StoreAge and Zycko Provide Storage Virtualization Management Solution to Future Publishing Plc

Cirencester, UK (PRWEB) June 27, 2003 - StoreAge Networking Technologies, an innovator in enterprise SAN storage management, today announced the recent deployment of its SVM (Storage Virtualization Manager) at Future Publishing Plc, a leading UK-based publishing house with offices across four countries. The deployment was effected in cooperation with Zycko, StoreAges distributor in UK, through its reseller partner Genisys. Future Publishing selected StoreAges solution for its proven ability to lower administration costs, improve the level of data protection and maximize data availability.

Future Publishing was founded over fifteen years ago. Today, it is responsible for over eighty titles and extensive online activities across Europe and the US. The companys publications address a variety of vertical markets, including: Internet-related business, computing, gaming and entertainment, with familiar titles such as the Official Playstation magazine, PC Plus and Internet Works.

Nick Harvey, Network Manager at Future Publishing, explains the decision to implement the StoreAge SVM solution, saying: The older system was failing to cope as a result of the increasing business demands being placed upon it - our needs had simply outgrown the existing infrastructure in terms of scalability and resiliency. An added problem was that, as with most storage systems, our solution was incredibly inflexible and also needed a great deal of time-consuming, 'hands-on management."

Future Publishing had investigated various approaches and products but felt that nothing they had seen within budgetary limits offered a viable, long-term solution. The StoreAge solution, distributed in the UK by Zycko, offered Future Publishing a wealth of business benefits.

In addition to the increased scalability and simplified storage administration Future Publishing needed, it offers:

§   The ability to tier storage allowing Future to assign high-end storage to more demanding applications while assigning legacy, lower-end storage resources for less demanding services such as file or print.
§   Comprehensive operating system support, allowing the company to make future storage acquisitions based on price and performance factors rather than vendor lock-in or compatibility issues.
§   Load balancing, failover and replication facilities, giving peace of mind that Futures data is securely maintained and protected.
§   The ability to automatically provision storage on-the-fly whenever needed, vastly reducing the time traditionally needed.

As soon as we had read the information about the product we knew it was the way to go for us -- there was never any other real contender," says Harvey. The StoreAge solution itself actually does a lot more than I thought it possibly could. The path failover and load balancing capabilities alone could prove to be absolutely essential. It has been one of those 'too good to be true situations that makes you think, 'no, it simply cant be that easy, but in this case it really was."

Nigel Lambert, Product Manager at Zycko, added: As StoreAges UK-based distributor, we are privileged to be able to offer resellers value-added storage solutions and management tools. This implementation, overseen by ourselves and StoreAge, has been an outstanding success. So much so in fact, that we are seeing the solution go from strength to strength within the channel."

We are happy to cooperate with Zycko in providing our mutual customers cutting-edge storage management solutions," said Dani Naor, Vice President of Business Development at StoreAge. Currently we are expanding our activities in the UK, and this installation at Future Publishing is one of many new projects StoreAge is involved in, further indicating that our SVM provides organizations a true added-value solution."

Laura Kidd, Data Management Consultant at Genisys, commented: We had initially looked at replacing all of Future Publishings disparate storage systems with one centralised SAN but it was a very expensive solution. After speaking to StoreAge and Zycko about their virtualisation solution we were able to put in a Fibre Channel fabric, virtualising their existing storage arrays and leveraging their initial investment."

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