Qsource Networks

Qsource Networks, a Managed Network Services company offering outsourced IT services has teamed with Vembu StoreGrid to offer an online backup service as part of its Qmanage IT program for SMBs.

Company Profile

Founded in 1999, Qsource Networks, based out of Atlanta, provides managed network services to small to medium sized businesses nationwide. QSource has partnered with Cisco and Microsoft to provide a complete outsourced IT solution for organizations. Qsource has a team of 20 technicians focusing on comprehensive and cost effective quality support for its customers.

What were the challenges that you were faced with before using StoreGrid?

All our customers were initially using tapes/tape drives for backup. For the traditionally used tapes, the backup windows were too long, tapes would need to be replaced annually and tape drives were very expensive to deploy and maintain. We wanted to offer an online backup program to our customers by making a transition from tape or tape drives.

What led to your choice of Vembu StoreGrid for backups?

Well, we started with considering some enterprise backup to disk products from Symantec and a few others as well as some of the Microsoft Data storage products. We chose StoreGrid because it was cost effective, easy to deploy and did not require many different external services like DNS, Active Directory, etc. We loved the fact that it was simple – easy to deploy for new clients, runs in the background and provides good reporting for managing many different customers.

How did you go about deploying Vembu StoreGrid?

We had to ensure that the data we backed up was in a secure location and the connection to the StoreGrid server was reliable. We purchased a Dell Poweredge 2850 with a couple of TB space initially and placed the StoreGrid server in our data center. As we began to offer it to customers, they jumped at the chance to eliminate tapes from their day to day routine. Within only a month or two, we added a Dell MD1000 storage array with 7TB of space. We have added additional MD1000 storage arrays as needed and are now storing over 16TB of customer’s data from 35 different customers.

How has customer response been for your online backup program?

Currently, we serve over 35 customers at over 50 locations with our online backup service. The biggest advantage of using StoreGrid in our environment has been the liberty of not having to use tapes. All of our clients enjoy that freedom.

What has been the business impact of your choice of Vembu StoreGrid?

We charge approximately $1 per GB and find that it is cost effective compared to tapes. We only took about 8 clients for the services to pay for it, and now that we are running about 35, the margins are pretty healthy. The cost of equipment is high but cost averaged over a 3 year period, there is easily a 20-25 point margin.

“StoreGrid has met a need for our business and our clients when every other software on the market was so over priced, it was untouchable by the small business or so badly written that it put clients at a high risk factor for data loss. Vembu support is responsive and quickly works with you to correct any issues you may run across, most of which we have found are related to lack of bandwidth or old hardware.”

What are your future plans?

We will continue to offer StoreGrid online backup to our customers as a part of our Qmanage IT service. We find it is the perfect fit for the small business and provider alike.

A few words for other service providers...

Online backup is not extremely complex but can be time consuming without the right product. If you are going to deploy online backup services, make sure you take the time to plan well, use good industry standard hardware and choose a product like Vembu StoreGrid. Take it slow and learn the product really well before putting clients on it. The software is not overly complex, but it will save you some time to learn how it works in a test environment before deploying it in a production environment or to a customer. Vembu makes a solid product and I look forward to their future releases.