A Leading Provider of Online Information Resources

A leading provider of online information resources asked Corporate Technologies to help architect a storage solution to house its rapidly expanding family of research databases. With thousands of institutions around the world relying on the accessibility of this information at all times of day, every day, it was paramount that the recommended solution provide the highest level of reliability, and also the performance capability, to allow efficient responsiveness to millions of information requests per day. Having a high-performance, 24 x 7 environment was not just an objective, it was an absolute business necessity.

In 2003, in an earlier stage of the company’s rapid growth curve, our assessment of their increasing storage requirements indicated the addition of a mere 3 terabytes of storage capacity to the then-modest capacity totals in use would meet their needs. We recommended, then provided for the implementation of, a storage system manufactured by NetApp.

In their most recent fiscal year, the company’s sales have grown significantly. They now offer a suite of nearly 300 full-text and secondary research databases, comprising a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports, and various other publications from renowned publishers. The company’s online platform is now the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world—serving schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, corporations, government, and public libraries. This business growth has accelerated the growth of their storage needs as well—to several hundred terabytes. Corporate Technologies has continued to help our client meet their ever-growing storage needs with ever-increasing state-of-the-art NetApp storage products.

In addition to NetApp excelling at delivering products with the reliability, scalability, and performance that online applications such as our customer’s require, it also excels at delivering innovative products and functionality that provide new ways for customers to meet their business needs. NetApp’s FlexClone technology is one example of this innovation. Flexclones are read-writeable SnapShots of data that take no additional storage capacity to create and only a small amount of capacity to accommodate newly written data. They can be created in a near-instant, they can be used for a variety of purposes just as an additional full copy of the data could, and the amount of copies that can be put into use is almost limitless.

One valuable use of Flexclones, and one that our client has taken advantage of, is with database development. Developers can be provided with a complete copy of the production data—in the form of a read-writeable Flexclone—for development purposes. Not only is a full copy significantly more useful in testing new code development than a small subset of the data, as would traditionally be at their disposal, but the state of the data can be reset in an instant for a new cycle of testing. The result is a significant increase in the productivity of developers and the rapid development of new code and applications.

Fact:  NetApp exceled at delivering reliable, scalable high performance products that online applications such as our customer's require.