ONStor Virtualized Storage for Imagination Technologies
With its Bobcat clustered NAS gateways
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 21, 2008 at 2:14 pmONStor Inc., the leading provider of scalable clustered NAS solutions for the enterprise, today announced that Imagination Technologies, a leader in System-on-Chip Intellectual Property (SoC IP) has deployed Bobcat 2260 clustered NAS Gateways for its data centres.
Scalability and flexibility were the chief motivators for making the investment, according to the technology team at Imagination Technologies. Reduced power consumption and floor space, however, as well as providing cost effective fail over were also important factors in giving the green light to the upgrade.
“Our business depends upon data being available all the time. That’s why we need a storage system with rock-solid reliability,” said Phil Knowles, UNIX systems manager at Imagination Technologies. “As a growing business, we have a need for greater storage capacity. ONStor met this demand extremely cost effectively. Since the Bobcat 2260s run virtual file systems, there are huge savings in power consumption and floor space. This means that we save big time on infrastructure costs. Pound for pound, we get twice the performance.”
Bobcat series ‘Open’ architecture gives Imagination Technologies the flexibility to add storage from many vendors rather than being locked in to any one. As demand for storage grows, they can shop around for the best deal, using multiple combinations of storage types.
“Being able to choose who we buy storage from makes a real difference to us. The fact that we can mix and match also helps us to adapt to change effectively and respond accordingly,” said Phil. ONStor’s virtualised storage solution provides scalability and a cost effective fail over plan. Virtual servers appear on LANS with unique IPs but can easily be moved around the system. This provides for effective load-balancing, fail-over and scaling. Phil continued: “One amazing feature of our new set up is the impact on scalability and fail over. We can optimise server utilisation by transparently relocating servers around the system. We can reallocate services according to demand. So, if there’s a bottleneck, we can easily change which server deals with it. None of this involves any disruption to services. Down-time has been radically reduced.”