Despite all the attention that cloud computing had gotten in recent years, there are still many companies that have been reluctant to make the move to the cloud. But moving is what Flexi-Van Leasing is all about, and the company decided to move its storage to the cloud in 2013.
Flexi-Van had still been on tape storage until this year. But the company found its tape-based on site storage system was creating as many problems as it did solutions. Complaints with the existing system included excessive paperwork, unreliable equipment, time-consuming maintenance and skyrocketing costs. The company also had to replicate and disperse all of the data stored on tape on premises to a number of sites across the country.
Making the move to the cloud required some psychological adjustment as well as systems adjustment. But the result has been improved efficiencies, reduced maintenance, an estimated annual cost savings of $25,000 and new peace of mind for IT Director Jim Mercer. Mercer spoke with FierceCIO about the company’s move to the cloud, and how he worked with provider TwinStrata to overcome his initial fears.
Flexi-Van Leasing is one of the nation’s largest suppliers of intermodal transportation equipment. Flexi-Van supplies rail, trucking and shipping companies with the equipment they need to get goods to market. A good way to think of Flexi-Van is as the middle piece in the pipeline to get goods from a shipping port to a distributor, for example. A 50-year-old company, Flexi-Van has approximately 200 employees and $160 million in revenue, Mercer says.
It’s primary service is providing the chasis for large storage containers, to enable them to be transported from one location to another. Other companies lease the chasis on as-needed basis from Flexi-Van, which has approximately 155,000 chasis in its fleet. According to Mercer, the company has historically had about 70 larger customers. But in recent years, Flexi-Van has sought to expand its market to include thousands of smaller companies and specialized truckers. The result has been an increase in business, but an added burden to systems that were hardly state-of-the-art.
Approximately one year ago, the IT department (a staff of 15) began working with cloud storage provider TwinStrata to make the switch from tape to cloud. Out went old tape storage devices and unused switches. In came new servers and a virtualized environment. “After slugging through the initial targets I began to focus on backup and recovery, and how they were handling it,” Mercer recalls. “My guys were spending an hour, maybe more, a day on this. So I began to look for another solution.” Mercer wanted a new storage system that would be easily accessible, scalable, easy to maintain, require no additional staffing, and could accommodate a new disaster recovery plan. “We told ourselves, ‘let’s take a look at the cloud,’ and we looked at a couple of companies (TwinStrata was not initially one of them),” Mercer said.
What led Flexi-Van to TwinStrata was that most invaluable of all search tools–word-of-mouth. A client of Flexi-Van recommended that the company look into TwinStrata’s services. Mercer says he liked what he saw in the TwinStrata solution: security, reliability and easy recovery. “I came to the conclusion that I was looking at a robust and secure backup solution,” Mercer says. The TwinStrata cloud storage solution does a complete data encryption before it is actually sent to the cloud, a feature that Mercer says he likes. TwinStrate has a relationship with Google, which in turn does another layer of encryption, providing double security. But Mercer acknowledges that more security than Flexi-Van even needs at this time. “Our data isn’t really very sensitive,” Mercer notes.
Still, it’s nice to know the added security is there, and it was a part of the process for Mercer to personally embrace the cloud. Mercer also likes the savings he has calculated already with the new cloud storage system.
Between the eliminated cost of tapes and the freed-up time of staff, he estimates he has saved approximately $25,000 so far in 2013. AS to advice for others, Mercer says a CIO should address any fears about moving to the cloud right up front. A quality service provider can help with that process, he notes. “Don’t go into the relationship looking for problems,” Mercer concludes. “Proceed with caution, but by all means, proceed.”