Aegis Software Trades Direct-Attached Storage for Reliable Fibre Channel Solution from NetApp(R) StoreVault(TM)

StoreVault, a NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) division, today announced that Aegis Software, a global provider of high-performance and configurable trading and testing solutions for financial service companies, deployed the StoreVault S500 to address its rapid data growth, limited local storage, and need for more highly available network services. Aegis Software provides powerful and sophisticated trading software, testing products, and services for equities, options, futures, and foreign exchange trading. In just one year, the number of Aegis employees increased more than 40% to deal with its rapidly growing business and client base. As a result, the company was reaching its limits with its data storage requirements for e-mail and database applications, with many of its servers already running at 90% to 95% of capacity and its Exchange server at 95% to 100% capacity with over 200GB in storage groups. "Our storage growth became a huge concern for us,” said Aaron Laskowski, senior systems engineer, Aegis Software. "We were managing 1TB of data on internal Dell direct-attached storage, and we had limited local storage capacity and no expansion capabilities with our blade servers. Just trying to figure out where we were going to find capacity and managing our data became a daily concern and extremely time consuming. We needed a better plan in place to deal with our fast-growing business.” As Aegis Software’s storage capacity requirements increased, so did its demand for fault tolerance on all critical business systems for continuous service reliability, data availability, and high availability. The company overhauled its Exchange environment with e-mail archiving and migrated to Exchange 2007 with four redundant clustered mailbox servers, which required a shared storage device between the clustered servers. Additional hardware in the company’s infrastructure also introduced a secondary office location with a plan to replicate data off-site. "It was clear that based on Aegis Software’s requirements, Fibre Channel SAN would need to be a big part of the company’s initiative to upgrade its entire infrastructure for fault tolerance,” said Nick Ruddy from HorizonTek, a StoreVault VAR specializing in the latest in networked storage technology. "Among all the solutions available to SMBs from HP, Dell, and EMC, the StoreVault solution had the richest feature set for fault tolerance and performance that Aegis Software needed.” Aegis Software deployed the StoreVault S500 with nine 500GB drives and a card for Fibre Channel connection. The StoreVault S500 is also connected to an Ethernet network, but by leveraging Fibre Channel, Aegis Software doesn’t consume existing LAN bandwidth, which was already a severe bottleneck. Now the company’s Exchange server, mail archiving system, and blade servers are connected to StoreVault using Fibre Channel. As a result, Aegis Software significantly improved its business availability and lowered its costs by reducing the amount of local storage connected to servers. "StoreVault is one of the best investments we ever made in our infrastructure,” added Laskowski. "The StoreVault S500 allowed us to simultaneously address our multiple issues of inadequate direct-attached storage, server clustering, and file server consolidation — all at an incredible price. Shared storage through Fibre Channel has provided more highly available network services, leading to better performance and less downtime for all our users. We’ve been very pleased with our buying experience, as the StoreVault and HorizonTek teams were a tremendous help from the moment we first considered StoreVault all the way through to postinstallation.” "Keeping business-critical systems up and running is important to all SMBs, especially in the financial services industry,” said Sajai Krishnan, general manager of StoreVault. "StoreVault is now making storage solutions a reality for smaller companies needing the same performance and availability that larger enterprises do. With the StoreVault S500, Aegis Software can now focus on increasing profitability and efficiency for its customers.” The StoreVault S500 is a scalable all-in-one networked storage appliance that is customized for SMBs at a price point that fits SMB budgets. With its intuitive Windows® graphical user interface, the StoreVault S500 is 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 solve the growing customer challenges of data growth, data protection, and data management. About Aegis Software Inc. Since 1994, Aegis Software has been developing powerful, sophisticated and easy to use trading software and services for financial companies that demand performance, robustness, availability, and flexibility. Aegis is the developer of AthenaTrader, an algorithmic execution management system (EMS) for global Equities, Options, Futures, and Foreign Exchange trading. In addition to trading solutions, Aegis’ testing products – Exchange Simulator, Client Simulator and T3 – are considered the industry standard for automated, regression, interactive and performance testing of FIX-based trading systems. Aegis provides unmatched trading solutions to clients such as Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and many others. For more information please visit www.aegisoft.com. About StoreVault StoreVault, a NetApp division, is focused on delivering data storage solutions tailored to the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. StoreVault combines enterprise-proven technology from Network Appliance, a world leader in unified storage solutions for today’s data-intensive enterprise, with the scalability, simplicity, security, and affordability required by SMBs. Information about StoreVault solutions and resellers is available at www.storevault.com. About Network Appliance Network Appliance is a leading provider of innovative data management solutions that simplify the complexities of storing, managing, protecting, and retaining enterprise data. Market leaders around the world choose NetApp to help them reduce cost, minimize risk, and adapt to change. For solutions that deliver simplicity and value, visit us on the Web at www.netapp.com. The products, solutions and technologies herein can be configured in a variety of different environment and architectures, and it is possible to use different configuration of hardware, software and architecture to achieve optimal results. © 2007 Network Appliance, Inc. all rights reserved. NetApp and the Network appliance logo are a registered trademarks and Network Appliance and StoreVault are trademarks of Network Appliance, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.