Nexsan, an independent provider of disk-based storage systems, has announced that Mentora, a provider of testing, tuning, and hosting services for business-critical systems, has chosen high-density Nexsan storage systems to save valuable rack space in its data centers and provide reliable, flexible, high-capacity storage in a private cloud environment. In its deployment, Mentora is using multiple Nexsan storage systems, including a SATABeast® for disk-based backup and SASBeast® for the company's private virtual platform.

Mentora architects, builds and maintains customer environments at top-tier data centers, each with hundreds of servers, in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas and Washington, D.C., and delivers services nationwide to mid-market and large businesses. The company also provides application performance services for computing environments that include Oracle eBusiness Suite and databases, healthcare ERP, and other applications, as well as Websphere MW and Citrix technologies. In addition, Mentora hosts and proactively manages enterprise equipment and applications for eCommerce, healthcare, insurance, finance and publishing in the company's data centers and virtual private cloud.

Mentora backs up hundreds of terabytes of data per month for a large number of customers. Prior to selecting Nexsan, its storage systems employed power-hungry off-the-shelf controllers that took up a great deal of rack space and did not live up to performance expectations. Mentora needed a storage solution that would consolidate its storage environment to reduce energy and space requirements and provide very high disk I/O for performance to meet stringent service level agreements (SLAs).

"We use top-tier facilities to house our storage infrastructure which comes at a premium price. Therefore, it is critical for us to optimize those facilities for maximum utilization and efficiency," said Andrey Dmitriev, Director, Host and Applications, Mentora Group. "With space also at a premium, we wanted a storage solution that offered exceptional density and high availability, allowing us to provide significant value to our business customers."

When architecting its storage environment, Mentora required systems that could handle high-speed backup processes in a relatively small footprint and provide the level of service needed. Today, Mentora's Nexsan solution includes multiple SATABeast high density storage systems that are used primarily for backup. The company also employs the Nexsan SASBeast high-capacity, high-performance, enterprise-class storage system with a density of 25.2TB of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) storage to build out its private virtual platform.

Its Nexsan storage solutions not only make far better use of rack space but also provide Mentora with other important advantages:

• Reliability — During the time Mentora has been running its Nexsan systems, the disk failure rate has been far lower than that of other systems it has experience with. In addition, the company has never had issues with firmware upgrades, ensuring maximum uptime.
• Flexibility — A customer may have different workloads in its environment, such as a database operations, various file systems and virtual machines, that have different throughput and capacity requirements. Nexsan allows Mentora to handle all of these environments by mixing SATA, SAS and high-performance SSD drive technologies in a single tiered storage system.
• Ease of Use — Mentora found it very easy to deploy and manage its Nexsan systems using Nexsan's browser-based administration tools, which require no special plug-ins.
• Cost Effectiveness — Other vendors offer high availability, or high performance, or high capacity, but they usually offer these capabilities at a much higher price. Nexsan products offer all of these advantages at a very competitive price.

"Our high-capacity Nexsan storage allows us to back up a hundred megabytes a second, and do so very efficiently," said Dmitriev. "Once we started using Nexsan, we realized they let you do things that many other vendors do not. You can mix drives of different speeds in the same chassis to support multi-application workloads in a very dense form-factor. You can also have different levels of access with Fibre Channel and iSCSI, providing a very flexible multi-purpose solution. Nexsan products really provide the best value for the dollar."

"Cloud service providers like Mentora need affordable enterprise-class solutions that can fill a wide variety of needs for many different customers,” said Victoria Grey, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Nexsan. “Our solutions provide the flexibility to meet those needs while maximizing data center resources, including space, power and management resources."

Resources

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About Mentora
Mentora specializes in application performance: testing, tuning and hosting high-availability revenue-driving solutions for business-critical systems.  Customers choose Mentora for managed hosting because the company provides application availability and performance that businesses require, with Tier III named-engineers interacting directly with client IT teams. Application specialties include the Oracle eBusiness Suite and databases, healthcare ERP, eCommerce and Enterprise Web applications and Websphere MQ and Citrix technologies. Mentora hosts and proactively manages applications in eCommerce, healthcare, insurance, finance, and publishing at top-tier data centers. The company has

offices in Atlanta, Boston, Washington D.C. and Dallas, delivering services nationwide. Visit the company at www.mentora.com.

About Nexsan

Nexsan® is a leading independent provider of disk-based storage systems purpose-built and priced for the mid-market, offering industry-leading reliability, space and power efficiency. Nexsan storage systems provide scalability, integrity and security for growing volumes of unstructured data and are ideal for virtual storage, data protection, secure online archiving, bulk and cloud storage applications. Overcoming the challenges of traditional storage, Nexsan delivers a different kind of storage experience with easy-to-use, efficient and enterprise-class solutions that reduce the complexity and cost of storage. Nexsan delivers its storage systems through a select global partner ecosystem of solution providers, OEMs and system integrators. Nexsan is based in Thousand Oaks, Calif. For more information, visit the company’s website at www.nexsan.com.

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Nexsan is a registered trademark of Nexsan Corporation. All other product or company names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.