Buckeye Color Lab

The digital photography boom is starting to put a strain on IT storage resources, as Buckeye Color Lab discovered recently when it ran clean out of space to store the 25,000 digital images it processes every month (see FalconStor Gets the Picture).

Based in North Canton, Ohio, Buckeye develops pictures for studios that specialize in weddings, graduations, and other special occasions. Two to three years ago, the company converted about 25 percent of its film to digital images; today, 80 percent of all its pictures are stored digitally.

"The professional photo processing industry is undergoing a tremendous technology shift, with a transition from traditional photo to digital photo processing," says Bob Hendrickson, Buckeye's COO. As a consequence, the lab's storage needs have fast outgrown the 250 GBytes it had in place using IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) Netfinity servers and direct-attached storage.

Buckeye engaged Chi Corporation, an Ohio-based systems integrator specializing in SANs, to expand its storage capacity and help it centrally manage the volumes of data it houses. Chi recommended an IP-based SAN to speed up the workflow of moving graphic files and large digital images through their network, and it implemented FalconStor Software Inc.'s (Nasdaq: FALC) IPStor virtualization software.

"With IPStor, we centralized Buckeye's storage management and were able to convert their existing direct-attached storage to an IP-based SAN, while increasing their raw storage capacity to over 2.5 terabytes," says John Thome, Chi's VP of sales. Buckeye has a Nexsan Technologies