Storage Networking World (SNW) has selected the GEO Foundation as the winner for its Spring 2010 “Best Practices” Awards Program. GEO Foundation was named winner in the Technology Innovation and Promise category for its excellence in virtualization and storage IT solutions.
“We are honored to be chosen as a category winner from SNW,” said Brian Beck, IT Director, GEO Foundation. “Through our research, we were lucky to have found Scale Computing and Citrix Solutions– they made our decision easy and helped us both exceed our IT goals and make implementation a very simple process.”
Through its deployment of storage solutions from Scale Computing and Citrix Systems for its virtualization needs, GEO Foundation was able to solve the issues the organization was facing with data growth and system upgrades. Deployed on a commodity hardware platform, Scale storage clusters grow seamlessly from as little as 3 terabytes (TB) to more than 2.2 petabytes (PB), in increments as small as 1 TB at a time. This technology provided GEO with the storage it needed, at an entry-point price that was nearly 50 percent cheaper than the alternative solutions the organization had researched.
“We love it when our clients see superior performance coupled with cost savings by using our storage technology – it’s what drives our business,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and founder, Scale Computing. “We are excited for GEO Foundation and thrilled to see that they are being recognized for their innovative approach to solving their IT issues. They are very deserving of the recognition.”
The GEO Foundation immediately saw tangible results and cost-savings. In a little over one month, GEO was able to transition all of their storage onto Scale solutions, virtualize six existing servers and even retire five other servers – all at just one of GEOs charter schools. They have also been able to condense their data to a single backup repository on Scale storage. Overall, they have retired and/or repurposed 14 servers – resulting in more than $60,000 in savings in just one month.