Siemens Magnet Technology Chooses Two Coraid Arrrays

Coraid, Inc.,has been selected by Siemens
MR Magnet Technology, a designer and manufacturer of superconducting
magnetic resonance imaging magnets for medical applications, to revitalise its
storage infrastructure.

Two Coraid EtherDrive SRX4200 arrays have replaced an existing ailing iSCSI
system to integrate with the company’s CommVault DR software and LTO tape
archive technology, providing a performance and backup
infrastructure.

More than 30% of the MRI
scanners in hospitals worldwide contain a superconducting magnet manufactured by
Siemens MR Magnet Technology at its Oxfordshire, UK headquarters. Here, an IT estate including Windows and Unix servers, CAD CAM workstations
and PCs, supports the company’s 500 staff responsible for R&D, design and
manufacturing operations.

When Chris Farmer, IT
manager at Siemens MR Magnet Technology, found that the existing storage system
was starting to fail, he turned to Coraid.

He explained: "We run both frequent
snapshots and a traditional overnight backups and our old storage array was
starting to let us down. As a manufacturer of quality-assured critical medical
equipment, we take quality and BC very seriously, so storage failure is not an
option.

"While our DR strategy continues to meet our
needs we needed to replace our old storage heads because scheduling backups was
becoming a problem due to the old array’s inability to backup multiple projects
and data volumes, which have also been growing exponentially."

After assessing his options, Farmer selected two SRX4200 arrays.

These are the foundation
of EtherDrive storage line, providing low-latency, high-bandwidth data
transfer between hosts and storage on a network. The SRX 4200 was designed to deliver flexible, high-performance, scale-out and
easy-to-use storage and is certified with CommVault Simpana.

As Farmer concurred:
"We were reassured by Coraid’s full
compatibility with our CommVault platform and impressed by the highly scalable
architecture which the SRX4200 gives, as we can now easily upgrade
connectivity, capacity and performance as our data grows. We are getting a 1 TB
per hour read speed and that is ten times faster than what we got with the old
array. We are so pleased with the price-to-performance ratio we’re getting that
we’re considering Coraid for our primary storage as well."

The IT staff at Siemens MR Magnet Technology have also found that they no
longer need to intervene with backup operations, versus up to six times a week
with the prior solution, and their team can efficiently generate accurate
backup and integrity reports.

Peter Godden, VP for EMEA at Coraid concluded: "More and more world-class enterprises across
Europe and indeed worldwide are seeing the tangible benefits of using our
EtherDrive technology. In contrast with legacy solutions based on decades-old
technology, our platform was designed from scratch to meet the needs of modern
datacentres. By combining a scale-out cloud architecture with enterprise
storage features, Coraid uniquely enables customers to manage ever-greater
volumes of data without trading off performance or resilience."