Aegis Software Trades Direct-Attached Storage for Reliable Fibre Channel Solution from NetApp® StoreVault™
Sunnyvale, Calif. - October 8, 2007 --
StoreVault, a NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) division, today announced that
Aegis Software, a global provider of high-performance and
configurable trading and testing solutions for financial service
companies, deployed the StoreVault S500 to address its rapid data
growth, limited local storage, and need for more highly available
network services.
Aegis Software provides powerful and
sophisticated trading software, testing products, and services for
equities, options, futures, and foreign exchange trading. In just
one year, the number of Aegis employees increased more than 40% to
deal with its rapidly growing business and client base. As a
result, the company was reaching its limits with its data storage
requirements for e-mail and database applications, with many of its
servers already running at 90% to 95% of capacity and its Exchange
server at 95% to 100% capacity with over 200GB in storage
groups.
"Our storage growth became a huge concern for
us," said Aaron Laskowski, senior systems engineer, Aegis Software.
"We were managing 1TB of data on internal Dell direct-attached
storage, and we had limited local storage capacity and no expansion
capabilities with our blade servers. Just trying to figure out
where we were going to find capacity and managing our data became a
daily concern and extremely time consuming. We needed a better plan
in place to deal with our fast-growing business."
As Aegis Software's storage capacity
requirements increased, so did its demand for fault tolerance on
all critical business systems for continuous service reliability,
data availability, and high availability. The company overhauled
its Exchange environment with e-mail archiving and migrated to
Exchange 2007 with four redundant clustered mailbox servers, which
required a shared storage device between the clustered servers.
Additional hardware in the company's infrastructure also introduced
a secondary office location with a plan to replicate data
off-site.
"It was clear that based on Aegis Software's
requirements, Fibre Channel SAN would need to be a big part of the
company's initiative to upgrade its entire infrastructure for fault
tolerance," said Nick Ruddy from HorizonTek, a StoreVault VAR
specializing in the latest in networked storage technology. "Among
all the solutions available to SMBs from HP, Dell, and EMC, the
StoreVault solution had the richest feature set for fault tolerance
and performance that Aegis Software needed."
Aegis Software deployed the StoreVault S500
with nine 500GB drives and a card for Fibre Channel connection. The
StoreVault S500 is also connected to an Ethernet network, but by
leveraging Fibre Channel, Aegis Software doesn't consume existing
LAN bandwidth, which was already a severe bottleneck. Now the
company's Exchange server, mail archiving system, and blade servers
are connected to StoreVault using Fibre Channel. As a result, Aegis
Software significantly improved its business availability and
lowered its costs by reducing the amount of local storage connected
to servers.
"StoreVault is one of the best investments we
ever made in our infrastructure," added Laskowski. "The StoreVault
S500 allowed us to simultaneously address our multiple issues of
inadequate direct-attached storage, server clustering, and file
server consolidation-all at an incredible price. Shared storage
through Fibre Channel has provided more highly available network
services, leading to better performance and less downtime for all
our users. We've been very pleased with our buying experience, as
the StoreVault and HorizonTek teams were a tremendous help from the
moment we first considered StoreVault all the way through to
postinstallation."
"Keeping business-critical systems up and
running is important to all SMBs, especially in the financial
services industry," said Sajai Krishnan, general manager of
StoreVault. "StoreVault is now making storage solutions a reality
for smaller companies needing the same performance and availability
that larger enterprises do. With the StoreVault S500, Aegis
Software can now focus on increasing profitability and efficiency
for its customers."
The StoreVault S500 is a scalable all-in-one
networked storage appliance that is customized for SMBs at a price
point that fits SMB budgets. With its intuitive Windows®
graphical user interface, the StoreVault S500 is easy to install
and simple to manage, while providing enterprise-class networked
storage functionality. The StoreVault S500 has been deployed across
a wide range of industries to solve the growing customer challenges
of data growth, data protection, and data management.
About Aegis Software Inc.
Since 1994, Aegis Software has been developing powerful,
sophisticated and easy to use trading software and services for
financial companies that demand performance, robustness,
availability, and flexibility. Aegis is the developer of
AthenaTrader, an algorithmic execution management system (EMS) for
global Equities, Options, Futures, and Foreign Exchange trading. In
addition to trading solutions, Aegis' testing products - Exchange
Simulator, Client Simulator and T3 - are considered the industry
standard for automated, regression, interactive and performance
testing of FIX-based trading systems. Aegis provides unmatched
trading solutions to clients such as Citigroup, Credit Suisse,
Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and many others.
For more information please visit
www.aegisoft.com.
About StoreVault
StoreVault, a NetApp division, is focused on delivering data
storage solutions tailored to the needs of small and medium-sized
businesses. StoreVault combines enterprise-proven technology from
Network Appliance, a world leader in unified storage solutions for
today's data-intensive enterprise, with the scalability,
simplicity, security, and affordability required by SMBs.
Information about StoreVault solutions and resellers is available
at
www.storevault.com.
About Network Appliance
Network Appliance is a leading provider of innovative data
management solutions that simplify the complexities of storing,
managing, protecting, and retaining enterprise data. Market leaders
around the world choose NetApp to help them reduce cost, minimize
risk, and adapt to change. For solutions that deliver simplicity
and value, visit us on the Web at
www.netapp.com.
Press Contact:
Roger Villareal
Network Appliance, Inc.
(408) 822-1959
rogerv@netapp.com