The Challenge

Bentek Energy, LLC is the leading energy market information company that focuses on analyzing supply & demand, evaluating natural gas customer needs and evaluating gas and power utility tariffs. Their products consist of multi-client and proprietary research projects that primarily targeted large natural gas marketing organizations.

Bentek Energy is a valued customer of Enhance Technology (ETI); they first purchased UltraStor RS8 for replicating backups off-site and later purchased the UltraStor RS16 IP-4 enterprise GbE iSCSI storage for database archive and processing. Randy Leonard, Bentek Energy’s Network Administrator notes, “We are very pleased with Enhance Technology’s products, the RS8 has performed well, when a single drive failed, it rebuilt the RAID 5 automatically,” he adds, “We have the RS16 IP-4 for almost a year now and have been very pleased with it. ”

Based on the positive experiences, Bentek Energy is looking for a storage solution to be used on SQL Server 2008 to store mine energy data and needed populated storage solution with more than a dozen drives as well as fast throughput. After talking to ETI’s sales representative, Bentek Energy decided to purchase UltraStor RS16 SS, a high performance SAS disks that delivers over 800MB/ sec which meets the requirements of data intensive applications in geophysics exploration.

High Performance and Fault Tolerance Solution.

In order to have the product ready for Bentek Energy, Enhance Technology’s engineers helped configure the RS16 SS on RAID-5 using the latest Seagate 1.5 TB HDDs & LSI 3801E host bus adapter (HBA). Randy says, “ETI did all the configuration work, supplied the HBA hardware and offer best in class configuration support.” As far as system setup, Bentek Energy used Dell R710, dual quad-core CPUs with 32GB RAM for their host system and Windows Server 2003 Standard for their Operation System.

Overall, Bentek Energy was pleased with ETI’s products and services. “The RS16 SS is simple and easy rollout, great product, great support. We are very satisfied, speed and fault tolerance are just what we had hoped for. We are impressed with both pre-sales and production support,” he adds, “We will very likely purchase more UltraStor products in the years ahead.”

About Randy Leonard and Bentek Energy, LLC

Randy Leonard is the Network Administrator, MCSE, CompTIA A+.

Bentek Energy was founded in 1985 and specializes in bringing companies daily Energy Market Fundamentals that give them the analytical tools and competitive intelligence needed in order to make critical, bottom-line decisions in today's energy marketplace.

Bentek Energy help their clients understand the fundamentals, how energy is moving, where bottlenecks may develop, and which supply/demand factors impact prices. They support their clients' decision making abilities by providing energy flow, supply, demand, capacity and storage data packaged with graphics and analysis.