Case Study: Ballou Hosting Intelligence achieves scalable, high-performance, cost-effective storage (75% cost savings, 50% less management time) with Nexenta (NexentaStor)

Ballou - Customer Case Study

Ballou Hosting Intelligence, founded in 1997 and now part of the Malmö group, provides web hosting, cloud, virtualization and storage services across Europe. After deploying VMware, Ballou found its aging IBM SAN lacked performance and capacity for its growing customer base (about 304 TB and growing ~3 TB/month), and needed a scalable, easy-to-manage, cost‑effective storage platform without increasing headcount or risking vendor lock‑in.

Working with Layer 8, Ballou deployed NexentaStor in an HA cluster with ZeusRAM/ZeusIOPS and additional JBODs, using ZFS-based auto‑sync and snapshot replication. The rollout delivered higher performance, redundancy and flexible scalability, cut storage management time by 50%, reduced projected costs by about 75% versus competing solutions, and preserved budget and staffing while enabling future cloud projects.

Ballou

Daniel Jakobsson

Storage & virtualization specialist, Ballou