Case Study: Preferred Credit, Inc. Invests In Scalable Pillar Axiom Storage System

Fast becoming a top provider of financial services to the U.S. direct sales industry, Preferred Credit has experienced tremendous growth over the last five years. The company opened an office in Texas to serve as its hub for customers in the south, and it continually augments its IT and telecommunications infrastructure with additional capacity.

With so much growth occurring over a short period of time, the company began to experience issues with its storage.

"We had a lot of servers with direct-attached storage," said Steve Halvorson, Network Administrator at Preferred Credit. "It was getting to the point where it was difficult to manage the storage on all these separate servers and to make sure it was all backed up."

The company decided to virtualize its data center using VMware, and with that decision came the decision to replace its many separate direct-attached storage systems with a single storage area network (SAN) to enable the centralized, always-up storage that they needed. They looked at multiple options for their SAN, looking not only for functionality, but also for serviceability and the ability to scale easily as their business continues to grow. At this point, the company brought in North American Systems International (NASI), which introduced them to the Pillar Axiom.