
  • Data is safe from regional disasters
  • Limitless storage capacity
  • Near-instant disaster recovery
  • Compressed, de-duplicated, and doubly encrypted data
  • Simplified backup of large network shares

Instant Storage Capacity and ‘Peace of Mind’

It took Mosaik Solutions just 40 minutes to download, install and configure the TwinStrata CloudArray virtual appliance and use it to thin-provision a 19TB iSCSI storage volume on Amazon S3 cloud storage.  Not only does Mosaik Solutions no longer have to throw away potentially valuable data due to storage constraints, but now has the ability to take snapshots of R&D data at any interval, which allows them to develop and test new analytics for customers without fearing data loss or corruption from user/script errors.

Perhaps the greatest CloudArray benefit is the peace of mind Daniel derives from their new cloud backup strategy. “Mosaik Solutions is located on the New Madrid Fault System. With our backups now automatically replicated offsite in the cloud by TwinStrata CloudArray, we have protected ourselves against regional and local disasters. Should there be irreparable damage to our building, we can deploy CloudArray in a co-location facility or on Amazon EC2 and recover access to our business data in an instant.”