PersonalizationMall.com and Bakersfield City School District Opt for Xiotech

Xiotech Corporation announced that two of its customers, PersonalizationMall.com and Bakersfield City School District in California, have added the company’s Magnitude Storage Services Gateway (SSG) to their IT environments. The Magnitude SSG enables IT administrators to add network-attached storage (NAS), iSCSI Target and Single Instance Storage capabilities to Emprise or Magnitude 3D storage area network (SAN) environments. The solution also consolidates file and block data management, enabling organizations to gain the greater performance, capacity and reliability of a SAN while protecting their existing investments in Internet Protocol (IP) networking and file serving technology.

PersonalizationMall.com

Bakersfield City School District in California

The Magnitude SSG is an appliance-based solution that provides block-level application data via iSCSI as well as file data through the standard Ethernet protocols NFS and CIFS. The Magnitude SSG offers unparalleled expansion as data needs grow, along with simplified management for provisioning storage volumes (LUNs).

The Magnitude SSG and Emprise 5000 storage system together form a ‘purpose-built’ solution for unified block and file data access. Xiotech is developing a variety of such purpose-built solutions under its ISE Powered Alliance Program, which the company introduced in October. The program is designed to build an ecosystem of storage products that inter-operate, integrate with and are optimized for Xiotech’s game-changing Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, which is the underlying architecture for Xiotech’s Emprise storage systems. The Magnitude SSG also integrates seamlessly with Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D SAN offerings, so existing customers can realize the benefits of consolidated data management.

Online Retailer Preserves IT Infrastructure
PersonalizationMall.com, an online retailer of personalized gifts, saw its e-commerce business more than double in 2008, outpacing its available storage capacity. To leverage its existing network infrastructure and file server investments, PersonalizationMall.com purchased two Magnitude SSG systems to connect its existing file servers to Xiotech’s Emprise 7000 SAN.

"The preservation of our existing IT infrastructure played a crucial role in selecting Xiotech’s Emprise 7000 storage system and Magnitude SSG," said PersonalizationMall.com Executive Vice President of IT Technology Andrew Deren. "The ability for us to access highly reliable and scalable storage on the Emprise 7000 system across our existing network will serve our growing data requirements for years to come. We also will be able to unify our storage management across both NAS and SAN storage, which will allow us to further increase our reliability and performance."

School District Consolidates IT Environment
To improve operational efficiency and reduce hardware costs, Bakersfield City School District (BCSD) purchased two Magnitude SSG systems to complement its existing Xiotech Magnitude 3D 4000 SAN solutions. The Magnitude SSG is serving as the access point for students, teachers and administrative staff to retrieve their saved documents on the network.

"The physical appearance of the network folders for our users is the same as it was before we implemented the Magnitude SSG systems," said BCSD Administrator Jonathan Foth. "The only difference is the information is no longer stored across several different servers’ direct attached storage. Instead, the data is hosted in our data center through a pair of clustered Magnitude SSGs that leverage capacity from our Magnitude 3D 4000 system. As overtime continues to be scrutinized in California’s current financial climate, it is an additional benefit that the clustered nature of our Magnitude 3D and SSG configurations allow us to perform maintenance traditionally reserved for after hours during regular business hours with no down time, saving the district in costly overtime."

"IT administrators are being forced to make tougher buying decisions as budgets tighten," said Xiotech Director of Product Management Eric Lomascolo. "The Magnitude SSG enables customers to consolidate file servers and centralize data management, reducing both capital and operational costs."