Coraid Inc., developer of Ethernet storage solutions, has been selected by Siemens MR Magnet Technology, designer and manufacturer of superconducting magnetic resonance imaging magnets for medical applications, to revitalise its storage infrastructure. Two Coraid EtherDrive SRX4200 arrays have replaced an existing ailing iSCSI system to seamlessly integrate with the company's CommVault disaster recovery software and LTO tape archive technology, providing a high-performance and robust back-up infrastructure.
More than 30% of the MRI scanners in hospitals worldwide contain a superconducting magnet manufactured by Siemens MR Magnet Technology at its Oxfordshire head-quarters. Here, an extensive IT estate including Windows and Unix servers, CAD CAM workstations and PCs, supports the company's 500 staff responsible for research and development, design and manufacturing operations.
When Chris Farmer, IT manager at Siemens MR Magnet Technology, found that the existing storage system was starting to fail, he turned to Coraid. He explained, "We run both frequent snapshots and a traditional overnight back-ups and our old storage array was starting to let us down. As a manufacturer of quality-assured critical medical equipment, we take quality and business continuity very seriously, so storage failure is not an option. While our DR strategy continues to meet our needs we needed to replace our old storage heads because scheduling backups was becoming a problem due to the old array's inability to back up multiple projects and data volumes, which have also been growing exponentially."
After assessing his options, Farmer selected two Coraid SRX4200 arrays. These are the foundation of Coraid's EtherDrive storage line, providing low-latency, high-bandwidth data transfer between hosts and storage on a network. The SRX 4200 was designed from the ground up to deliver flexible, high-performance, scale-out and easy-to-use storage and is certified with CommVault Simpana.
As Farmer concurred, "We were reassured by Coraid's full compatibility with our CommVault platform and impressed by the highly scalable architecture which the SRX4200 gives, as we can now easily upgrade connectivity, capacity and performance as our data grows. We are getting a 1 TB per hour read speed and that is ten times faster than what we got with the old array. We are so pleased with the price-to-performance ratio we're getting that we're considering Coraid for our primary storage as well."
The IT staff at Siemens MR Magnet Technology have also found that they no longer need to intervene with back-up operations, versus up to six times a week with the prior solution, and their team can efficiently generate accurate data back-up and integrity reports.
Peter Godden, VP for EMEA at Coraid concluded, "More and more world-class enterprises across Europe and indeed worldwide are seeing the tangible benefits of using our EtherDrive technology. In contrast with legacy solutions based on decades-old technology, our platform was designed from scratch to meet the needs of modern datacentres. By combining a scale-out cloud architecture with enterprise storage features, Coraid uniquely enables customers to manage ever-greater volumes of data without trading off performance or resilience."
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