Acopia Networks, a provider of file virtualization based in Lowell, Mass., last week announced that United Rentals successfully deployed Acopia ARX systems as the foundation for its information lifecycle management and disaster recovery efforts. Acopia ARX systems are now in use supporting United Rentals' data migration, tiered storage and disaster recovery efforts.
The Acopia systems were used to migrate more than four terabytes of data, transparently and non-disruptively, from legacy hardware to new network-attached storage devices within United Rentals' primary data center.
United Rentals then used the Acopia solution to automate tiered storage policies across its file storage environment. Under United Rentals' policy, data over one year old is now automatically moved to Tier 2 SATA disk, freeing Tier 1 resources for business-critical data, and resulting in a cost savings of more than 50 percent in hardware alone. In addition, rather than spending time manually tuning storage utilization as they had before, storage administrators are now focusing their efforts on more important business initiatives.
United Rentals is also now using the Acopia systems to replicate data from its primary datacenter to a remote site.
"The migration to Acopia was seamless and fast," said Bonnie Stiewing, senior systems administrator at United Rentals. "Acopia's switches reduced the size of the data set we actively manage, creating operational efficiencies. We estimate that Acopia has reduced our total backup and replication time by more than 70 percent.”
Greenwich, Conn.-based United Rentals is No. 1 on the RER 100.
