Features - Storage Innovations:

OLYMPUS ACCELERATES DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL CAMERAS

StoreAge Networking Technologies, an innovator in enterprise SAN storage management, announced the deployment of its SVM (Storage Virtualization Manager) at Olympus Optical Co, a world-leader in OPTO-digital technologies, with annual revenues of $4.4 billion. Olympus selected SVM to centralize storage management, accelerate data backup and improve application availability. The deployment at Olympus was effected in cooperation with Computer Dynamics Corporation, StoreAge's partner in Japan. Olympus manufactures and markets a broad variety of products -- from digital cameras and endoscopes to microscopes and industrial equipment. The Imaging Systems Group at Olympus is the company's closest arm to the consumer and the pulse of the marketplace. It is responsible for a variety of advanced products, including cameras, printers, digital lenses, ultra compact recorders and magneto-optical drives, with major focus on the development of digital cameras. Developing and testing new products causes rapid growth in the amount of organizational data, thus requiring a storage management solution that combines scalability capabilities with cost benefits.

"We needed a flexible solution that would enable us to easily and quickly add storage systems of any brand to the SAN, in order to accommodate our ever-growing storage needs," explains Yasuyuki Nishidai, senior supervisor at Olympus Imaging Systems Group. "After examining various solutions, the advantages of asymmetric virtualization became clear, and we decided to implement StoreAge's SVM to facilitate the management of our storage resources and reduce administration costs."

In order to improve backup, the Olympus Imaging Systems Group will soon implement StoreAge's multiView, which creates instantly available, low-capacity snapshots of SAN data. multiView snapshots enable copies of data to be backed up to disk or tape without disrupting production applications, and leave production servers uninvolved in the data movement process. Moreover, since each low-capacity snapshot is a fraction of the original volume size, multiple snapshots can be created each day and retained online without consuming excessive amounts of disk capacity. This improves the level of data protection, and allows data to be rapidly restored from disk rather than from tape.

"We are very satisfied with SVM's performance and the flexibility it allows us," Nishidai added. "Use of our Fibre Channel RAIDs is much more efficient now, as we are easily adding new hosts and disk capacity on an as-needed basis. We will shortly install another SVM and look forward to using multiView for further enhancing our backup capabilities."

"We are very pleased to have our solutions chosen by Olympus, a global leader in its field," says Dani Naor, vice president of business development at StoreAge. "StoreAge is committed to providing customers with reliable, cutting-edge solutions that meet business demands. Together with Computer Dynamics, our valued partner in Japan, we will continue to serve this strategic market with full dedication."

Hiro Sakamoto, president of Computer Dynamics Corporation, said, "This successful implementation is enabled by our close cooperation with StoreAge. Our customers see the added value of StoreAge's solutions and are happy with the ease and flexibility in managing their storage environments. Furthermore, in today's world economy it is a major advantage to be able to implement such advanced yet cost-saving solutions."