NetApp StoreVault S500 named best solution at GTC East 2007

ALBANY, NEW YORK: StoreVault, a NetApp  division, has announced that the StoreVault S500 was honored as a “Best Solution” at the Government Technology Conference (GTC) East 2007 at the Empire State Plaza Convention Center. GTC East is the largest technology expo in New York, providing business and technology training for government.

The Best Solutions Showcase is a component of the GTC expo featuring successful solutions implemented in a government organization. Nominations were open to all exhibitors to submit a technology solution and detail a customer business challenge and the results achieved. All submissions were reviewed and selected by GTC. The StoreVault submission, “Consolidate, Replicate, and Protect Your Data to Save Time and Money,” was recognized as a successful solution implemented in collaboration with the StoreVault government customer, Portage County.

The County Office of Portage in Wisconsin has more than 35 departments with more than 600 employees who handle legal, education, entertainment, health, finance, and other issues for its residents. The Portage County IT department established a network server environment with 4TB of storage. The county’s server technology proved inadequate in handling all transaction, project, and operation data because of slow processors and inadequate memory. Portage County’s backup and recovery processes were inconvenient, inefficient, and slow as well. Tape backups were physically taken five miles away to an off-site location, and restoring data was a time-consuming process, often requiring more than 12 hours.

To solve its storage challenges, Portage County needed more efficient technology that was at the same time cost-effective by keeping internal storage to a minimum. The StoreVault S500 provided better data protection and disaster recovery with Snapshot technology for point-in-time copying of file systems. In addition, Portage County centralized and replicated its data over a WAN for fast, efficient disaster protection that required no more trips to the off-site location. Most importantly, servers no longer need to be purchased with large storage capacities. Instead, servers can be connected to the StoreVault S500 for a pool of large, dynamically allocated storage on demand, keeping costs to a minimum.

“We are honored to be recognized by GTC for our deployment with Portage County,” said Sajai Krishnan, general manager of StoreVault. “Many state and local government customers are realizing that powerful storage technology is now readily available to them at an affordable price with StoreVault. Portage County is a great example of how the right storage solution can have significant impact on time, money, and data management headaches.”

The StoreVault S500 is a scalable all-in-one networked storage appliance that is customized for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) at a price point that fits SMB budgets. With its intuitive Windows graphical user interface, the StoreVault S500 can be easy to install and simple to manage, while providing enterprise-class networked storage functionality. The StoreVault S500 has been deployed across a wide range of industries to help solve the growing customer challenges of data growth, data protection, and data management.