ACADEMIA

Fusion-io announced that backup and archiving solutions provider Front-safe has integrated Fusion ioMemory-based IBM High IOPS Adapters into its Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) cloud solution to power performance improvements while saving time and money.

Front-safe offers a unique online, user-friendly web interface that tightly integrates with Tivoli Storage Manager to create a TSM cloud solution that is easily available to large and small businesses. Front-safe automates backup and recovery, while also providing reporting and dynamic invoicing. As Front-safe's customer base and data volume grew, continuing to deliver outstanding service began to be a challenge. While researching solutions, Front-safe looked at adding more disks and using them in different ways to maximize I/O. As that approach required a SAN, Front-safe realized it would increase its data center footprint, raise power and cooling costs, and still not provide the desired performance.

"Conventional SSDs did not provide us the capacity we needed. We chose the Fusion-io powered IBM High IOPS Adapter because it gave us the highest performance with our existing hardware," said Geirr G. Halvorsen, Front-safe Senior Systems Engineer. "The savings were enormous. We are now able to fully utilize the processors in our TSM servers. This allows us to cut our server footprint, and accompanying floor space, power and cooling costs, by two-thirds.  At the same time, we've increased the speed of database backups and tasks like inventory expiration jobs, which makes our servers more responsive. Our customers have noticed the difference."

In addition to the performance improvements and cost savings, Front-safe noted that installing the High IOPS Adapters was far easier than upgrading to a SAN. With the High IOPS Adapters from IBM, Halvorsen's team also found that system upgrades could be conducted in hours, rather than days.

"We believe Front-safe's results demonstrate that the low latency, ioMemory-based High IOPS Adapters are ideal for powering high performance jobs and queries in enterprise systems like Tivoli," said Neil Carson, Fusion-io chief technology officer. "Inspiring companies like Front-safe are improving customers' cloud-based service experiences with innovative technologies built for a cloud-powered economy."