ONStor Press Releases

ONStor Increases Data Replication Speeds at Smartways from 4 to 50 gigabytes per hour

Leading managed services and hosting company records massive increases in performance


CAMPBELL, Calif. - Jan. 24, 2008 – - ONStor Inc., the leading provider of scalable clustered NAS solutions for the enterprise, today announced that Smartways, a leading hosting and managed services company, has chosen the ONStor Bobcat Series NAS Gateway solution for its two data centres.

The ONStor product's scalability and speed of backup plus significant space and energy savings, were cited by Smartways as reasons for its choice of the ONStor solution. Smartway's TouchPoint Online Backup and Disaster Recover customers include amongst many, Thorn EMI, Equity, and the Portland Financial Group.

"Continuous data availability is at the heart of our business, so downtime is not an option. Performance therefore is key. We simply cannot afford to have long periods of downtime when our business is providing a complete managed service for our clients," said Mike Rickards, Managing Director, Smartways.

"We were attracted to the high availability of the Bobcat 2240 series. As our company has grown we have experienced an exponential increase in the amount of data we are storing on behalf of our clients. The traditional tape-to-tape backup and recovery solution rapidly became obsolete, as we could not continue to store vast amounts of data in this format. It simply took too long to backup, let alone recover, in the event of a disruption to service. To put it into context we are currently managing circa 32 terabytes of data - (32 Million Megabytes of information growing at between 2-5 terabytes per month) and that naturally puts pressure on our existing infrastructure," he continued.

ONStor Bobcats have been installed as part of a new SAN infrastructure project based on data replication between our Hitachi and LSI SANs which is able to support twice the capacity across Smartways' storage environment as its previous solution, while accommodating spikes in utilisation without disruption.

Using the ONStor Bobcat 2240, Smartways is now able to back up 50 gigabytes of data in under an hour, a dramatic increase from the 4 gigabytes it had been able to store previously.

Smartways has also constructed a second data centre enabling the company to offer a complete disaster recovery and business continuity service to its managed services clients. The SAN at the second location is a Hitachi system and ONStor has been able to integrate seamlessly with both SANs ensuring asynchronous data replication for the first time.

Furthermore, ONStor's open SAN capability capitalizes on Smartways existing storage infrastructure, which also includes Asigra, rather than requiring the addition of new storage before the current investments in capacity run out. As its storage needs grow, the company will be able to add storage to the ONStor environment from any of their preferred storage vendors, including ONStor.

"The beauty of ONStor has been the ability of the product to easily expand upon our existing storage. Adding capacity and managing it is very simple," said Mike Rickards.

"From the ONStor web console, virtual file servers can be created and moved very quickly, and we can bring them online or offline very fast. Adding and provisioning storage resources with the ONStor solution occurs via point-and-click, instead of the hard re-cabling and downtime required using traditional file servers."

About ONStor
ONStor drives down the cost of storage management by delivering scalable clustered NAS that saves enterprises 50 percent on total cost of ownership with systems that let customers start small and scale massively as their requirements grow. ONStor's award-winning Pantera Clustered NAS Systems and Bobcat NAS Gateways consolidate information from multiple Windows, UNIX and Linux devices into a single, highly scalable file storage environment. The open storage architecture allows existing assets to be leveraged, while integrated file server virtualisation enables resources to be redeployed quickly to accommodate changing needs. Proven at hundreds of enterprise customer sites, ONStor delivers the cost-effective approach to scalable storage. More information about ONStor can be found at www.onstor.com.



Copyright © 2007 ONStor, Inc. All rights reserved. ONStor, the ONStor logo, Pantera, ONStor Bobcat, EverON, AutoGrow, PSQuota, Data Snap, Data Restore, STOR-FS, are trademarks of ONStor, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other marks and trademarks may be the property of their respective owners. Information regarding products, services and offerings may be superseded by subsequent documents and are subject to change without notice. For the latest information and specifications regarding ONStor, Inc. and any of its offerings or services, please contact your local sales office or the corporate headquarters.

For further information, please contact:

Katherine Maddison / Richard Merrin
Spreckley Partners Limited
+44 (0)20 7388 9988
maddison@spreckley.co.uk


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