Grand Rapids, MI., September 14, 2021 – SoftIron Ltd., the
world leader in task-specific appliances for data center solutions, and a
global leader in Ceph expertise and implementation, today announced that it has
successfully engaged with Michigan-based IT solutions company, US Signal, to seamlessly
upgrade and expand its Storage As A Service (STaaS) infrastructure. The initial
implementation, which immediately increases US Signal’s storage capacity by
over a petabyte, leverages SoftIron’s Ceph-based HyperDrive™ storage appliances
and is being facilitated with a no-downtime migration across multiple
distributed data center sites in four midwest states, including Illinois,
Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The US Signal expansion is being driven by the company’s
need to scale its critical infrastructure due to increasing customer demand.
Having already established a Ceph software-defined storage architecture in
2012, the company took the opportunity to re-evaluate its incumbent solution
against evolving requirements. These requirements included the need for cluster
management across multiple, disconnected sites, the need for seamless
integration with services billing, stringent cloud service SLAs, as well as
limited resources (including skills, space and power). Because customers were
in current operation, zero downtime during the capacity expansion was a
critical requirement. SoftIron’s expertise and Ceph-based HyperDrive solution
proved to be an ideal fit for the expansion, which is being accomplished with
zero downtime.
“The strategic focus for this project was to ensure a truly
future-proofed and seamless growth plan for US Signal, providing the best
outcomes for both our business and our customers,” said Derrin Rummelt,
Executive Vice President of Engineering at US Signal. “We chose open source
Ceph as a foundational building block for our needs early on because of its
innate power and capability. Ceph’s virtually infinite scalable nature combined
with an uncompromising feature set made it a natural fit for our company, which
provides world-class services in a highly competitive, mission-critical
environment. SoftIron quickly demonstrated its deep understanding of complex
storage environments, and how to maximize Ceph to provide the best of its
wide-ranging feature set. They’ve delivered value over and above the hardware
and software, providing expert guidance and support as we execute on this
project together.”
The expansion, leveraging SoftIron’s expertise and
HyperDrive storage appliances, further validates the enterprise-grade status of
open-source Ceph, the software-defined storage platform that supports object,
block, and file storage in a distributed, no single point of failure
architecture. SoftIron’s HyperDrive storage appliances are engineered to
maximize the performance and utility of Ceph, built using SoftIron’s “task-specific”
approach, which counters the traditional commodity approach to appliances that
use commercial off-the-shelf hardware (COTS). SoftIron’s approach optimizes
component-level hardware design to the needs of the software at the source code
level. Using this approach, SoftIron produces units purpose-built for maximum
performance, eliminating commodity hardware inefficiencies, and creating
greener, higher-performing, more efficient appliances.
“SoftIron continues to lower the bar for enterprises to adopt
open source, and Ceph in particular, as a key part of their infrastructure
strategy. Ceph provides organizations with all the robust features needed for
always-on enterprise operation and delivering all the value that people expect
in a world-class open source solution,” said Phil Straw, CEO of SoftIron.
“SoftIron has built the ultimate productization of Ceph in our HyperDrive
storage appliances, simplifying the operations and life cycle experience with
Storage Manager and making Ceph accessible for today’s enterprise workloads
with Storage Router. Our goal is always to meet our client organizations and
their infrastructure wherever they are, and work with them to maximize every
aspect of performance and efficiency that both Ceph and HyperDrive, together, have
to offer.”
The SoftIron HyperDrive family storage appliances span from
high-value to high performance and are available for POC and purchase today.
SoftIron offers both traditional purchasing (CAPEX) and as-a-Service (OPEX)
options. For more information, visit SoftIron’s HyperDrive Storage page.
Downloadthe full case study here.
Media Contact:
BERRY
SoftIron
+61 424859084