Pixorial and SquareTwo Financial Buy HDS NAS

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced enterprise customers across all industries are selecting the Hitachi Network Attached Storage (NAS) Platform over competitive solutions to help them access and protect unstructured data, such as email and video critical to their businesses, while reducing IT costs.

With the Hitachi NAS platform as the file sharing, file server consolidation and data protection choice for enterprises, customers such as Pixorial and SquareTwo Financial benefit from robust consolidation and intelligent file tiering capabilities to minimize complexity in the data center. These consolidation and data protection capabilities are highly in demand and have driven approximately 200 percent growth in fiscal year 2009 for the Hitachi file and content portfolio compared to fiscal year 2008.

The increase of unstructured data, especially in industries such as healthcare, life sciences, entertainment and Internet services, is putting a strain on IT organizations who already have limited budgets and resources, to better and more quickly serve the needs of the business. At the same time, IT organizations are struggling to consolidate file servers with legacy NAS systems that do not have the scalability and performance capabilities needed to keep up with the demands of users. However, with the Hitachi NAS Platform, which is managing more than 40 petabytes of data with customers today, these enterprises can benefit from enhanced performance, scalability and simplified management to handle the most demanding data center application environments – all while lowering IT costs.

Pixorial: Exponential Growth
Demands Optimal Performance
with High Density Storage
An online video sharing platform, Pixorial allows consumers and organizations to send, upload, edit, organize and share videos. Pixorial also archives digital masters and estimates each customer video to be about seven gigabytes in size. With the volume and type of file sharing and management needed to support Pixorial’s growing business, the company implemented the Hitachi NAS Platform to manage its massive data growth and to provide high performance file sharing and tiering capabilities, decreasing overall costs per gigabyte and per square foot stored, while ensuring no service interruptions to maximize the customer experience.

"Our business model is based on cost per gigabyte per user by account subscriptions. This model helps us manage every opportunity as cost-effectively as possible while providing an easy to use video platform," said Joshua Terry, vice president of systems engineering, Pixorial. "The Hitachi NAS Platform allowed us to build a storage infrastructure with the maximum amount of flexibility, density and capacity possible, while accommodating the high performance needs of our network."

SquareTwo Financial:
Scalable, Intelligent Storage
Keeps Data Growth in Check
SquareTwo Financial’s unique business model, experienced use of technology make the company one of successful players in the US$40 billion asset recovery management industry. SquareTwo Financial creates a way for companies and consumers to swiftly resolve their fiscal commitments through the buying and selling of debt. The company gathers, assimilates and analyzes client information, managing and storing millions of case files, each one containing hundreds of records. Essential to its business, SquareTwo Financial must have instant access to all client data, prevent disk failure, data corruption and loss as well as keep client data available and secure until each case is closed or the debt is sold to comply with federal and state regulations.

To better manage its year-over-year data growth, SquareTwo Financial implemented the Hitachi NAS Platform for centralized single-pane management of both block and file data. With a unified view of the data through a single interface that includes proactive performance monitoring and in-system and remote replication as well as dynamic provisioning capabilities, the Hitachi NAS Platform allows for the provisioning of new storage equipment in less than an hour.

"In addition to exceptional reliability, scalability and performance, we were looking for a NAS solution that could replicate between our data centers," said Ken Vandenbark, vice president of IT operations and engineering, SquareTwo Financial. "We can now complete faster and easier backup and recovery and are able to keep our data current to within four hours of transactions, which allows for peace of mind from a compliance and litigation perspective."