Consolidated Communications Holdings, Inc., (Nasdaq: CNSL) is one of the top 10 largest fiber providers in the U.S. The company uses DataCore software-defined storage to power its high-availability, always-on infrastructure with incredible results—including 100% uptime for more than 10 years.
Consolidated Communications uses software-defined storage in two ways: as a traditional SAN product that uses bare metal servers with hard drives and SSDs, and in a hyperconverged model as virtualized storage controllers providing scale-out storage. DataCore was initially deployed at three Consolidated locations in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Texas.
As the company has grown, it continues to deploy software-defined storage throughout its infrastructure and today, the group manages 17 implementations with plans for additional deployments in future. In fact, DataCore software-defined storage has displaced every other storage product within Consolidated Communications’ engineering group.
Always-on availability across all sites
“After witnessing the many benefits, it was a no-brainer to continue to add software-defined storage to all new locations,” said Jeff Fuesting, systems engineer at Consolidated Communications. “DataCore is the perfect fit to power our entire storage infrastructure.”
Consolidated Communications relies on the software-defined storage platform’s synchronous mirroring capability to implement a stretched high-availability configuration across two separate geographical regions. This prevents equipment and site outages from interrupting access to critical information, which is the reason Consolidated Communications has enjoyed 100% uptime for more than 10 years.
Improved performance and efficiency while reducing costs
Furthermore, software-defined storage has enabled Consolidated Communications to keep storage costs down by enabling them to design the storage exactly how they want it; reducing the amount of hardware it needs to achieve performance results; and extending the life of existing storage hardware.
“Every time we review the data storage offers of other well-known vendors, I’m not convinced their products can outperform the capabilities we have with DataCore,” concluded Fuesting.
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