Cobweb Selects EMC to Weave Perfect SAN Solution

HostReview.com
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; 02:42 AM

The number of mailboxes and the amount of data held within them managed by Cobweb increases on a monthly basis - it has doubled the number of customers in the past year alone, and now has more than 4 Terabytes of emails stored in total. This rapid growth meant that Cobweb's existing storage was starting to come under pressure, and recognised the need to invest in a new solution to cope with the increasing customer demand.

Following an in-depth review, including internal workshops and demonstrations of the products available, Cobweb selected EMC and its systems integrator MTI, purchasing two EMC CLARiiON CX700 arrays to provide the core of its storage area network. These provide redundant storage for Cobweb's multiple Hosted Exchange platforms. MTI designed the EMC solution to have a three-year lifecycle including 24*7 support and maintenance.

"The EMC solution was chosen for four reasons" explains Mark Adams, managing director at Cobweb. "First, the very high levels of reliability, performance and scalability of the storage platform, plus the quality of support from our EMC supplier - MTI. The quality and the ease-of-use of the products is very impressive and finally the overall solution, including maintenance and support, provides great value for money."

Following the deployment, future capacity and performance are no longer issues. Reliability and performance have increased and backup windows have been significantly reduced. The improved capacity has even enabled Cobweb to increase the amount of storage given to customers when they purchase additional or new mailboxes - meaning Cobweb can offer an improved service.

"As demand grows we will turn again to EMC, and utilise MTI's services and expertise, when adding additional capacity to the EMC arrays. We will continue to use EMC solutions because we know with them we can deliver the best, most reliable and cost effective managed services to our customers, and can continue to grow our business on this basis.

The £300,000 investment in the EMC Clariion infrastructure is part of over £1,000,000 that Cobweb has invested in our service delivery platform and capabilities in the last 18 months. These investments have included a move to new offices, the upgrade of our Network Operations Centre, providing MessageLabs Email Protect services to all our Hosted Exchange customers and achieving ISO27001 accreditation." Adams concludes.

Cobweb has delivered business critical services to its customers since its launch as a business-to-business ISP in 1996, and the experience gained over these ten years underlies its capabilities to meet and exceed customer's needs and expectations. With data centres in London and Fareham, Cobweb is Europe's leading provider of Microsoft Hosted Exchange services, with over 3,000 customers managing over 30,000 mailboxes.