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hand in hand technologies |
Ultimately, It’s About Your Application...
Although we pride ourselves on the quality, performance and reliability of our software, services and systems products, we realize that the best storage system is the one that you never think about because it just works. We also realize that you use network storage for different applications and that we can’t be the master of all of them (though we are working on that!).
One of the things that we did early on in our history (going back to at least 2003..) is to create a dedicated test and certification lab in our Southern Virginia headquarters. We spent a lot of our investors money setting up an environment where we could verify that our software works the way it is supposed to, conforms to industry specifications and meets our stringent performance requirements before release (we are all over the performance thing..). We also use this test center to validate our products with those of other leading software and hardware companies in our industry. Although this list continues to expand, we started with application scenarios where we felt we could offer you the best value.
Backup and Archiving sound alike, but they are quite different in practice. The old fashioned way to “backup” is to use tape drives and cross your fingers that you never need to restore one. The new way is to use disk based backup, shared using an iSCSI SAN. Not only will you get your data back, it will be much faster. We test disk based backup with all of the leading software applications (Microsoft, CA, Symantec, etc) and other system vendors like Unitrends.
Archiving is a bit different in that you are intentionally storing reference data to disk, hopefully in a way that is efficient and easy to retrieve. Typically, this type of data rarely changes.
Virtualization is now a standard way to make your storage more efficient (like we do) and to make your servers more efficient and cost effective (using XEN or VMware). It is a defacto standard that Ethernet based iSCSI SANs are the natural companion to virtualization – Fibre Channel need not apply..heck, you are moving to virtualization to consolidate servers and save money – why dump it into expensive, non-standard storage networking that is “passe’”.
Surveillance and Digital Video Recording is another area where our VMX iSCSI SANs and our Storage Builder for iSCSI SAN excel. One of the leading vendors in the video surveillance market began using our iSCSI product as their primary network storage used in Casino monitoring. This gives us a good reason to go visit some of our customer sites and support their efforts by putting a few quarters in the Slot’s.. We may not feel all that comfortable seeing cameras on every street corner or intersection or throughout our daily travels, but we can’t stop it. So, we might as well take advantage of the situation.
One of the cool things that you may want to do with your virtual servers is to Remote Boot from the iSCSI SAN. Our products work perfectly with the remote boot capability offered by our long term Canadian friends at Emboot.
Check out the other ways you can effectively use our products in support of you Email requirements, database apps, clustered servers and streaming video. |
