PROSOCO has chosen Maxta’s hyperconvergence solution to reduce downtime and constant challenges that stopped many of its business operations. PROSOCO, founded in 1939, is a national manufacturer of products for cleaning, protecting and maintaining concrete; making building envelopes air- and water-tight; and cleaning, protecting and restoring new and existing masonry buildings. PROSOCO has offices and production facilities in Lawrence, Kansas with sales and technical support staff throughout the United States.
As the company started to grow and looked toward expanding operations, IT Manager, Tim Norris, said his current IT environment needed to change. He wanted to continue down the virtualization path that they had started on a couple of years ago, but there were challenges to overcome with the existing Hypervisor/SAN infrastructure. “Our environment was at capacity and needed to grow, but it was already overly complex and had performance issues that were difficult to track down,” Norris said. “We needed something simple to operate, with solid performance and reliability.”
Tired of all the downtime and constant challenges, Norris knew he needed to drastically change his environment. He pondered the possibility of installing another brand of SAN and had read there were some good results with different vendors – but overall that was not what was needed.
Norris ultimately concluded that the data center needed a hyper-converged solution that could offer simplicity, flexibility and scalability. He looked at EMC, Nutanix, SimpliVity, and Maxta since all these vendors had good coverage.
PROSOCO requirements included:
• Ease of Use
• All-in-one solution
• Snapshotting for testing
• Reliability
• Ability to efficiently run the back office applications
Norris found Maxta MxSP software to be the right solution for PROSOCO and installed several Dell R730 XD servers with 27 TB of server-side storage. Norris appreciated the overall simplicity of Maxta’s MxSP VM-centric solution and found that he was able to reduce IT management time – as the solution performed flawlessly. Maxta also offered capacity optimization to help the IT team with their storage needs. Maxta provided PROSOCO with the flexibility to hyper-converge on any x86 server, using their preferred hardware devices, and eliminating the need for complex and expensive storage arrays.
Overall, Norris was thrilled with the simplicity and reliability of Maxta: “What I like about Maxta is that it is one giant storage pool – unlike iSCSI which gives you the solution in small chunks and makes you worry about how many VMs will fit into one storage pool – Maxta is one big hunk of storage. Simple and streamlined.”
The business benefits were also apparent almost immediately. Before Norris even fully deployed the Maxta solution – he learned that with Maxta there is no downtime during server maintenance or upgrades. This instilled a peace of mind that allowed Norris to focus on more strategic projects to help grow the company rather than worry about shutting down the whole compute system for hours at a time to reboot his servers.
Going forward, PROSOCO will be looking to co-locate in the next year. Norris says he will look into replicating the Maxta environment with several more nodes.
