Reldata Supplies Cambridge

PARSIPPANY, N.J. -- RELDATA, the leader of a new generation of unified storage systems, today announced that the Geography Department at the University of Cambridge has chosen its unified storage solution as the most cost-effective to extend its storage infrastructure and fulfil future storage demands. The Department chose RELDATAs unified storage gateway for its ability to deliver block-level (application) storage, NAS shared files and sophisticated data replication from a single device. In addition, the RELDATA gateway offers open storage connectivity, which allows the Department to reuse existing storage investments as a part of the new unified storage network and frees it from vendor lock-in for future capacity upgrades.

With research demanding the regular use of files over 100MB in size, the Geography Department has extensive storage demands. Initially the Department had considered installing either an enterprise NAS device or a traditional fibre channel SAN, but after exploring the possibilities, Mike Bithell, the department’s assistant director of research in computing, decided that iSCSI technology offered a more flexible and cost-effective alternative.

“iSCSI is extremely practical: it enables us to use our current Ethernet network to provision fast, flexible storage across our existing server infrastructure. We do not need to invest heavily in the hardware and new skills needed for FC SAN, and we are not tied to using machines which we can’t afford to connect to the FC network,” explains Bithell. “However, while it’s fast, the use of the raw iSCSI devices has limitations because the protocol restricts access to a single host machine and requires additional hardware to provide the replication functionality we require to backup datasets.”

Reldata Inc.