ONStor's NAS Shows Its Dazzling True Colours at Image Source

Leading Stock Photography Service Meets Storage Scalability Needs With ONStor

Reading, UK – January 16, 2007 - ONStor today announced that UK-headquartered Image Source, the world's leading independent producer of royalty-free stock photography, has deployed two Bobcat 2240 NAS Gateways to cope with a dramatic increase in capacity requirements, meet future scalability needs, and increase data availability. According to the company, the ONStor NAS system not only delivered the scalability needed to accommodate the agency's anticipated 150% annual capacity growth, it also saved Image Source capital on the acquisition cost compared with alternative solutions.

'The rapid storage growth we had been experiencing was showing no signs of abating and so we needed a solution that would be easy to scale and would provide high levels of reliability. The two Bobcat NAS Gateways, set up to be mutually redundant, were the ideal solution for us,' said Jonathan Biggington, IT manager at Image Source. 'The ONStor Bobcat was the only option that would let us add disks to expand a single folder through virtualisation. The scalability and flexibility it offers are fantastic.'

Image Source has a portfolio of over 80,000 images which are sold directly through its website and around the world through a network of distributors; 3,000 more photographs are added to the library every month and to date the business counts thousands of clients worldwide.

Until early 2006 Image Source relied on a cluster of disks attached to a server to provide storage for its images as well as for its creative and administration files. However with the company's capacity requirements quickly soaring from 100 GB to 50 TB in just two years following the transition from transparencies to digital images, this infrastructure hit a scalability wall and the team looked for more effective and reliable ways to store their data.

Image Source wanted the new storage infrastructure to provide the right combination of high availability, scalability, ease of use and price. After evaluating HP and Dell's EMC solutions and eliminating them because of cost and lack of virtualisation features, Image Source followed the advice of Insight Direct (UK) ltd. and chose ONStor.

Image Source, founded in 1999 in the UK, now has offices in London, New York, Los Angeles and Cologne, Germany and counts a staff of 85. All the data generated at these locations is stored on the disks managed by the ONStor Bobcats in the London office.

'Most organisations today are not asking for rocket science-based solutions; they are looking for tools to build a reliable, scalable and flexible storage infrastructure without breaking the bank,' said Jon Toor, VP of Marketing at ONStor. 'We have designed our products with these requirements in mind; our Bobcat NAS Gateways are effective, easy to use, and affordable. And most importantly, they grow with our customers.'

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 contact emea-sales@ONStor.com or +44 (0) 118 963 5866 for the UK and +49 171 148 9828 for continental Europe.