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Home >> Success Stories >> Appalacian Technologies Success Stories
FlashDisk Enables Internet Service Provider to Take On More Business The Organization -- www.apptechnc.net Calling Appalachian Technologies just an Internet service provider (ISP) can come off as an understatement. Started in late 1999, Appalachian Technologies provides organizations and individuals in the mountains around Boone, North Carolina, with low-cost access to the Internet via UUNET. But that's not all. This ISP will also design or consult on the design of a customer's Web site and host it on shared Linux server. Web design capabilities range from animation to sophisticated Java programming. If a customer needs a computer system, then the folks at Appalachian Technologies can build one to a customer's exact requirements or sell the customer a brand-name system. Technical support and hardware repairs complement this ISP's computer sales business. Organizations needing assistance with networking systems can turn to the consultants at Appalachian Technologies. They can solve problems for just about any networking platform. FlashDisk Customer Profile as Told By The Company Founder "To get our Web hosting and Internet service provider (ISP) businesses off the ground, we took several of our custom-built, high-performance Linux servers and added just added a bunch (JBOD) of IDE 7200-RPM disk drives. Our business took off faster than we had expected. We found ourselves hosting a string of Web sites, as well as looking at some large pieces of Web hosting. As an ISP, if our network provider experiences a bottleneck on the East Coast backbone can't control that. However, we could control our server environment by ensuring that our customer's data is safe and always available. We also had to offer our customers peak performance or else they would take their business to another ISP. Fully redundant servers and fully redundant storage became critical to the success of our operations. But our JBOD IDE drives didn't offer the data redundancy that comes with RAID storage. We decided to go with an external, multi-host RAID storage system with redundant, hot-swappable components. Since we build our servers, we have plenty of identical spare Linux servers (without disk drives) available to connect to the external RAID array. This combination would not only provide the best redundancy but would allow us to add disk space and or servers as needed. As a result of our previous networking businesses, we're quite familiar with storage systems from IBM and Dell. They didn't offer the flexibility we needed. So we looked elsewhere and selected Winchester Systems' FlashDisk RAID storage system. It offered the most hardware redundancy, horsepower, and data redundancy. The open systems, SCSI-based FlashDisk provides us with the flexibility to plug it into any type of server, as well as to accommodate multiple servers with different operating systems. We can add additional 18-Gbyte drives or upgrade the drives to 36-Gbyte drives to accommodate more storage space on the same FlashDisk. Like our servers, the FlashDisk has redundant, hot swappable components. If a server goes down, we plug one into the FlashDisk, make a few adjustments, and not loose one drop of data on the FlashDisk in a RAID 5 configuration. That's total redundancy. Installing the FlashDisk was easy. We did the entire install from the server to the FlashDisk through the SCSI card. In other words, we plugged the FlaskDisk into the Linux server and booted it, and then the server responded with "FlashDisk SCSI ID zero." Linux OS handled all of the FlashDisk partitioning. We were anxious to see how fast the FlashDisk with SCSI LVD, 10,000-RPM disk drives could read and write large files. With just one server attached to the FlashDisk, we copied a 550-Mbyte file several times to the same partition in a RAID set within the same file system. The copying topped off at a mere one minute and five seconds. That was extremely fast for that size file. On the other hand, copying a file that size to our IDE drives would have taken forever. The overall performance of the FlashDisk has been superb. Its lightening fast speed is noticeably faster than our JBOD. What's more, we haven't had to touch the FlashDisk since we installed it. Right now we have a chunk of Web hosting business on a shared server using a partition on the FlashDisk. We plan to move that business to its own dedicated, secure server with a separate T1 line. We can easily add the new server to the FlashDisk without touching the data that goes with that piece of business. Overall, purchasing the FlashDisk turned out to be the right decision."
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