Scale-Out NAS Delivers ROI for Bunduq’s HCI Infrastructure Data Backups

Bunduq Company Limited has been developing the El Bunduq offshore oil field since 1975. Recognized by the industry for its operational efficiency, the company has adopted digital technologies that are indispensable for its day-to-day operations and management. For Bunduq, having an agile, resilient, dependable, and scalable IT infrastructure is crucial to its success.

That is among the reasons the company embraced a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) several years ago. It also chose HCI to maintain stability and increase performance across its many digital processes. Scale-up network-attached storage was another important consideration because of the massive amount of data the company needs to back up.

Bunduq used a scale-up storage environment for those data backups, built with solutions from QNAP and Netgear. But the Bunduq IT team soon realized that this storage architecture’s scale-up technology had significant limitations—it only allowed them to add data storage within a fixed upper limit, at which point they would have to add more storage controllers or upgrade their system with newer models with higher capacities.
 

More Data Requires More Backup Storage

“We needed a solution that would not only be compatible with our hyper-converged setup but one that would also be able to manage the sheer volume of data we were generating and needed to back up,” said Bunduq IT Supervisor Muayad Fahmawi. “Our data growth is exponential, and we had to have multiple backups in place to cover our disaster recovery site. But this was becoming complex and inefficient. We wanted to consolidate everything in one place.”

Bunduq recognized that its current solution wasn’t cost-effective and was concerned that it would become ever more complex to manage. It also had severe inefficiencies in data migration and workload resource allocation. Led by Muayad, Bunduq started searching for a better scale-out storage solution.
 

Arcserve Partner Recommends OneXafe

Arcserve technology partner and IT and cybersecurity solution provider Unicorp Technologies, LLC, recommended the Arcserve OneXafe platform. Unicorp showed the Bunduq IT team how OneXafe would easily integrate into their setup, secure their data, and, most importantly, meet their mounting capacity needs. It was also more powerful and offered a more comprehensive range of features than alternative offerings.
 

Scalable Capacity for Primary and Secondary Workloads

“Arcserve OneXafe not only provided scale-out architecture. It also offered ransomware protection to backup files thanks to the immutable snapshots it takes every 90 seconds, which made it unique when compared to other storage solutions. It also had replication features built into the same license, making it much more cost-effective. And the OneSystem management console made it much easier to manage—with all these advanced features, we felt that OneXafe met our needs and then some,” said Muayad.

OneXafe is designed to offer scalable, immutable network-attached storage capacity for either primary or secondary workloads. It expands storage seamlessly—by either adding one drive at a time or multiple nodes within a cluster—without any configuration changes to the application. OneXafe also minimizes storage requirements with powerful data reduction technologies such as inline deduplication and compression, further reducing storage and operational expenses.
 

OneXafe: Cost-Effective and Easy

Bunduq quickly realized OneXafe’s benefits as soon as it was introduced into its infrastructure. “It is an incredibly user-friendly solution; it’s just plug-and-play. The implementation was quick, it fits in seamlessly, and we didn’t need any training. It requires limited monitoring and maintenance. It has been so effective that within a year, we were adding a second box to the cluster to increase our backup coverage,” said Muayad.

Bunduq now uses OneXafe NAS storage for more than 80 TB of its business-critical data. The company’s IT team has been impressed by OneXafe’s advanced deduplication and compression features which have helped it realize a data reduction ratio of just under 8:1.
 

Delivering Beyond Expectations

“OneXafe’s performance has exceeded our expectations—its return-on-investment is quite substantial. Its scalability, compression, and deduplication technology have boosted our efficiency and reduced our cost of operations. And its protection from ransomware attacks ensures that our business-critical data is secure. It supports any expansion plans we might undertake now or in the future,” said Muayad.

If you’re looking for a better scale-out storage solution, Arcserve has the answers. To get started, find an expert Arcserve technology partner, or check out our OneXafe on-demand demo to see for yourself what OneXafe can do.