Business Structure and Growth

When I wrote my previous blog on data backup last summer, Net2Vault was processing over 65,000 replication streams per day. Since that blog article was published, we have experienced some growth. Net2Vault is now processing over 87,000 replications streams each day. That is over two and a half million per month!
 

But this has not been a nightmare scenario for the company. It was actually only a moderate surprise that things have grown so dramatically in such a short time. As most of you are probably aware, just like not having enough business, too much business can actually hurt a company as they struggle to keep pace.
 

How did Net2Vault accomplish that kind of growth in such a short amount of time without the usual problems that can plague a company?

In our case, the structure of our company is a key factor to keeping things running smoothly. First and foremost, at Net2Vault we maintain a focus on our core strength. We are experts at NetApp. We also use NetApp native tools to replicate data from our customer’s production systems. By utilizing NetApp storage and NetApp Snap* products we can leverage our years of experience to better serve our customers' needs.
 

Since Net2Vault focuses on one storage platform, this simplifies monitoring and automation. We have developed custom programs to monitor, automate, and report on our environment. Some problems are automatically identified, corrected and reported before engineers ever see them in a log or on a console. Again, this is made easier because we focus on one platform. This has allowed us to more easily create an environment where everything that is important is monitored and some problems can be auto-corrected by intelligent monitoring programs that have been developed in-house.
 

Supporting multiple vendors would make an environment like the one I just described much more difficult and the results would likely be uneven. What may be easy to accomplish for one vendor often proves much more difficult, even impossible, for another. But support for one vendor produces very binary results. You can either accomplish something or you cannot. At Net2Vault, by having a deep understanding of the storage platform we utilize, we have been able to accomplish quite a bit with relative ease.
 

Focusing on our core strength has allowed Net2Vault to continue to grow without suffering many of the growing pains that would occur in a more heterogeneous environment. We simply leverage the expertise that has come from our years of NetApp experience as we continue to add to our existing infrastructure. We hardly noticed as we moved from 65K replication per day to 87K replications per day. It was just a matter of building on what we already do well.
 

I think we should have a party to celebrate when we hit 100K replications streams per day – assuming we notice when we do!
 

- Larry Breniser
Net2Vault