ACADEMIA

Nexsan announced that its Nexsan E60 storage system has been selected by Earth Rangers, an award winning Canadian charitable organization dedicated to educating children and families about biodiversity loss and empowering them to "Bring Back the Wild!" The storage system was chosen for its ability to deliver high energy savings without sacrificing performance, and deployed in the organization's Centre for Sustainable Technology Media.

The Earth Rangers Centre for Sustainable Technology Media is an advanced green building, certified as Gold under Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for New Construction. The IT environment was designed to embody Earth Rangers' values, to show that the organization practices what it preaches, and to serve as an inspiration to everyone who walks through the doors. The Earth Rangers Centre (ERC) has been designed to minimize its impact on the environment. The direct relationship of a specific building feature to air, energy, water, materials and/or biodiversity are briefly described through ERC's "sustainability pillars." These pillars identify elements that prioritize air quality, energy use and generation, water use and quality, renewable materials, as well as biodiversity and occupant health.

To support the data protection and disaster recovery needs of its world-leading Earth Rangers Centre, Earth Rangers reviewed a number of storage systems presented by competing vendors. The organization wanted access to robust storage technology that was green in terms of energy efficiency, thereby reducing power consumption and lowering cooling requirements. After reviewing a variety of solutions, Earth Rangers found that there are no real standards when it comes to solutions that claim to be green. Many solutions that professed to be energy efficient only delivered three to five percent power savings when reviewed by Earth Rangers. That is when the organization discovered the Nexsan E60 storage system.

"When we approached Nexsan regarding the data infrastructure necessary to meet Earth Rangers' green requirements, we knew that each of the solutions we chose would need to play an important role in delivering an environmentally friendly solution," said Rob DiStefano, IT Systems Director, Earth Rangers. "We dedicated a lot of time and resources to identifying the most power efficient solutions available. Nexsan is an example of a company that really hit it out of the park. An 80 percent plus savings in power consumption is a huge deal, not only for Earth Rangers, but for organizations mindful of both power consumption and IT costs."

The Nexsan E60 storage system is an expandable, high density and high performance storage solution with the ability to scale up to 180TB in only 4U of rack space. It features AutoMAID Level 4 technology which reduces energy usage up to 85%, making it the most energy efficient, enterprise-class storage system on the market. Yet, the power savings of the E60 was not the only thing that surprised Earth Rangers. It was even more impressed by its performance. They had expected to take a performance hit. Instead what they found was that it out-performed the other enterprise-class storage systems they had considered. As a result, the E60 was selected as the green storage platform of choice for the Earth Rangers Centre.

"The environmentally-friendly data center that the Nexsan E60 supports for Earth Rangers meets all of our goals for power savings, operational efficiency and sustainability," added DiStefano. "Plus, the solution delivers remarkable performance and reliability demonstrating that you don't have to give up performance to be green."

Earth Rangers started out using the Nexsan E60 storage systems as a secondary storage platform for disaster recovery and archiving. Then it had a requirement to put a financial system on the E60, running within an Oracle database. The system performed so well that it was then added to other applications with production data storage requirements such as Exchange and SQL databases. Never did Earth Rangers see an impact on performance when using the E60 for primary storage. As a result, the E60 has become the cornerstone of Earth Rangers' data storage environment.

"A key consideration for organizations choosing energy efficient storage systems is the trade-off between energy savings and performance. The mindset is that when you reduce power, performance will suffer," said Victoria Grey, SVP, Marketing at Nexsan. "The Nexsan E60 shatters this long held belief and for environmentally aware organizations such as Earth Rangers, this was a key factor in their purchasing decision."