The Honey Baked Ham Company needed to replace its slow legacy backup system. Learn how OneXafe became the key ingredient for fast, affordable backups.
About Honey Baked Ham
In 1957 Harry J. Hoenselaar opened the first Honey Baked store in Detroit, Michigan, because he believed in an idea. That idea produced what is regarded today as the best-tasting ham in the world. Using the highest quality bone-in smoked ham, Hoenselaar created a special curing and cooking procedure, bringing out a one-of-akind taste. All these years later, the company has stayed within the family and so has the commitment to make every ham the same way Hoenselaar did-one at a time.
The Challenge
As is the case for most companies, the volume of data that Honey Baked Ham Company generates continues to grow exponentially. Unfortunately, the company’s legacy backup solution offered a finite amount of storage, and adding more storage was prohibitively expensive. Even worse, the company’s IT team was constantly struggling with tape backups that took as long as five days to complete. “We had to find a more efficient way to back up our data-a faster solution that could scale with us,” says Honey Baked Ham’s Director of Infrastructure and Security, Kevin Madsen. “We also had to stay within our IT budget.” The company had three key criteria for choosing a backup solution: backup speed, cost, and ease of use. After researching available solutions, the IT team chose StorageCraft OneXafe. “StorageCraft’s scale-out architecture, simple interface, and unique approach to securing our data really stood out,” says Madsen. “But what ultimately sold us was the value StorageCraft delivered, especially compared to the other solutions we looked at. StorageCraft’s solution was very reasonably priced.”
The Solution
Working with StorageCraft’s local rep, Honey Baked Ham chose the StorageCraft OneXafe object-based converged data platform for its on-site primary data centre backup. The company added another OneXafe in a secondary stack in a remote location to securely store replicated backups. “The initial install was really easy,” says Madsen. “The StorageCraft team helped walk me through the entire setup process.” Honey Baked Ham started out with two OneXafe appliances, each with a single one-terabyte drive. With its storage needs growing quickly, the company soon realised the true value of OneXafe’s scale-out architecture, which makes it easy to quickly and seamlessly add one drive or multiple nodes in a cluster. “After the initial install we added two more one-terabyte drives to each OneXafe, for a total of six terabytes in two stacks,” says Madsen. “We chose the StorageCraft solution because of the added level of support the company offers. And installing the drives was incredibly simple.”
The Results
The StorageCraft solution shrunk the time required for a full backup of Honey Baked Ham’s data from five days to overnight. “We love that the hassles we had with our old system are over, and because backups are now fast and easy, our people are more efficient,” says Madsen. Honey Baked Ham also realised another cost-cutting benefit from the StorageCraft solution: a reduced data footprint. With OneXafe’s inline deduplication and compression, Honey Baked Ham achieved data compression rates as high as 5:1. It’s a simple equation: Less storage space equals less money spent on drives. OneXafe features continuous protection and encryption for data at rest, so Honey Baked Ham no longer needs to dedicate extra storage capacity just for data protection. “It’s so easy to scale the StorageCraft solution as our needs grow,” says Madsen. “And I was really impressed by the StorageCraft software stack.” Madsen says. he especially likes the fast backups and replication features. “Now our backups are pretty much effortless. It really is a ‘set it and forget it’ solution,” says Madsen. “And we’ve never needed to contact support for help. I’ve recommended StorageCraft to colleagues and will definitely keep doing so.”
Key Differentiators
Honey Baked Ham expects to continue to add more drives to its OneXafe platform as its data requirements grow. “It’s great to have the confidence that we can meet our storage needs now and into the future without facing the challenges and costs of a forklift upgrade,” concluded Madsen.
