Voonami, a Utah-based provider of colocation, hosting and managed services, has successfully added 20 terabytes to its environment using hybrid storage arrays from Tegile. Steve Newell, a sales engineer with Voonami, discussed his company’s use case during last month’s Wikibon Peer Incite event.

Before the upgrade, Voonami’s public cloud offering ran in an environment that combined NetApp storage with Cisco UCS servers and VMware virtualization software. The company’s IT department was “very happy” with the features of their NetApp deployment, Newell said, but they concluded that scaling the environment by 20 terabytes using a disk-only solution would cost too much.

Voonami sought a cost-efficient storage platform that delivers high performance, supports both iSCSI and NFS, and includes comprehensive management functionality. The cloud provider received bids from EMC, HP, Nimble and a number of other vendors, but most did not offer native support for NFS or charged extra for it. Toward the end of the search Vooami came across Tegile’s hybrid Zebi line, which not only undercut the competition but also promised to eliminate the need for manual provisioning.

Voonami ended up deploying Zebi 2600 arrays in both of its data centers. In May, the company expanded its relationship with Tegile via an agreement to offer remote replication between customer environments and the cloud. At present, Voonami is offering both VMware solutions and private and public cloud offerings based on OpenStack and Hyper-V.

Newell’s advice to CIOs is to keep in mind that they know their environments better than anyone else, including vendors. Companies should look for the “best real solutions” that can effectively address their rapidly changing IT needs.