Tech Company Builds Hybrid Infrastructure with StoneFly and Azure

Organization

A tech company in New Jersey, USA – operational since 2011. They serve clients from all over the world and provide services such as web applications, software development, digital IT transformation, and maintenance.

Industry

Technology Services | IT Consultants

Challenges

The company wanted to build solutions at scale for their customers. With their legacy infrastructure, which consisted of a number of physical Windows and Linux servers, scaling was a disruptive and complex process. They wanted a solution which would help them effectively use their existing environment and integrate Microsoft Azure cloud storage with it.

In addition to scalability, the company was also concerned about data loss due to ransomware attack, human error, or hardware failure. As a service provider, losing customer data meant more than just financial losses. Alternatively, with a ransomware-proof infrastructure, they would be able to get more business and customers.

“As a service provider, our customers expect our solutions to be ransomware-proof and able to scale dynamically. With our setup, we were struggling to do that and the increasing hardware didn’t make it easy for us.”, said Jeremy, the IT head of the company. “We knew we wanted to use Microsoft Azure but we also didn’t want to completely replace our storage systems.”

Solution

After reviewing their existing setup and their requirements, our experts recommended StoneFly Smart cloud gateway.

The Smart cloud gateway are physical or virtual gateway appliances that enable users to connect their applications and servers to Azure cloud repositories. In order to set up on-premises hot-tier Flash Cache, the tech company decided to setup physical gateway appliances.

“The cloud gateway appliances allow us to set hot/cool tiers using on-premises and cloud storage and automate transfers between them by defining policies. The integration process was seamless and quick. Our storage administrators are happy and our customers feel the difference” noted Diana, the CTO of the tech company.

In addition to integrating Azure cloud storage, and setting automated hot/cool storage tiering, the Smart cloud gateway also includes enterprise data services such as air-gapped volumes, immutable WORM, deduplication, thin provisioning, encryption, S3 object lockdown, and more.

The Results

With the Smart Cloud Gateway, the tech company was able to connect their servers and applications to Azure cloud storage. The built-in features of the cloud gateway allowed the company to not-only leverage cloud storage for scale but also simplify data management, ensure high availability, and protect critical customer data from threats such as ransomware, human error, and hardware failure.

“With a few clicks, we can scale storage on-demand. We have a central interface to keep track of resource consumption, and data services. And we’re confident that our customer data is safe from ransomware” said Jeremy, “Not only did StoneFly’s (Smart) cloud gateway cost less than the alternatives but also delivered additional value for us and our customers”

On-Demand Scalability with a few Clicks

The preinstalled storage virtualization engine of the Smart cloud gateway enables the tech company to scale their storage capacity with a few clicks – by using integrated Azure cloud storage.

As opposed to the disruptive process of adding JBODs to their servers, the company is now able to scale dynamically and on-demand. This ability allows them to keep up with the needs of their customers, accommodate new customers without delay, and keep the resource cost in check by using the built-in real-time performance monitoring and reporting features.

Ransomware-Proof Data Storage

With ransomware protection features such as Write-Once Read-Many (WORM), S3 object lockdown, air-gapping, and immutable snapshots, the tech company is able to secure confidential customer and business data from ransomware attacks.

The features are offered as part of the standard license for the Smart cloud gateway which reduces costs and simplifies integration for the IT administrators.

“Most vendors are offering services such as air-gap and immutable storage as an add-on. We were pleasantly surprised to find out that they’re included in the standard license for the StoneFly (Smart) cloud gateway. So, we ended up saving money and were able to set up enterprise-level ransomware protection” said Jeremy.

Seamless Azure Cloud Integration

The integration process was quick and simple. After receiving the physical gateway appliance, StoneFly tech support walked their IT administrators through the process and they were up and running in a day.

As the Smart cloud gateway has been tested for most popular servers, virtual environments, and Azure cloud, the tech company didn’t have to worry about troubleshooting or compatibility issues – for them, it was a plug and play experience.   

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