INgrooves Deploys Silicon Mechanics Unified Storage Appliance

Silicon Mechanics, Inc. has supplied its unified storage appliances to INgrooves (Isolation Network, Inc.), a San Francisco-based digital media distribution and technology company looking for a more efficient and cost-effective storage solution for its increasing volume of digital music.

INgrooves is using zStax, an enterprise, software-defined storage platform based on open-source ZFS technology and powered by NexentaStor.

Compared to INgrooves’ original deployment of a traditional storage platform, the new zStax has reduced their storage costs by about 60-70% by lowering both equipment and installation costs. The appliance’s compact configuration means that INgrooves gets nearly three times more storage in the same amount of physical space as its prior solution. Future plans include transferring their entire storage infrastructure onto the zStax platform.

After looking around at a variety of alternatives, INgrooves worked with Silicon Mechanics to consolidate and modernize its storage from hardware RAID to ZFS-based software-defined storage.

“INgrooves needed to grow, and their long-term success depended on finding a lower-cost storage alternative that would allow them to continue growing at a fast pace,” said Steve Scherer, storage solutions expert, Silicon Mechanics. “zStax is an easy and cost-effective way to expand storage capacity over the long run. INgrooves can also take advantage of built-in features like asynchronous replication, which is an extra cost in most legacy storage systems.“

Because of the workload, the CPU selected for INgroove’s zStax appliance was the performance Xeon E5-2670.

“Content distributors like INgrooves require the performance and low latency that the Intel Xeon processor delivers“, said Bev Crair, GM, Intel Corp.‘s storage division. “And pairing the processor with the flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of software-defined storage provides an open and efficient solution to the challenges facing today’s content distribution networks.“

Nicolas Ratineau, director of systems engineering, INgrooves, believes the power of zStax lies in its flexibility: “The system is built to respond to a variety of customer needs, from super IO/s to pure storage, which means zStax systems can use their hardware to meet a variety of environmental requirements, but all can share the same management interface.“

He also sang the praises of the Silicon Mechanics engineering development team, saying: “I am impressed with their ability to quickly understand the client’s issue and find an appropriate solution.“

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