Right Place, Right Time

The company filled its 50,00-square-foot retail location in Sandy with knickknacks, decorative accessories, art, mirrors and furniture. Rather than showing its wares on traditional boxes and shelves, Tai Pan created decorated areas to allow customers to see the products in natural arrangements. Quickly, the retailer realized it had a successful model.

"We did so well in the Christmas season that we decided to go for it and transitioned from doing straight wholesale to retail," Capener said. "We currently have a single location but will be opening another storefront in November 2006."

Finding a New Road

CR&T had traditionally recommended Hewlett-Packard's Storage Works MSA (Modular Smart Array) Series storage arrays as the storage solution of choice for many of its customers. However, working under a tight deadline, Aguilar discovered the HP products he needed weren't available so he was forced to look for an alternative.

"We had largely been using HP as a source for material hardware, but allocation and availability was difficult," Aguilar said. "We knew that in order to fulfill customer orders, we had to find alternative products." Aguilar's search brought him to the ISC (Integrated Storage Concentrator) from StoneFly, of San Diego, Calif., a provider of IP SAN (storage area network) solutions. The ISC-1620 is an integrated IP SAN in a box that supports up to 12TB. "We looked at a bunch of products and what intrigued us initially about StoneFly was the price point," Aguilar said. The complete StoneFly system cost about $30,000, including all hardware and software.

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In addition, the StoneFly solution included all the necessary software, which provided additional savings. "Something that had bugged us with other vendors is that they often would sell a solution and leave out all the key components, and then nickel-and-dime us before we could get what we needed," Aguilar said.

The ISC includes a StoneFly Storage Concentrator appliance; StoneFly Snapshot and Reflection synchronous mirroring software for data recovery; block-level virtualization; and the StoneFusion Intelligent Network Storage Platform, which offers centralized storage management, storage consolidation, access control, volume management, mirroring and provisioning to present SAN storage to hosts as local disks. Most important, StoneFly could ship the IP SANs CR&T needed almost immediately, Aguilar said.

Putting it to the Test

In its efforts to help clients find the best new technologies, CR&T has developed a reliable testing methodology for new products. "CR&T follows a unique model," said Ken Friend, director of channel sales at StoneFly. "[Aguilar] puts products through independent testing and matrices because he wants to make sure his solutions are as reliable as he pitches them to be."

Before making his final selection, Aguilar tested the ISC thoroughly, even setting up a mirroring scenario with two RAID sets. "We look at a bunch of different factors, including cost, ease of use in configuration, reliability and support," Aguilar said, adding that StoneFly scored high in all test areas. "And, of course, we knew that we had to come up with a solution that was highly available."

Next Page: The Right Price