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Intraworks IT Management is a Canadian provider of information technology assistance for SMBs, particularly those located on Vancouver Island and near its headquarters in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Intraworks IT Management brings expertise and support in network installation and monitoring, technology management and consulting, help desk support, web, email, secured offsite backup solutions, and residential, commercial, institutional and telecommunication electrical and wiring services. Intraworks also provides a variety of innovative hardware solutions from industry leading manufacturers including its own line of Proximity servers and workstations.

DOWNTIME NOT AN OPTION
The challenge that Intraworks faced was straightforward to express, if not to address: providing a wide array of IT services to a niche customer base meant downtime was not an option, even for a storage upgrade.

Intraworks delivers a technological lifeline to its niche customer base, the SMBs on Vancouver Island and other regional businesses in the lower mainland. As the largest IT solutions provider north of Victoria, British Columbia, its 5000 square foot data centre gives clients access to a fully secured, environmentally controlled and power redundant data centre with 100 mbps fibre and Internet access. Intraworks prides itself on reliable IT offerings to its clients and service without disruption.

Intraworks constantly monitors its virtual machines and disk arrays on multiple servers and it needed a redundant storage solution for its critical applications and cloud services. With a steadily growing client base, ease of scalability was of utmost importance to Intraworks, at the same time as they needed to balance budget considerations.

"We had been hunting around for some time looking for new storage technology to ease our data centre requirements. We looked at expensive and complex to configure options including solutions from NetApp, EMC and Datacore. All of these options were complicated, limited in their ability to grow with a data centre's needs and prohibitively expensive," said Phil Stiller, president of Intraworks. "Then we found Gridstore and decided to test run its offerings."

After evaluating Intraworks' needs, Gridstore provided the company with single site back end storage to a Server 2012 R2 SMB cluster. The SMB cluster provides storage to several HyperV clusters. Gridstore allows Intraworks to manage a common storage pool for all of the company's virtual machines - enabling the proper management and redundancy to Intraworks' production servers, so that customers' systems are up and running all day, every day.

Intraworks found that the Gridstore functioned "like RAID on servers" and that it was a solution that provided greater storage flexibility and less downtime when deployed. "For us," said Stiller, "the greatest savings realised were in manpower. Gridstore provided us with the ability to deploy additional storage without interruption to production. For Intraworks and our customers, the prospect of 'zero disruption' is huge. Gridstore performed exactly as the team said it would."

THE ULTIMATE IN PLUG AND PLAY
Once on the ground at Intraworks, Gridstore was put through its paces, as Stiller explains: "Getting into new technology is stressful. We had to know what the Gridstore units were like in real life, so we gave them a work out: unplugged them, rebooted and the system never failed. They performed exactly as Gridstore said they would."

Intraworks noted that with Gridstore in place it can now run its System Centre 2012 and virtual machines instantly on any server. With expected storage growth, the scalability of Gridstore was another attractive and required feature.

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