The Challenge

Fast PC Networks is an online backup and managed services company in which they help customers manage on-site business and hosted environment, and also serve as a solution provider to organizations supported by their engineering team.

Fast PC Networks was looking for a storage solution to run VMware on top of that for backup solutions, web hosting, e-mail and store data on SAN environment. Enhance Technology was offering a high quality and low cost storage system. But, before considering Enhance Technology’s storage product, Fast PC Networks also researched and evaluated other vendors such as Dell/ EqualLogics. Robert Zarate, Lead Engineer and partner of Fast PC Networks says they use Enhance Technology’s UltraStor RS16 IP-4 for their data center in Columbus, Ohio to support all of their products as a robust platform for storage.

“We evaluated several vendors and concluded that Enhance Technology’s iSCSI system offered comparable performance to SANs costing almost twice as much,” says John Tourloukis, Partner of Fast PC Networks. After contacting with Enhance Technology’s sales rep and knowing the features that RS16 IP-4 offers on its performance and speed, Fast PC Networks purchased the unit.

“We chose this specific product because of its great performance versus other iSCSI SAN, and the throughput works really good at a tremendous saving”- John Tourloukis

High Performance, Fast Speed Backup Solution

Fast PC Networks was working on more advanced configuration on UltraStor RS16 IP-4 with VMware to support their products. They use Dell 2950 for system setup and for their operation system they use Windows 2008 and Linux for windows virtuals. Robert says that they use RAID 6 for all of their main servers. As far as implementation for RS16 IP-4, Fast PC Networks didn’t have any problem, “the unit worked perfectly, the performance work perfectly as we planned it,” John also says “the RS16 IP-4 is a low cost SAN with enterprise performance.”

The iSCSI architecture gave Fast PC Networks the speed and performance it needed with reasonable price, they were impressed with the unit especially its speed.

“It has very fast speed as far as read and writes data. It writes the data faster than read”- Robert Zarate

Overall, Fast PC Networks was pleased to use RS16 IP-4. One thing that they like a lot is the WebGui and the LCD screen, “The LCD screen is very nice, you just click on it and put the IP address in there and you’re done! You connect your IP address to the unit and you’re ready to go”, states Robert.

Now, Fast PC Networks is looking forward to the new dual controller model UltraStor ES3160 to be out in the market shortly. Robert says they are interested to test the unit in terms of speed and performance.

About John Tourloukis, Robert Zarate and Fast PC Networks

John Tourloukis and Robert Zarate are partners and run Fast PC Networks Company (www.fastpcnet.net). John Tourloukis is 16 years veteran of the industry; he worked with IBM global services, Bellsouth.net. Robert Zarate is the technical background engineer and has been working with IT for 20 years.

Fast PC Networks was founded in 2001 and it changed the name to Fast PC Networks in 2004. Fast PC Networks is located in Houston Texas, and they are a disaster discovery and data center call location company. Fast PC Networks is a complete collocation and managed services solution provider. With experience working with several types of businesses across different industries, they have the knowledge and resources to get any job done right way. Fast PC Networks Ready Business and Data Center Solutions help reduce information technology complexity and costs. Partner with Fast PC Networks to manage on-site business & hosted environment and organization's solution will be supported by their experienced and certified engineering team.