ONStor's Bobcat Lands in Italy at INGV

ONStor's Scalability and Open Storage Interoperability deliver savings for the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology

CAMPBELL, CA – October 24, 2006 - ONStor today announced that the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), one of the largest research centers in Europe, has deployed the Bobcat NAS Gateway to consolidate the management of scientific data. Because the Bobcat enabled INGV to redeploy existing storage resources, the Institute reported significant cost savings compared to other solutions.

The INGV, founded in 1936 and which specializes in geophysics, seismology and volcanology, comprises nine departments and one national institute spread across seven main research centers. The Institute currently manages over 20TB of information, and expects growth to nearly 50TB over the next year.

"Because of the nature of our research we gather and generate extremely large volumes of data on a strict 24/7 basis and require a highly scalable, reliable, and easy to use solution," said Lucio Badiali, Head of ICT at INGV. "ONStor's Bobcat NAS Gateway meets the needs of such a demanding environment with a strong combination of features at a significantly lower price point than any other option we considered and without any compromise."

The multi-vendor IT environment deployed by INGV included HP, Nexsan, Plasmon, Procom, Promise and Xiomtek Fibre Channel, SCSI and SATA arrays and NAS systems, all deployed to store earthquake data, forecast events, carry out research and to support general administration processes. However, when the number of servers grew to an unmanageable number, the IT team decided to look for a new solution that would allow them to consolidate the existing resources and implement new applications at an affordable price.

"During the selection process, INGV also considered products by EMC and FalconStor, but ONStor offered the only solution that let INGV re-use their existing storage infrastructure, which was one of their key objectives," said Roberto Fabbriconi, technical field manager at reseller MTI. "Another appealing feature for INGV was ONStor's server virtualization that allows them to simplify storage management across their various departments."

"Many organizations are faced with the double challenge of exponentially increasing volumes of data and limited budgets," said Jon Toor, VP of marketing at ONStor. "Our solutions enable them to address these issues while leveraging existing resources and skills."

About ONStor
ONStor drives down the cost of storage management by delivering enterprise-class file storage systems at affordable prices. ONStor's award winning Pantera Clustered NAS Systems and Bobcat NAS Gateways consolidate information from multiple Windows, UNIX and Linux devices to a single, highly scalable storage environment. 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 or by calling toll-free 877-2ON-STOR (877-266-7867).