Case Study: Northern Backup achieves 4x performance and 40% storage-cost reduction with NexentaStor (Nexenta)

Northern Backup Uses Nexenta to Quadruple Performance and Reduce Storage Costs by 40%

Northern Backup is a Calgary-based IT managed services provider that supports government and enterprise customers across industries. Rapid growth exposed limits in their legacy SANs—insufficient capacity, poor agility, vendor hardware lock‑in and rising costs—so they sought a software‑defined storage solution that could deliver high performance, easy management and faster service delivery.

After benchmarking several platforms they deployed NexentaStor on commodity HP/Hitachi hardware. Implementation took two days and delivered a fourfold performance increase (read IOPS grew from ~3K to >12K; write IOPS from 2K to 27K), average write latency improved by about 50%, and storage costs dropped roughly 40% (about $100/TB). The result: faster delivery of data‑intensive apps, simpler management, higher availability and the freedom to scale on any hardware.

Northern Backup

Brent Thumlert

Chief Architect, Northern Backup