Russell Lands owns and operates 25,000 acres of land holdings situated along more than 200 miles of shoreline on 44,000 acre Lake Martin; four world-class marinas; Russell Crossroads, the town center including restaurants and recreational facilities with thousands of acres of forest and approximately100 miles of hiking, biking and equestrian trails; nine retail stores including Russell Do-It and Russell Home Décor Centers; and Willow Point Golf and Country Club. The company employs more than 500 people in numerous locations.

Earlier this year, company management was challenged to keep pace with growing storage demands, both onsite and offsite, for its many business operations.

To meet disaster recovery objectives, Russell Lands used Veeam Backup & Replication 6.0, and transferred data to an offsite colocation provider. The company originally considered an expensive upgrade of its VMware servers to increase storage capacity but instead took advantage of a special offer of a Free CloudArray 1TB virtual storage appliance for Veeam users, and quickly upgraded to an unlimited capacity CloudArray appliance. Deploying CloudArray not only enabled them to bypass the costly storage capacity upgrade but also the need for a colocation provider, resulting in a 75 percent reduction in offsite storage expenses.

“Year after year, we had to make the same decision. How fast will our data grow this year?” said Cliff Grappe, Russell Lands IT Director. “With the TwinStrata solution, we don’t have to guess any longer.”

Grappe set the local cache size to several hundred GB, and provisioned several TB of cloud storage space. With a cache large enough to retain 95 percent of data that is accessed by Russell Lands employees, users do not experience any loss in performance.

“With TwinStrata, we get twin benefits. We still experience local performance because of the locally cached data yet our data also sits at an offsite storage location with far better disaster recovery provisions than we could ever afford before,” said Grappe.

“With CloudArray, businesses like Russell Lands can meet off-site backup and disaster recovery requirements with the significant advantage of data growth on-demand rather than the endless cycle and costs of traditional storage upgrades,” said Nicos Vekiarides, Chief Executive Officer at TwinStrata. “We’re proud to have earned the business of Russell Lands, a company with a history of looking toward the future, and pleased to have assisted them in their transition to cloud storage.”

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