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STILL WATERS RUN DEEP

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 1 - February 2007

Leading stock photography service provider, Image Source, has turned to ONStor to DELIVER its storage scalability needs

ONStor's NAS technology has taken centre stage at Image Source, showing off its dazzling true colours. And it couldn't be in better company, for the stunning images that the independent producer of royalty-free stock photography provides have earned it a worldwide reputation.

With business now accelerating, Image Source has deployed two Bobcat 2240 NAS Gateways from ONStor to cope with a dramatic increase in capacity requirements, meet future scalability needs and increase data availability. According to the company, the ONStor NAS system not only delivered the scalability needed to accommodate the agency's anticipated 150% annual capacity growth, it also saved Image Source capital on the acquisition cost, compared with alternative solutions.

"The rapid storage growth we had been experiencing was showing no signs of abating," says Jonathan Biggington, IT manager at Image Source, "and so we needed a solution that would be easy to scale and provide high levels of reliability. The two Bobcat NAS Gateways, set up to be mutually redundant, were the ideal solution for us. The ONStor Bobcat was the only option that would let us add discs to expand a single folder through virtualisation. The scalability and flexibility it offers are fantastic."

Image Source has a portfolio of more than 80,000 images, which are sold directly through its website and around the world through a network of distributors. Moreover, a further 3,000 photographs are added to the library every month and, to date, the business counts its clients worldwide in the thousands.

Until early 2006, Image Source relied on a cluster of discs attached to a server to provide storage for its images, as well as for its creative and administration files. However, with the company's capacity requirements quickly soaring from 100 GB to 50 TB in just two years, following the transition from transparencies to digital images, this infrastructure hit a scalability wall.

The Image Source team had to track down more effective and reliable ways to store their data. The company wanted the new storage infrastructure to provide the right combination of high availability, scalability, ease of use and price. After evaluating other solutions and eliminating them on the grounds of cost and what it felt to be a lack of virtualisation features, Image Source followed the advice of IT products, services and solutions provider Insight Direct (UK) and chose ONStor.

"Most organisations today are not asking for rocket science-based solutions; they are looking for tools to build a reliable, scalable and flexible storage infrastructure, without breaking the bank,'" states Jon Toor, VP of marketing at ONStor.

"We have designed our products with these requirements in mind; our Bobcat NAS Gateways are effective, easy to use and affordable. And, most importantly, they grow with our customers."

Image Source, founded in 1999 in the UK, now has offices in London, New York, Los Angeles and Cologne, Germany, with 85 staff. All the data generated at these locations is stored on the discs managed by the ONStor Bobcats in the London office. ST