CUSTOMER SUCCESS
PROOF-OF-CONCEPT: AWS STORAGE GATEWAY IN EDUCATION
About the Company
Sierra College (Sierra) serves over 18,000 students and 1,300 employees across four campuses in Northern California.
The Vision and Challenge
As organizations become interested in utilizing the cloud, they can become overwhelmed by the many offerings cloud can provide. To help understand how cloud can meet specific needs, proof-of-concepts can be helpful to organizations. For Sierra College, they determined a proof-of-concept was the right direction to take before fully committing to a cloud environment.
Sierra was interested in utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a part of their backup storage solution. Their critical need required storing their main ERP backups offsite in the event of critical hardware failure or disaster, as there were no existing offsite backups.
The Outcome
InterVision was asked to provide a solution that would accommodate the backup and disaster recovery needs for their ERP application. We determined that the most beneficial and expedient solution for Sierra would be to implement Storage Gateway, as this AWS service can be used for backup and archiving, disaster recovery, cloud bursting, storage tiering, migrations, etc. We designed and worked with Sierra’s team to deploy a Storage Gateway virtual appliance on-premises with the required minimum hardware and network firewall settings and deployed a working proof-of-concept. Within hours of deployment, Sierra’s database administrator was successfully copying their ERP backups to S3.
This proof-of-concept included the following:
- AWS Account Creation: We created a new account in AWS for subscription of services and provided necessary hardware/network requirements to Sierra for the Storage Gateway.
- Storage Gateway: We worked with Sierra to deploy a Storage Gateway virtual appliance and mount the NFS shares on their systems.
- Storage/S3 Bucket Setup: Storage provisioning and IAM roles created.
- Data Migration/Initial Upload: We assisted with the initial upload of Sierra’s ERP data.
InterVision’s delivery of a proof-of-concept with AWS Storage Gateway provided Sierra with a clearer picture of how AWS can be utilized to help them reach their business continuity and disaster recovery goals. By the end of this project, Sierra observed the benefits of adopting AWS, and the seamless execution of InterVision sparked greater confidence within Sierra’s team to adopt additional cloud services.
AWS Cloud Services Utilized:
- AWS Storage Gateway
- AWS Storage/S3
- AWS Glacier
Third-Party Applications or Solutions Used:
- Oracle RMAN Backup
