US Signal Expands Distributed Storage Infrastructure Capabilities

US Signal scales its Storage As A Service (STaaS) offering to help meet growing demand ¶

Founded in 2001, US Signal is the largest debt-free, privately held, data center services provider in the Midwest, delivering industry-leading data center technologies, cloud solutions, data protection and managed services to help companies transform their IT operations and meet ever-changing technology and business needs.

They recently increased their storage capacity by over a petabyte with a no-downtime migration across multiple distributed data center sites in four midwest states, including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Increasing customer demand required capacity to scale-out rapidly ¶

Having already established a Ceph software-defined storage architecture in 2012, the company took the opportunity to re-evaluate its incumbent solution against evolving requirements. These requirements included the need for cluster management across multiple, disconnected sites, the need for seamless integration with services billing, stringent cloud service SLAs, as well as limited resources (including skills, space and power). Because customers were in current operation, zero downtime during the capacity expansion was a critical requirement. SoftIron’s expertise and Ceph-based HyperDrive solution proved to be an ideal fit for the expansion, accomplished with zero downtime.

“We chose open source Ceph as a foundational building block for our needs early on because of its innate power and capability. Ceph’s virtually infinite scalable nature combined with an uncompromising feature set made it a natural fit for our company, which provides world-class services in a highly competitive, mission-critical environment." - Derrin Rummelt, Executive Vice President of Engineering at US Signal.

Download the full case study: Leading Services Provider, US Signal, Achieves Scale & Efficiency with Ceph + SoftIron HyperDrive (PDF).