Calgary Consulting Firm Integrates Open-E DSS Storage Solution

Every year, TERA Environmental Consultants' data needs nearly double, and were in 2005, in excess of one terabyte spread amongst several file servers. We decided to consolidate our storage and do so in a way which would not need biannual overhauls. TERA held several meetings with top tier vendors for an adequate SAN solution and every one failed to deliver; many admitted themselves that SAN's were generally too complex for small companies to maintain and too costly to purchase for their data needs. This was generally true - Fibre Channel SAN's were more than $30 per gigabyte when hard drives were under $2 per gigabyte.

The answer was in a rather new technology - iSCSI - allowing us to reuse most of our existing gigabit network and hardware to build our own SAN. Open-E DSS was chosen as the software to provide this as we found it to be most economical, fastest and most reliable of all the available options, even when compared to Open Source solutions. The straight-forward installation and management of volumes were also huge positives as were did not want the headaches afforded by most Fibre Channel SANs

Open-E has enabled a level of reliability and scalability we were unable to attain through attached storage and works flawlessly with VMware's virtualization technologies. No other solution would have provided us with anything so easy to administer for even ten times the price. Next time GIS runs out of room, we can simply log into the server and give them a few hundred more gigabytes of room.