Condor Storage Integrates D2D Backup for Macintosh at SK+G Advertising

Given the volume of multimedia content used and reused in today’s advertising industry, it is not surprising to find that high density, readily accessible storage for the Xsan market is a key concern. Earlier this year, SK+G Advertising, a pioneer in new media advertising in the entertainment and tourism industries, began searching for a cost-effective storage solution to house its rapidly growing archive of production-quality, multimedia content in a disk-to-disk (D2D) back up model. They were looking for a cost-effective disk based solution that could handle the large volume of storage without sacrificing performance. Environmental issues in terms of limited data center space and rising energy costs also played into their specification.

A creation of SK+G Advertising

Around the time, SK+G began its search, Nexsan released the SATABeast Xi, the first high-density disk based storage offering for the Xsan market that brought more than 42TB in a 4U footprint along with embedded energy efficiency. Working with Condor Storage of Arizona, SK+G selected the SATABeast Xi coupled with ‘s backup software to fulfill its needs. SK+G became an early customer for the SATABeast Xi product and installed the system without outside support over a weekend.

"SATABeast Xi gave us the reliability we needed coupled with an excellent price point and a good warranty", said Brian Carter, SK+G. "This was essentially plug and play for us, and we’ve been very pleased with the performance and energy savings."

"No other storage solution exists out there that combines the level of storage density and energy efficiency of the SATABeast Xi," said Jeanne Wilson, president and storage architect at Condor. "Atempo backup software has a flat pricing model which means customers are not charged more for supporting more terabytes of data. Pairing Atempo Time Navigator with the high-density SATABeast Xi gave SK+G the price point, reliability and performance they needed. The energy efficiency was a great bonus." She added: "Our corporate theme for 2008 is Smartly Tiering Storage and with Atempo and Nexsan’s common support for Mac, Windows and UNIX, this joint solution is optimized for heterogeneous environments, particularly organizations with a strong Apple Mac presence."

SK+G is using the SATABeast Xi with 28 one terabyte disk drives connected to a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN). The system has been in place at SK+G for more than three months and already they are pushing toward their initial capacity.. "We have already stored all our business critical, high bandwidth content and still have room to grow considerably since SATABeast Xi can handle up to 42TB in the same footprint," said Brian Carter", IT Director, SK+G. "When you consider that the Apple market is famous for owning cutting edge design and multimedia development, it’s amazing that the high density storage options built exclusively for this environment were almost non-existent. Previously, we just cobbled together a solution and dealt with the integration headaches ourselves."

Although energy savings was a secondary consideration in the initial purchase, SK+G has grown to appreciate the various settings available through Nexsan’s AutoMAID technology, which came with SATABeast Xi at no extra cost. The company initially set AutoMAID to Level 1, which unloaded the heads for a 15 to 20 percent energy savings and sub-second recovery time. They are considering boosting that savings by implementing both Level 2 and Level 3 of AutoMAID for certain types of data. At level 2, the heads are also unloaded but then slowed to 4000 RPM. This provides 35 to 45 percent savings and about a 15 second recovery time. At Level 3, the drives stop spinning and enter sleep mode though they are still powered on. Other storage vendors use an on/off model and recovery time can vary dramatically. At Level 3 AutoMAID, the SATABeast Xi will achieve 60 to 70 percent savings and an acceptable 30 to 45 second recovery time.

"We will continue to adjust our AutoMAID settings to best meet our needs for both energy savings and application performance", said Brian. "We need to have near-instant access to this data, and so far, the SATABeast has not let us down. I know we can maintain the necessary level of performance and squeeze even more energy out of the data center in the process."