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Open-E, a leading developer of innovative storage management software, has won a major contract to provide a robust storage solution for the Tax Authorities of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The company will work jointly with partners BASIS and Tarox to install and launch 150 critical systems based on Open-E's Data Storage Server (DSS) throughout the German state in a mere five weeks.

Once complete, the tax authorities will be provided with approximately 1.8 Petabytes (1,800 Terabytes) of trusted, secure and reliable storage capacity for the crucial financial data of residents. The overhaul will impact the computing center, which is responsible for the operations of the state's 200 departments, as well as back up and archiving data at each of its field offices.

"This project was very demanding on the Open-E storage solution, the project managers at BASIS and those responsible for coordinating the installation due to the sensitivity and nature of the data being stored," said Ruth Philipp, marketing and sales director of Open-E. "We initially had to adapt the Data Storage Server to the tax authority's unique requirements. The entire system then had to be installed and fully launched for operation in a matter of a few weeks. Everyone involved performed at a superhuman level and brought the project to a successful conclusion."

When the project began, the computing center in Düsseldorf, which is responsible for all the revenue offices in the entire state, required the delivery of a high performance, highly secure and proven replacement for its overloaded and obsolete storage system without any interruption of ongoing operations.

The center intensely tested and considered some of the top storage solutions in the market, including new tape-based technologies and centralized or decentralized disk tape libraries (DTLs) - as well as other tapeless solutions.

Open-E's Data Storage Server, which enjoys prominence in Europe, was ultimately selected in a combined solution with an Intel storage server - due to superior price-to-performance metrics, massive data throughput rates, enhanced manageability, superior reliability and immense scalability. At the highest expansion level, the combined systems may handle approximately 1,764 Terabytes (nearly 1.8 Petabytes), providing the computing center with an ideal amount of scalability and tremendous potential for growth.

"After a few initial challenges, the individual partners worked together so well that they were able to bring the systems into operation in just a few weeks," said Andreas Hedderich, IT director at the Düsseldorf computing center. "Everyone involved in the project handled their responsibilities in such a professional manner that we experienced no delays from the time the configuration files were generated at our location until the actual installations took place in the departments."

About NRW's Computing Center
The North Rhine-Westphalia Finance Computing Center is an official service provider for the State Ministry of Finance. It works in conjunction with regional tax offices, which in turn manage local tax authorities.

The computing center currently serves 137 tax offices, two regional offices, and three educational institutes for the state's financial administration organization. Accordingly, the 600 employees of the center serve 32,000 others around the state. In order to keep up with this volume and to simultaneously successfully launch new technologies and solutions, the computing center must select reliable and professional partners when awarding contracts.

About Open-E's Data Storage Server (DSS)
Open-E's Data Storage Server (DSS) provides a fast, reliable, and scalable platform for IP Storage and is one of the easiest ways of implementing a NAS server and/or an iSCSI technology in a network. The DSS can be used with all x86 PCs containing USB ports, an IDE controller and an additional SATA controller on the main board or hardware controller.

DSS is built on Open-E's industry recognized NAS and iSCSI software technology, which is noted for its performance, superior security, robust operation and ease-of-use management advantages. With DSS, users may cost-effectively and quickly add storage to an existing network; consolidate storage and backups for multiple servers; centralize storage management with optimal performance and data protection; and improve data availability and efficiency.

The solution offers outstanding price-to-performance metrics, enhanced manageability, superior reliability and increased productivity for applications ranging from file sharing, storage consolidation, backup and recovery and virtualization to volume replication for disaster recovery.

DSS also supports a wide variety of hardware RAID platforms from the industry's leading names, as well as multiple types of network connectivity including GbE, 10GbE, Fibre Channel and Infiniband. The versatility of DSS also allows the user to combine NAS systems with iSCSI SAN systems, and provides built-in anti-virus and backup utilities, along with agents to support backup products from industry leading names.

Additionally, DSS supports software RAID functionality, taking advantage of current multi-core processing technologies.

About Open-E
Open-E, Inc. is a pioneering leader and developer of IP-based storage management software with headquarters in the United States and Europe. Its DSS, NAS-R3 and iSCSI-R3 product lines, built from the ground up for the SMB and SME markets with scalability to the enterprise, enjoy a multi-national reputation for best-in-class performance, flexibility, reliability, scalability and return-on-investment.

Open-E delivers its software exclusively through a world-wide network of experienced system integrator and reseller partners. With an extensive network of over 600 registered OEMs, distributors and reseller partners, including over 200 Open-E certified partners, organizations have the flexibility to work with the hardware solution provider of their choosing, allowing Open-E to focus on its core competency of storage software development.

Open-E distributes its products through a global network of partners that has an outstanding presence within the markets for storage and network systems. For more information about Open-E and its products, or to become a partner, please visit www.open-e.com.

SOURCE: Open-E