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Product and Services

DataON CiB-9473

Windows 2012 R2
Storage Spaces
Industry Transportation
Organization Size 51 to 200 employees
Country United States
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“The real clear winner was DataON and Windows Storage Spaces. Using HGST SSDs, we saw a 40x performance increase with speeds up to 100,000 IOPS for a fraction of what it would have cost to buy additional HPE or EMC storage. We especially liked how much Windows Storage Spaces simplified deployment and backup and recovery management—and it was completely independent of the SAN. Not to mention, Storage Spaces offers 100TB availability, which SAN storage just can’t do.”
Testimonial by Nate Bibb
Nate Bibb
Systems Administrator, ALC

American Logistics Company (ALC) is a national passenger transportation management company serving transit agencies, school districts and the healthcare industry. ALC leverages proprietary transportation management and route optimization technology to manage vehicles across the United States, providing high quality, innovative transportation services that raise the bar for efficiency, cost-effectiveness, driver safety and accountability. Partnered with Lyft, ALC employs one hundred fifty people and contracts thousands of independent drivers.

Over the last few years, ALC’s customer base and the amount of drivers have grown, putting greater demand on its datacenter virtualization and backup and recovery needs. Dedicated to improving Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for its staff, drivers, and ultimately their customers, ALC realized that quickly, it had outgrown its datacenter.

IT Challenge – Increase Backup and Recovery Performance for Business and Mission Critical Applications, Reduce CAPEX and OPEX and Stay Current with the Latest Technology

Faced with sluggish backup and restore times, large increases of data and high CAPEX for purchasing additional standalone HPE and EMC storage, ALC had to make as decision to whether stick with a traditional storage area network (SAN) model or move to a software defined storage (SDS) CiB solution using Windows 2012 R2 and Windows Storage Spaces.

ALC’s goals were to:

  • Increase backup and recovery performance for large amounts of data
  • Avoid hefty additional HPE and EMC SAN storage hardware costs
  • Stay on par with current trends in the industry and future-proof its investment
  • Simplify management with SDS

The Solution: DataON CiB-9473 with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Storage Spaces

ALC’s IT team did its homework before finally settling on a DataON and Windows Storage Spaces solution. ALC tested HP iSCSI (1Gb), EMC Fibre Channel (FC) SAN storage and DataON CiB-9473 with Windows Storage Spaces (set in mirror spaces mode) and Data Protection Manager (DPM).

The Results

After a successful DataON Windows 2012 R2 deployment, ALC plans to upgrade to 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) and offload some of the storage workloads to Microsoft Azure. ALC is slated soon to open up another data center and is currently testing business and mission critical silver and gold tier production loads on two more DataON CiBs running Storage Spaces in a Windows Server 2016 ReFS environment.


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