Case Study: Thorntons achieves non-stop business operations and cost-effective disaster recovery with DataCore Software's SANsymphony

DataCore SANsymphony™ Software-Defined Storage Ensures Non-Stop Business Operations at “Convenience Store Chain of the Year” Thorntons

Thorntons, Inc., a 40‑year‑old convenience store and travel plaza operator with 162 locations, faced a critical IT challenge: mission‑critical, write‑intensive POS and store systems were suffering from slow response times, limited capacity and weak write‑caching on legacy Dell Compellent SANs, putting 24/7 operations and disaster recovery at risk. To solve this, Thorntons engaged DataCore and evaluated DataCore SANsymphony software‑defined storage to modernize storage, improve performance and enable robust replication.

DataCore deployed SANsymphony in front of a new X‑IO SAN at the primary site and used SANsymphony to repurpose existing Dell Compellent hardware at the DR site with synchronous mirroring over fibre channel. The result: dramatic performance and backup improvements (VM backups cut from ~12h to 6.5h, SQL backups from 11h to 7h, full file‑share backups from 35h to 15h; a P&L report dropped from ~9–10h to 3.5h), 15 TB of primary data mirrored to a 30 TB pool, eliminated the need for new DR storage and strong risk reduction — benefits Thorntons attributes directly to DataCore.

Thorntons

Kevin Schmidt

Senior Network Engineer