StorMagic announced Weiss Group as a new customer. Weiss Group uses the cost-effective StorMagic SM series software designed specifically for the SMB market to manage its archived and backup data.

“I know that many small and medium businesses such as ours think that SANs are too complex to manage,” said James Santillo, Weiss Group system administrator. “As an innovative company, always looking for leading-edge technologies to meet our increasing storage needs, we found that the flexibility to buy standard Intel servers, configure them with any type or amount of storage we needed, and then install the StorMagic SM series software on them gave us the cost-effective, yet reliable iSCSI SAN solution that could safely manage our mission-critical archived and backup data.”

“In my search for an iSCSI SAN solution that was easier to install and manage while providing the migration capabilities that I needed, I tested a few appliances. Most of them offered a CLI interface, requiring the user to learn proprietary commands,” commented Santillo. “When I first installed the StorMagic software, which turns standard Intel servers into iSCSI storage appliances, all it took was a simple, intuitive three-step process to set up and configure. It was so much easier than any other iSCSI storage appliance I tested or managed before.”

After a user-friendly interface guided him through the software installation, Santillo found that he only needed basic networking skills and fundamental TCP/IP knowledge to assign the IP address to the StorMagic storage appliance in order to operate on Weiss Group’s iSCSI SAN. Using StorMagic’s transparent data migration software, Weiss Group was able to migrate data to the StorMagic storage servers over its iSCSI SAN without unexpected application outages. The StorMagic software leverages the native Windows software for its inherent networking features and the Intel server’s RAID controller for data availability.

Weiss Group expects to realize even greater benefits from StorMagic’s SM series software in the future. Currently, the company is preparing its server environment from the introduction of server virtualization and a virtual desktop infrastructure. By using StorMagic in conjunction with its iSCSI SANs, it can cost-effectively provide storage for these systems using their Ethernet network.