Appliance Deployment Featured Article

ESRG, a data analysis and remote monitoring technology firm that provides real-time equipment analytics to the commercial maritime and defense naval sectors, has selected Silicon Mechanics’ zStax StorCore ZFS unified storage appliance to cost-effectively manage its growing data sets.

ESRG provides real time analysis of fleet-wide equipment health, facilitating early warning of functional failures, and regularly accesses and manipulates large volumes of data. A growing data set was making this task increasingly difficult for the firm to handle. Thus, ESRG sought out hybrid storage pools and the ability to queue up write operations to avoid bottlenecks.

The company ultimately chose Silicon Mechanics’s zStax StorCore ZFS storage solution, enhancing its overall storage capacity and helping increase its monitoring capabilities.

“High volumes of small-block write I/O can bring many storage systems to their knees, so we used high-endurance Seagate (News - Alert) SSDs to handle that write workload. Seagate SSDs can also be leveraged for read cache, holding the most frequently accessed portions of the database on solid-state media for extremely fast read access times,” explained Steve Scherer, storage solutions expert for Silicon Mechanics in a statement.

With a modular design, the zStax StorCore ZFS unified storage appliance is suited not only to support ESRG’s growing software as a service (SaaS (News - Alert)) business requirements but also to guarantee quick data recovery and the replication capability to support business continuity.

Based on open-source ZFS and powered by NexentaStor, the zStax software-defined storage platform can copy its data instantly through the use of snapshots, which can then be replicated to other nodes both onsite and offsite. This allows for data and applications to be brought up at other sites if there is failure at one particular site. Such features offer companies like ESRG flexibility in the development life cycle and the reliability and replication to support business continuity.

“The storage solution allows ESRG to capture state-of-the-art technology at the best price-performance ratio while not discarding any previous investments,” said ESRG’s IT Manager, John Schleigh, in a statement. “The solution can be easily scaled with our budget and performance requirements.”