Silverpop, a
provider of permission-based email marketing
solutions, has chosen the ONStor Bobcat Series NAS
Gateway solution for its two datacentres
to improve the efficiency
of its storage services.
ONStor is a provider of
scalable clustered enterprise NAS solutions and its products’
scalability and stability plus space and energy savings, were cited
by Silverpop as reasons for its purchasing choice.
Silverpop's customers include Fossil, Siemens, British Sky
Broadcasting, Little Tikes and Houghton Mifflin "Non-stop content
delivery is our business, so downtime is not an option. Power
consumption is a concern, and space is a precious commodity,"
explained Kevin Ahrens, director of production operations,
Silverpop.
He added, "We were attracted to the high availability…the
space-saving and consolidation abilities of the product have
enabled us to use one-third of the floor space we were using
before, plus cut our energy costs. The [new] solution is very
stable and has reduced our storage operational costs by 80%."
The new solutions deployed are able to support twice the capacity
across Silverpop's storage environment as its previous systems
while accommodating spikes in utilisation without disruption.
Furthermore, the solution’s open NAS capability capitalises on
Silverpop's existing storage rather than requiring the addition of
new storage before the current investments in capacity run out. As
Silverpop's storage needs grow, the company is confident that it
will be able to add storage from any of their preferred storage
vendors.
"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 Ahrens. "From the [system’] 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…occurs via point-and-click, instead of the hard
re-cabling and downtime required to deploy another NAS node using
traditional file servers."
Prior to the new implementation, Silverpop had multiple production
environments and needed to standardise technologies across its
facilities. In addition, the company was doubling its storage
capacity each time it implemented a new production environment and
needed a solution that could support this level of
scalability.