IMC Storage Technologies
The primary storage infrastructure is comprised of EMC CLARiiON CX500 and CX700 SANs and an NS700 NAS with multiple-terabyte capacities integrated with ATA drives in a flexible, mix-and-match RAID array running with almost 100, often clustered, Linux-based servers. The mature EMC CLARiiON product line comes with best-of-breed storage management software and ensures technology longevity and a trouble-free upgrade path, so customers will not suffer unnecessary interruption of service due to technology replacement. ATA drives are inexpensive and especially cost-effective because they can be scaled up or down as customers' storage requirements dictate. Linux, of course, is an open, high-powered UNIX operating system ideal for production environments which can easily integrate with new platform offerings so that our servers remain state-of-the-art.
Though IMC's target storage application is archival for hosted applications, it can also deploy custom storage solutions as needed. For instance, we can rapidly deploy additional servers and partition SAN and NAS capacity to enable high-speed and high-volume file transfers from a customer's environment to our storage equipment.
SANs, of course, use fiber-channel technology to enable networked storage and can integrate NAS storage-and-file serving and other devices to create a robust storage infrastructure in which we back up and transmit documents at very high speeds because they do not travel over a WAN and, therefore, are not limited by WAN bandwidth. IMC has further integrated SAN and NAS with ATA drives into configurations that optimize the capabilities of each component – SAN for massive capacity and high throughput, NAS for high-speed file serving, and ATA for storage flexibility as customer requirements change and for overall affordability.
By contrast, in most organizations using in-house storage, data is spread over diverse servers dedicated to heterogeneous and isolated storage devices from which they can access data, Often these technology islands are not integrated which results in isolated, often outdated devices that cannot communicate across the enterprise, which makes data transfer, backup and management decentralized, redundant and difficult. Inevitably, performance suffers. Instead, with IMC's unified centralized configuration, any server can opportunistically access any storage device for ultra-efficient many-to-many performance, operation and management for a customer's entire enterprise.
Also, all our servers are redundant, and the SANs and NAS configuration have redundant RAID drives with internal monitoring and management intelligence built in for immediate switchover if a component malfunctions for bulletproof reliability.
For backup purposes, and for data that is accessed less frequently, IMC also offers storage in the form of three multi-terabyte capacity AIT tape arrays running Computer Associates RAIDStore storage management software and one Overland LT03 multi-terabyte capacity tape array running NetVault storage management software. For archive applications using any tape array, we do weekly and/or nightly backups and can maintain a separate copy of the shelved tape, or multiple copies in separate locations, at an IMC facility. We can also provide copies to the customer.
Customers can also order storage in a number of cage configurations, depending on requirements and budgets – a single customer can lease a dedicated cage for servers and storage devices, multiple customers can leverage shared equipment in one cage, share a cage for their equipment with another customer, even share a rack in a cage. For instance, some customers permit us to support multiple websites running off the same virtual web server or multiple databases off one SQL server.
All cages come with pre-wired rack space with industry standard rack enclosures that are pre-configured with requisite electrical power distribution units, network cabling, and keyboard/video and monitor switching equipment for rapid deployment.
Customers can also provide their own servers or use IMC's.