May 08, 2008

LeftHand Networks: The Ideal Solution for BlueLock's Virtualized Environment

 

As you know, companies are rapidly adopting server virtualization to optimize their existing IT investments and to ensure business continuity. What has been lesser known, but is quickly being recognized is the need for shared storage, or SANs, within virtualized environments to provide complete high availability and data protection. 

“Since our servers are
100 percent virtualized,
we need to have a storage
solution that is also
virtual—and LeftHand
is one of the only truly
virtualized SANs out
there today.”

-Pat O'Day

Chief Technology Officer
BlueLock

 

About BlueLock:

 

 

Industry:

Technology

 

Challenge:

One of the country’s leading providers of infrastructure-as-a-service, BlueLock needs on demand. gives clients precisely the amount of computing capacity storage, bandwidth and disaster recovery that they need at any given time, with the flexibility to scale those

For many of BlueLock’s clients, the infrastructure-as-a-service model is like a dreamcome true: they get the infrastructure they need, when they need it, without having to worry about any of the nitty-gritty details. Behind the scenes, however, BlueLock relies on a robust IT foundation to make the dream a reality. “Whether we’re building a dedicated hosting environment to run an online application, or creating a disaster recovery target for an environment that’s running somewhere else, we need a flexible, high-performance architecture to support us,” said Pat O’Day, chief technology officer at BlueLock.

 

Solution:

Since BlueLock was using VMware technology as part of its platform, the next step was to find a storage technology that could successfully work with a virtual environment. “We were able to combine LeftHand Networks’ open iSCSI SAN with our VMware solutions to create a 100 percent virtual platform that scales easily and cost-efficiently,” said O’Day.

 

Benefits:

With LeftHand as part of its technological backbone, BlueLock has been able to readily adjust to clients’ infrastructure needs. “Adding capacity to keep up with our clients’ growing storage requirements is as simple as adding one or more storage nodes to the LeftHand cluster,” said O’Day. “That allows us to provide additional capacity and performance on demand.”

Additionally, LeftHand’s SAN solution has enhanced BlueLock’s ability to meet That increases reliability and enables us to offer a very aggressive recovery time aggressive disaster recovery and uptime service level agreements (SLAs). “LeftHand provides full fault tolerance and redundancy on all our disk volumes,” said O’Day. “If we lose one disk system, it switches over without interruption. objective to our clients—servers can be restored in as little as 15 minutes.”

 

Future Plans:

As BlueLock develops additional offerings to meet its customers’ needs, LeftHand’s is the case with the BlueLock Box, an alternative to BlueLock’s hosted offering that SAN products are poised to continue playing an important supporting role. Such allows clients to deploy the BlueLock solution at remote sites and branch offices.

“The BlueLock Box uses virtual SANs created with LeftHand technology to provide can replicate data back to their corporate data center without adding additional cost-effective storage and replication functionality,” said O’Day. “Customers hardware or file replication software. We’re very excited at how LeftHand’s SAN is supporting this innovative new offering.”

 

BlueLock

6325 Morenci Trail

Indianapolis, IN 46268

1-888-402-2583

www.bluelock.com