Interactive Media Associates Finds Increased Benefits Through Storage Virtualization Solution

IMA maintains a sophisticated technology infrastructure encompassing two data centers. The company maintains 2.5TB of physical data storage on an InforTrend RAID 5 array. IMA's primary onsite data center handles content generation, creative development, R&D, and all administrative functions. All customer production servers and databases reside at a remote 24*7 supervised IT facility.

IMA requires both ISCSI block-oriented SAN storage and file-oriented NAS storage. It wanted to take advantage of the 2.5TB of array capacity for both types of data. The company also wanted to provide near-line copies of its data for fast recovery in addtion to conventional tape backup. Since it works with large content-rich files, it also needed fast storage performance. "In short, we needed to be able to split our storage into diffrent logical pieces and still have fast performance," says Brain McGovern, IMA's director of technology.

The company turned to RELDATA storage networking virtualization technology. The RELDATA technology enabled the company to configure, maintain, and external logical storage volumes for both block-based access via ISCSI and file-based access via CIFS and NFS. Today, the company runs Windows 2003 SBS, Microsoft Exchange Server, a domain control, MS SQL Server, and a variety of NAS file Servers all sharing the same physical storage pool through the RELDATA technology.