Balboa Park Online Collaborative Installs Exablox Oneblox

Exablox Corp. announced that Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) has selected OneBlox with OneSystem, Inc. as its scale-out storage and backup solution.

BPOC was looking for an affordable scale-out storage solution after both NetApp’s and Dell’s shared storage solutions came up short. Exablox’s scale-out architecture allows BPOC to scale as it grows, resulting in significant CAPEX savings and reducing management time by an estimated 40 hours per month.

BPOC has enhanced the technology capabilities of its clients, including re-launching more than 25 websites on Drupal, a community-based content management system; digitizing more than 180,000 museum objects; providing more than 800 person-days of technology-focused training; providing affordable desktop/server support for 13 organizations; and building needed park-wide technical infrastructure such as a high-speed fiber network to support future collaboration. These projects add strain to BPOC’s current infrastructure, causing the organization to rethink its storage strategy.

According to Jason Quinn, director of IT, Balboa Park Online Collaborative: “Every time we needed more storage we had to add another drive letter to the server, which introduced more management and caused participating organizations to need an additional 2TB each month – this approach did not scale.“

BPOC was looking for a standardized storage solution to support three use cases:

• File storage for users: approximately 10TB.
• A target for backups: approximately 80TB.
• A digital asset management system repository: approximately 400TB

With a team of only 12 IT personnel, BPOC is tasked with supporting 500 desktop users and the central infrastructure of more than 30 art, science and cultural organizations in San Diego – including museums outside of Balboa Park, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the New Children’s Museum. The non-profit collaborative receives support from a range of foundations and national grants and also earns revenue from clients; it therefore has a fiscal responsibility to keep both capital and operating costs low. The BPOC IT services department needed a shared storage solution to address its budget and management objectives, and to support its file storage, target backup and digital asset management system repository needs.

BPOC has enhanced the technology capabilities of its clients by updating the infrastructure and technology services of the many institutions it supports. To further its technology objectives, BPOC is leveraging OneBlox to support both the DAMS and Symantec Backup Exec environment and plans to implement a secondary unit as a target for remote replication in the very near future.

“Exablox’s Oneblox is a scalable object platform that behaves like a NAS solution,” said Laura DuBois, program VP, storage practice, IDC. “This means that it gets its scaling properties by virtue of the object platform that runs under the covers, and yet by way of its support for native file interfaces, it has the look and feel of a typical NAS solution. Exablox designed Oneblox to combine all the essential storage features in a single easy-to-deploy model. Oneblox therefore offers features like scalability, resiliency, availability, and storage efficiency that are found in higher-end purpose-built SAN and NAS solutions.“