NexentaStor™ Use Case:

Business Overview

Impulse Advanced Communications (www.impulse.net) is a service provider that designs voice and data networks that prepare companies for growth. For over 15 years Impulse has helped businesses gain a technological advantage by designing, implementing, and managing advanced communications networks that enable a geographically unbound workforce. Their services include FailSafe Internet Access, hosted VoIP, managed hosting, and network design.

Challenges

As a company specializing in a variety of IT services, it is imperative that Impulse’s internal infrastructure is sound and has robust data management tools available. Like many other IT

service providers, Impulse was originally a customer of legacy storage vendors. Impulse

started with the NetApp® Filer, however Impulse quickly out-grew capacity and, when it came time to expand, Impulse faced a hefty price tag.

After its experience with NetApp, Impulse decided to try a different service provider :

EMC®. Impulse deployed the EMC NS352 Celerra to manage their data storage needs. Soon

Impulse discovered, however, that EMC’s technology had some technological short-comings. For example, the EMC NS352 maxed out with 2 GB/sec

through put, resulting in networking bandwidth that was too low.

When they calculated they would also max out their existing storage, Impulse decided to evaluate other storage solutions

that would mitigate costs and provide better, more robust data management software than the technology offered through

NetApp and EMC.

Solution Overview

NexentaStor is the leading storage platform built upon the ZFS

Business Impact

➡ High-availability

active-active fail-over

to ensure data access around the clock

➡ Rich feature-set that tops legacy storage

solutions

➡ Cost-effective scalability

Impulse Advanced Communications leverages NexentaStor to manage high-availability infrastructure.

system. After consulting with Pogo Linux – a Nexenta Certified Partner – to consider

alternative storage technologies, Impulse selected the pre-configured and pre-tested Pogo

StorageDirector Z2 HA Cluster SAN solution – certified for NexentaStor Enterprise – to implement a business continuity strategy that’s ready to be deployed in hours, not months.

Below are some highlights of Impulse’s use of NexentaStor:

✦ Data is Highly Accessible: As an IT service provider, high-availability data storage is a must for Impulse. It’s important to make data accessible to Impulse customers around

the clock. NexentaStor supports high availability storage and Impulse trusts that their information will be available no matter where or when it’s accessed, who needs to

access it, or what device is used to do so.

✦ Applications Hosted from Two Datacenters: Impulse has deployed two

datacenters from remote locations, one of which being a Nexenta HA deployment. The two systems are connected to a single JBOD with active-active configuration.

✦ VMware® ESX: Since virtualization is a tool often used by Impulse, it was important

that their storage solution support VMware-based activities.

NexentaStor Benefits

NexentaStor helps enterprise customers implement cost-effective, high performance storage by taking advantage of NexentaStor features like in-line de-duplication, unlimited snap-shots,

thin provisioning, and high availability clustering. Below are some NexentaStor benefits which apply to high-availability use cases like Impulse’s:

✦ Eliminating a single point of failure with ‘active-active’ fail-over to a standby system.

✦ Establishing fail-over groups and implement highly cost-effective disaster recovery

✦ Achieve zero data loss and downtime with half the complexity of other storage solutions

✦ Automate and non-disruptively test fail-over/fail-back

✦ The option to set up manual and automated fail-over of critical applications and services

in a clustered environment.

“To meet our storage growth, we had to

upgrade our existing EMC appliance.

However, we chose to replace EMC with

NexentaStor instead. Nexenta provided best-in-class features and had superior performance compared to the EMC

appliance.”

-Jessie Bryan, Dir. of Systems Engineering at Impulse

Advanced Communications

Nexenta Systems, Inc.444 Castro Street, Suite 320Mountain View, CA 94041 USA+ 001 877.862.7770www.nexenta.com

About NexentaFounded in 2005 and privately held, Nexenta Systems, Inc., has developed NexentaStor™, the leading OpenStorage enterprise class storage solution and sponsors NexentaCore, an operating system that combines the high performance and reliability of OpenSolaris with the ease of use and breadth of applications of Linux. Both solutions leverage the revolutionary file system ZFS.

Nexenta, NexentaStor™ and NexentaOS™ are l icensed trademarks of Nexenta Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the p r o p e r t i e s o f t h e i r respective owners. 12-9-10

Impulse’s Configuration

Pogo Storage Director Z2 HA Cluster SAN solution, a pre-tested and pre-configured Nexenta certified high-availability storage solution from Pogo Linux featuring:

NexentaStor • Version 3.0.4• HA Cluster Plug-In• 24TB box and an expansion

license

18 web, email, database servers for:

• 250 Servers• 5,000 websites• 10,000 Zimbra Mailboxes• Zimbra Nightly Backups