Canadian Earth Rangers Deploying Nexsan E60

Nexsan Corporation announced that its
Nexsan E60
storage system has been selected by Earth Rangers, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated
to educating children and families about biodiversity loss and empowering them
to Bring
Back the Wild!.

The storage system was chosen for its ability to
deliver energy savings with performance, and deployed in
the organization’s Centre
for Sustainable Technology Media.

The Earth
Rangers Centre for Sustainable Technology Media is a green
building, certified as Gold under Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design
(LEED) for New Construction. The IT environment was designed to embody Earth
Rangers’ values, to show that the organization practices what it preaches, and
to serve as an inspiration to everyone who walks through the doors. The Earth
Rangers Centre (ERC) has been designed to minimize its impact on the
environment. The direct relationship of a specific building feature to air,
energy, water, materials and/or biodiversity are briefly described through
ERC’s ‘sustainability pillars.’ These pillars identify elements that
prioritize air quality, energy use and generation, water use and quality,
renewable materials, as well as biodiversity and occupant health. A virtual
tour of the facility is available at http://www.ercshowcase.com.

To support
the data protection and disaster recovery needs of its Earth
Rangers Centre, Earth Rangers reviewed a number of storage systems presented by
competing vendors. The organization wanted access to robust storage technology
that was green in terms of energy efficiency, thereby reducing power
consumption and lowering cooling requirements. After reviewing a variety of
solutions, Earth Rangers found that there are no real standards when it comes
to solutions that claim to be green. Many solutions that professed to be energy
efficient only delivered three to five percent power savings when reviewed by
Earth Rangers. That is when the organization discovered the Nexsan E60 storage
system.

"When we approached Nexsan regarding the data
infrastructure necessary to meet Earth Rangers’ green requirements, we knew
that each of the solutions we chose would need to play an important role in
delivering an environmentally friendly solution," said Rob DiStefano,
IT Systems Director, Earth Rangers. "We
dedicated a lot of time and resources to identifying the most power efficient
solutions available. Nexsan is an example of a company that really hit it out
of the park. An 80 percent plus savings in power consumption is a huge deal,
not only for Earth Rangers, but for organizations mindful of both power
consumption and IT costs."

The Nexsan
E60 storage system is an expandable, high density and performance storage
solution with the ability to scale up to 180TB in only 4U of rack space. It
features AutoMAID Level 4 technology which reduces energy usage up to 85%. Yet, the power savings of the E60 was not the only thing that surprised
Earth Rangers. It was more impressed by its performance. They had expected
to take a performance hit. Instead what they found was that it out-performed
the other enterprise storage systems they had considered.

"The environmentally-friendly data center
that the Nexsan E60 supports for Earth Rangers meets all of our goals for power
savings, operational efficiency and sustainability," added DiStefano.
"Plus, the solution delivers
remarkable performance and reliability demonstrating that you don’t have to
give up performance to be green."

Earth
Rangers started out using the Nexsan E60 storage systems as a secondary storage
platform for DR and archiving. Then it had a requirement to put a financial
system on the E60, running within an Oracle database. The system was then added to other applications with production data storage
requirements such as Exchange and SQL databases. Never did Earth Rangers see an
impact on performance when using the E60 for primary storage.

"A key consideration for organizations
choosing energy efficient storage systems is the trade-off between energy
savings and performance. The mindset is that when you reduce power, performance
will suffer," said Victoria Grey, SVP, Marketing at Nexsan. "The Nexsan E60 shatters this long held
belief and for environmentally aware organizations such as Earth Rangers, this
was a key factor in their purchasing decision."