Mentora Chooses Nexsan

Nexsan Corp, announced that Mentora, a provider of testing, tuning, and hosting services for business-critical systems, has chosen Nexsan storage systems to save rack space in its data centers and provide storage in a private cloud environment. In its deployment, Mentora is using multiple Nexsan storage systems, including a SATABeast for disk-based backup and SASBeast for the company’s private virtual platform.

Mentora architects, builds and maintains customer environments at top-tier data centers, each with hundreds of servers, in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas and Washington, D.C., and delivers services nationwide to mid-market and large businesses. The company also provides application for computing environments that include Oracle eBusiness Suite and databases, healthcare ERP, and other applications, as well as Websphere MW and Citrix technologies. Mentora hosts and manages enterprise equipment and applications for eCommerce, healthcare, insurance, finance and publishing in the company’s data centers and virtual private cloud.

Mentora backs up hundreds of terabytes of data per month for a number of customers. Prior to selecting Nexsan, its storage systems employed power-hungry off-the-shelf controllers that took up a deal of rack space and did not live up to performance expectations. Mentora needed a storage solution that would consolidate its storage environment to reduce energy and space requirements and provide disk I/O for performance to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

"We use top-tier facilities to house our storage infrastructure which comes at a premium price. Therefore, it is critical for us to optimize those facilities for maximum utilization and efficiency," said Andrey Dmitriev, Director, Host and Applications, Mentora Group. "With space also at a premium, we wanted a storage solution that offered exceptional density and high availability, allowing us to provide significant value to our business customers."

When architecting its storage environment, Mentora required systems that could handle high-speed backup processes in a small footprint and provide the level of service needed. Today, Mentora’s Nexsan solution includes multiple SATABeast high density storage systems that are used primarily for backup. The company also employs the Nexsan SASBeast enterprise-class storage system with a density of 25.2TB of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) storage to build out its private virtual platform.

Its Nexsan storage solutions not only make far better use of rack space but also provide Mentora
with other advantages:

• Reliability – During the time Mentora has been running its Nexsan systems, the disk failure rate has been far lower than that of other systems it has experience with. In addition, the company has never had issues with firmware upgrades, ensuring maximum uptime.
• Flexibility – A customer may have different workloads in its environment, such as a database operations, various file systems and virtual machines, that have different throughput and capacity requirements. Nexsan allows Mentora to handle all of these environments by mixing SATA, SAS and high-performance SSD drive technologies in a single tiered storage system.
• Ease of Use – Mentora found it very easy to deploy and manage its Nexsan systems using Nexsan’s browser-based administration tools, which require no special plug-ins.
• Cost Effectiveness – Other vendors offer high availability, or high performance, or high capacity, but they usually offer these capabilities at a much higher price. Nexsan products offer all of these advantages at competitive price.

"Our high-capacity Nexsan storage allows us to back up a hundred megabytes a second, and do so very efficiently," said Dmitriev. "Once we started using Nexsan, we realized they let you do things that many other vendors do not. You can mix drives of different speeds in the same chassis to support multi-application workloads in a very dense form-factor. You can also have different levels of access with Fibre Channel and iSCSI, providing a very flexible multi-purpose solution. Nexsan products really provide the best value for the dollar."

"Cloud service providers like Mentora need affordable enterprise-class solutions that can fill a wide variety of needs for many different customers," said Victoria Grey, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Nexsan. "Our solutions provide the flexibility to meet those needs while maximizing data center resources, including space, power and management resources."