Case Study: Burton Snowboards cuts backup storage costs and deployment time with SwiftStack

Top snowboard manufacturer retailer deploys SwiftStack as backup archive tier

Burton Snowboards, a global manufacturer and retailer of snowboards, outerwear, and shoes, needed a more cost-effective way to handle backup and archive storage. Its small infrastructure team was struggling with rising NAS/SAN costs, backup windows were getting tighter, and restoring file share data from tape was unpredictable. The company also saw an opportunity to add offsite disaster recovery, but its existing tier 1 storage could not support that efficiently.

SwiftStack provided a software-defined object storage solution based on OpenStack Swift, integrated with Commvault Simpana backup software. With SwiftStack, Burton reduced deployment time from 17 hours to 1.5 hours and made ongoing management about 10x easier. Storage costs dropped from about $5,000 per TB on NAS to roughly $500–$800 per TB, with recurring costs as low as $200 per TB, while also enabling plans for remote replication, file share archiving, and future DR expansion.

Burton Snowboards

Jim Merritt

Senior Systems