NBA Champions Leverage Integrated D2D Backup and Recovery Solution to Manage and Protect Critical Ticketing, Event Planning and Payroll Data
San Diego –Feb. 15, 2006 –StoneFly, Inc., a leading supplier of integrated IP storage area network (SAN) systems and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, Inc. (DNF), today announced that the San Antonio Spurs organization has deployed StoneFly Backup Advantage™ (SBA) to manage and protect its critical ticketing, event planning and payroll data. The SBA installation, a completely integrated, IP SAN-based disk-to-disk (D2D) backup solution, has enabled the Spurs to cost-effectively upgrade its overall storage environment with enterprise-class SAN capabilities while dramatically improving backup and recovery operations.
As the National Basketball Association’s championship team for the 2004-2005 season, the San Antonio Spurs franchise depends upon advanced technology, including SQL, Microsoft Exchange and applications such as ADP payroll and Bortz sports inventory management, to maintain vital fan, player and ticketing data. As a result, regular data backups are critical to the franchise’s administrative success. For years, the organization relied upon a digital linear tape (DLT) solution, but when the backup process began taking an entire weekend, the IT team recognized the need to transition to a more efficient data storage system.
According to Tod Caflisch, director of IT for the San Antonio Spurs, they evaluated both Fibre Channel SAN and IP SAN-based alternatives, but ultimately found that StoneFly’s IP SAN technology offered the best fit for the franchise in terms of cost and features. “Nobody else came close to measuring up to StoneFly’s technology and the overall value of the SBA solution,” said Caflisch. “With SBA, we can now conduct full backups of all data, including operating system and server configurations, in just hours -– an impressive improvement over our previous scenario.”
Restore times also have been reduced dramatically, with SBA now taking only minutes to retrieve vital data from disk-based backups. When a payroll server crashed one weekend just prior to payday, Caflisch was relieved to find that SBA enabled his staff to recover the data quickly and easily, allowing payroll to proceed on time, as if nothing happened. “That accomplishment alone was worth our investment in the SBA system,” he said. “It could have never been done with our previous DLT solution.
With SBA, the Spurs have achieved a comprehensive approach to their backup and restore needs. Incremental backups are now performed three times a day, followed by a full daily backup, which is then transferred to the DLT and stored off site on tape for an extra measure of protection. According to Caflisch, an added benefit of the StoneFly system is its use of Dell technology as the hardware platform for the IP SAN. “We are a Dell shop here, and it added to our comfort level in selecting StoneFly that our storage solution also resides on the Dell platform,” he said.
Caflisch has also been pleased with the level of service and support received from StoneFly. “Although we are the NBA champions, we maintain a lean IT staff, which means we depend heavily upon vendor expertise,” he added. “StoneFly has proven to be head and shoulders above the rest. They really came through for us during the sales and after-sale support process.”
StoneFly’s robust data management and protection solutions already support more than one petabyte of storage in field-proven installations nationwide. The company’s award-winning products are well suited for meeting the specialized storage demands of various vertical markets, including insurance, medical, manufacturing, financial services, retail, government and education.
Recently, StoneFly released ValueSAN, a low-cost IP SAN solution with a starting price of less than $10,000 and a modular foundation that can be expanded to incorporate additional storage capacity as well as sophisticated data protection functionality. StoneFly also recently introduced OptiSAN, a high-performance storage networking solution that builds upon the company’s IP SAN foundation with advanced RAID storage to support data-intensive computing environments. Both ValueSAN and OptiSAN offer a seamless migration path to a fully featured SBA system, with StoneFly Replicator® CDP, an asynchronous mirroring product with application-aware continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities.
About StoneFly, Inc. and Dynamic Network Factory, Inc.
StoneFly™, Inc. headquartered in San Diego, was founded in April 2000 to deliver upon the vision of simple and affordable storage optimization and disaster recovery protection through IP SAN solutions. StoneFly is a subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, Inc. (DNF), a leading maker of high-performance network attached storage, storage area networks, RAID and iSCSI systems. For more information on StoneFly, please visit (www.stonefly.com and www.iscsi.com ).
Founded in 1989, DNF is a privately held company based in the Silicon Valley (Hayward, Ca.). DNF carries a variety of products, ranging from network attached storage, direct attached storage solutions and IP SAN solutions, to assist companies in meeting their mission-critical storage needs with cost-effective, high performance storage equipment. DNF started as a U.S. subsidiary of the publicly-traded Japanese IT conglomerate, CSK Electronics, in 1989. In 1998, the company refined its strategy and began to focus the hardware group on storage solutions. Within a year, DNF’s rapid growth resulted in its emergence as an independent, privately-held spin-off.
Since its inception, DNF has designed custom solutions for organizations of all sizes and built products for many major computer manufacturers. DNF has more than 20,000 customers ranging from consumers and small-to-medium businesses, to government agencies, universities, hospitals, financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies. Key customers include UC Berkeley, MIT, the Federal Aviation Administration, FBI, Lockheed Martin, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Fujitsu, Honda Corporation of America, SBC, BAE Systems, and General Dynamics. For more information, visit www.DNFstorage.com.
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StoneFly, StoneFly Backup Advantage, StoneFly ValueSAN, StoneFusion and StoneFly OptiSAN are trademarks or registered trademarks and the property of StoneFly, Inc. All other company and product names contained herein are property of their respective owners.