Case Study: escape GmbH scales to host leading German companies and cuts servers from 10 to 3 with Nexenta

escape Scales Up to Host Leading German Companies – with SDS from Nexenta

escape GmbH, a Berlin-based design, development and hosting firm serving clients such as BMW, Nintendo, Vodafone and Leica, was outgrowing its 16TB iStor block-only system. With customers running ~100 VMs, large SQL databases and a mixed Citrix/Linux/Windows environment, escape needed enterprise features — unified file and block storage, snapshots, deduplication — plus greater speed, capacity and scalability without enterprise vendor prices.

escape deployed a 24TB NexentaStor (ZFS-based) solution on Supermicro hardware, integrating the existing 16TB iStor and backing up to a 48TB Openfiler over a 1Gb fiber link with SSD-backed writes and separate read/write caches. The move cut physical servers from ten to three, enabled RAID‑7 triple parity, improved performance and reliability, simplified management and maintenance with commodity parts, and substantially reduced storage costs.

Escape

Thomas Wenzel

Partner, escape GmbH