Established in 1994, Terratel provides web hosting, email solutions, and backup services to hundreds of customers across Sweden, Scandinavia, and Europe. For Terratel, managing and protecting its clients' mission critical data is serious business. An integral part is ensuring guaranteed uptime, superior performance, and data protection.

After moving to a VMware infrastructure, it became apparent that the company's existing storage infrastructure, which included a number of different SAN solutions, was unable to cope. The company required a consolidated, reliable enterprise storage solution to underpin its virtual environment but at the most competitive price.

After carefully evaluating several solutions, with the help of channel partner Layer 8, Terratel selected Nexentastor. Mattias Palsson, CTO, Terratel, explains: "Nexentastor offers great performance and is incredibly flexible. The biggest benefit for Terratel is that we can implement enterprise class storage for a fraction of the cost of a legacy system. With Nexenta, we no longer have to choose between features or performance, we can effectively provide both and satisfy our clients' needs when provisioning new virtual servers."

Nexentastor, which is exclusively used for Terratel's VMware infrastructure, is built on enterprise hardware from Cisco, creating two SANs. Each uses 2U rack servers with 16 disks to create a combined total raw capacity. Features include hybrid storage pooling, unlimited snapshots, deduplication, and thin provisioning.

Palsson explained that they had estimated that by buying two Nexenta solutions the company has made a great cost saving, providing Terratel with additional capital, which can be used for other IT resources to ensure they are meeting all their service level agreements.

Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. ''Terratel's use of Nexentastor to manage its virtual environment shows that Openstorage is a viable alternative to traditional legacy storage companies. Terratel's hosting business needs enterprise storage that can support and grow with it. No other approach to storage can match the scale and flexibility of the commercially supported Openstorage-based Nexentastor. We look forward to a long relationship with Terratel."