AFGE Reduces VMware Recovery Times by 80% with TwinStrata CloudArray®, Veeam and Amazon S3 Cloud Storage

NATICK, Mass., March 30, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- TwinStrata, Inc., the leading innovator in data storage and data protection solutions using cloud storage, today announced that the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal employee union in the United States, has selected its CloudArray® virtual appliance to provide a seamless extension to cloud storage for its Veeam Backup & Replication software.

Recently, AFGE has experienced an acceleration in data growth and associated storage requirements in its server virtualization environment. To understand the impact of virtualization and get a handle on its storage requirements, AFGE carefully considered all of its workload types, including email, video, audio, and small database data, and realized that its storage needs would grow exponentially. AFGE began searching for a simple, affordable and secure offsite backup solution for its VMware infrastructure and decided Cloud Storage was the way to go. It chose Veeam Backup & Replication for its backup software, Amazon S3 as its cloud storage provider and TwinStrata's CloudArray virtual appliance, which provided a seamless connection to the Veeam backup software via iSCSI and delivered immediate, "like local" access to Amazon cloud storage.  

"The decision to move to cloud storage was certainly a lot easier once we discovered CloudArray," said Taylor Higley, IT director, AFGE. "Now that we know the backup data is successfully and securely going offsite, we can rest easily. With the deployment of CloudArray, we were able to cut our storage costs, reduce data recovery times from one week to one day, and eliminate much of the manual work of handling all those tapes resulting in a savings of one quarter of a FTE."

Since selecting CloudArray, AFGE has experienced no disruption to its existing applications.  The Veeam data protection infrastructure remained intact with no requirement for a "rip and replace" of software, no change to policies, and no change to schedules.  The DS3 45Mbs network pipe to the cloud ensured optimum off-site backup performance for 3 to 4TB of data.

"With TwinStrata CloudArray, customers like AFGE are able to easily and securely extend Veeam's award-winning, best-in-class backup and replication solution with the availability, flexibility and efficiency of cloud storage," stated Dan Smith, federal sales director, Veeam.

Available in both virtual and physical appliance configurations, TwinStrata CloudArray is a proven solution that can significantly reduce capex/opex by enabling companies of all sizes to easily adopt off-site data protection and disaster recovery solutions in minutes without any changes to existing applications, need for new programming or APIs in order to connect with cloud storage providers. When used in conjunction with Veeam Backup & Replication™, the #1 virtualization backup solution, CloudArray gives organizations easy access to secure, highly scalable, pay-as-you-go cloud storage for their VMware backups. TwinStrata's enterprise-class data protection solutions are simple, affordable and secure and leverage the scalability and efficiency of cloud storage while maintaining the availability, performance, and security of local storage. CloudArray software provides substantial advantages over traditional off-site storage solutions, with a pay-as-you-go model, unlimited elastic capacity, local performance, in-cloud snapshots, AES256 bit encryption, and on-site, off-site or in-the-cloud access to data.  

About AFGE

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union, representing 600,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia. For more information, visit http://www.afge.org.

About TwinStrata, Inc.

TwinStrata is an innovator in iSCSI access to cloud storage for enterprise-class offsite data protection, file/archive storage, and disaster recovery/business continuity solutions. TwinStrata's CloudArray virtual appliance enables companies of all sizes to simply and economically leverage the scalability and efficiency of cloud storage while maintaining the availability, performance and security of local storage. CloudArray virtual appliance software runs on leading hypervisors and supports all file and operating systems, and  delivers substantial advantages over traditional off-site storage solutions, including a pay-as-you-go model, unlimited elastic capacity, local performance, in-cloud snapshots, dynamic caching, automated policies, AES256 bit encryption, and continuous access to data. For more information about TwinStrata and CloudArray software, visit www.twinstrata.com.

Press Contacts:
Laura Nelson or Bree Bolognese
SVM Public Relations
(401) 490-9700 or (760) 754-7025
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SOURCE TwinStrata, Inc.