Burton Snowboards is a manufacturer of snowboards. Founded by Jake Burton Carpenter in 1977, the company specializes in a product line aimed at snowboarders: snowboards, bindings, boots, outerwear, and accessories.
Burton’s infrastructure group was facing two key needs and one new opportunity. First, mounting costs from using their tier 1 NAS/SAN for both primary and backup storage. Expanding tier 1 to meet the demands of backup and DR were prohibitive.Second, completing backups within the available time window was becoming increasingly difficult. Full recovery of file share data from tape backups was unpredictable. For both these reasons Burton decided to implement another tier of storage focused on serving as a backup target.
Burton’s choice in solving its cost and performance needs for backup created an opportunity to add offsite disaster recovery. Previously, mirroring of backup data to a remote site to ensure availability and DR was not practical for them with their tier 1 storage.
To meet their goals of significantly lowering the purchase and ongoing price per TB, Burton needed to avoid vendor lock-in and have the freedom to select the right storage hardware and media technology. With limited staff, whatever solution they selected had to be very efficient at automating all deployment and management tasks, and had to provide proactive monitoring of the backup storage. Burton started their evaluation process for their new backup storage tier in May 2014. After looking at vendor-specific hardware-based solutions, it became clear that a software-defined object storage solution would better meet their needs for cost, scalability and functionality.
They chose OpenStack Swift as an ideal fit for their requirements. When deploying an initial cluster of 3 object nodes, it took over 17 hours to complete all of the manual tasks. Burton then found SwiftStack could automate the deployment process. With SwiftStack, the total time required for deployment dropped to 1.5hrs, a savings of over 90%. That same automation and simplicity made ongoing management 10X easier and faster in comparison to doing it themselves.
One of the key drivers for implementing SwiftStack was to reduce overall storage costs. Burton’s existing NAS tier was costing roughly $5,000 / TB to purchase, with recurring costs of about $1,000 / TB annually. The new SwiftStack object storage tier aimed to keep purchase costs under 1/5th the NAS tier costs. SwiftStack’s deployment has more than met these goals by keeping purchase costs between $500 and $800 per TB, or as low as 10% of the cost of additional NAS/SAN storage. SwiftStack’s recurring costs also ran as low as $200 per TB, or only 20% of the recurring costs for the legacy NAS tier.
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“SwiftStack cut our storage management overhead for backup by over 90%...the entire process took only an hour and a half."
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Learn how top snowboard manufacturer/retailer deploys SwiftStack as backup/archive tier.
Download“Re-purposing existing servers…allowed us to save because we didn't have to buy new hardware for one of our initial deployments. The technical support is good. I would rate it as a nine out of ten.”
“It's one less thing I have to stress about because it's extremely solid, easy to use for the entire team, and the performance is outstanding.”
“SwiftStack provides our business with an array of solutions to storage challenges, which helps me sleep a lot better at night. And I value that we can do server maintenance during the day without customer impact.”
“SwiftStack cut our storage management overhead for backup by over 90%...the entire process took only an hour and a half."
“SwiftStack is a “single source of truth” for our data. Our infrastructure team can manage data placement based on policies to optimize workflows without application developers or researchers even knowing changes have occurred.”
