Testimonials

Andy Sykes, IT Support Officer, University College London  

We'd been looking for an affordable RAID box with Fibre Channel to add to our small Xsan for about three months, and didn't want to buy into the overpriced Promise VTrak replacement for the Xserve RAID. Since we run Xsan 1.4, we'd have to upgrade to Xsan2, which would be costly and pretty disruptive.

After spending some time looking around at big manufacturers' solutions, and not finding anything that fit the bill, I remembered United Digital from installing their products in a previous job, took a look at their website. The HyperStar range with Fibre Channel was exactly what we needed - lots of storage, Xsan- compatible, and most importantly it was extremely affordable. I gave them a ring, and they got back to me. We talked it through, with Sales Director Paul Cook making sure that it fit with our needs. I placed the order with United Digital, and the RAID was shipped out to me a couple of days later. We even got a 5% discount for having an existing XServe RAID! The RAID arrived the following week, and I got it installed in the rack.

Configuration was incredibly straightforward through the web interface - I built the RAID sets I needed, left it to cook overnight, came in the next morning and connected it to our Fibre Channel fabric - we run a QLogic switch. It was recognised straight away by the switch, only requiring me to set the FC type to "fabric", and it the volumes appeared on the Xserves as usable LUNs. We run Xsan 1.4.2, and I was worried we might have compatibility issues, but they never materialised - the Xsan saw it straight away. I created a new Xsan volume, created some storage pools, and added the LUNs to them.

As for performance - I copied the entire contents of our Xserve RAID to it (4.5TB of video data) and it blasted through it in about 4-5 hours. We only run a 2GB FC fabric, and the RAID is set up as a big RAID5 stripe; not exactly a high-performance setup, but this was much, much quicker than I expected. Since then, the RAID has been happily providing storage for all the central video production at UCL with zero issues. I haven't had any calls about issues with speed or it dropping out of the SAN, nor do I expect to. I've dealt with UD support in a previous job, when we had weird issues that I put down to the RAID box; they had an engineer onsite the next day, and he helped us nail the problem down to a bug in Mac OS X, nothing to do with the RAID at all! If (and probably when) we come to expand the SAN once more, or are looking for reliable storage for another project, we'll definitely buy United Digital again. It'll be an easy sell to my departmental manager, as he's seen us go from zero space left on the SAN to 7.5TB extra in a week and a half.  

Paul Lee, Network Administrator, David McLean Group 

David McLean Group have been a customer of UD since 2003.

We purchased our first SuperStar SAN on the basis of a recommendation and a keen price that UD offered. We have not been disappointed. To date this solution has performed and never let us down. Two failed disk drives were swapped speedily and without fuss or drama and performance never noticeably suffered, nor was the data ever exposed to any risk of loss.

In 2006 we purchased a HP MSL series SATA SAN against recommendation from UD for our Enterprise Vault. Very quickly it became clear that it was not up to the job and we soon changed it for a comparably priced unit recommended by Paul Cook from UD. This new unit performs as we wished the HP unit had.

We have recently taken delivery of a new SuperStar 6116RM, fully populated with lightning fast SAS disk drives to replace our first SAN and it currently splits roles between a file server and exchange server, and the performance is quite remarkable via 2 x 4Gbit fibre channel cards. Nothing we can do seems to make it break a sweat.

I am more than happy with United Digital's service and sales advice. Both Paul Eastbury and Paul Cook have been nothing but a joy to deal with, and I would recommend speaking to UD for all your SAN and storage requirements.

Barrington Clarke, Group IT Manager, Kent Messenger Group

The Kent Messenger Group (KMG) is a regional multi-media company based in Kent with a strong portfolio of newspaper, radio and web products.  We once again returned to United Digital to upgrade our storage and backup devices which support the newspaper production critical media archiving repository.  As with our previous experience, United Digital provided an excellent level of pre-sales service and the on site installation and consultancy was first rate.  United Digital took time to understand our business and the systems being upgrading and recommended a RAID and backup solution which was the right balance between performance and cost.

The installation of the new storage and associated fibre cards was carried out in a far shorter timeframe than anticipated, minimising impact on the business and exceeding our expectations.  United Digital’s staffs are clearly passionate and proud of their products and we are proud to have them as our storage partners for our production critical systems.

Steve Bentley, IT Manager, Usbourne Publishing Ltd

I would just like to say thank you for resolving our RAID support problem. As one of the world's leading publishers of children's books we store enormous amounts of data and cannot risk losing any files. United Digital’s knowledge was superior to that of any of the competitors we tried and it was very comforting that staff took the time to understand our specific requirements. Another factor that was particularly important was that the solution will actually save us money in the long-term. This cost-effectiveness combined with the peace of mind the system will give us meant a United Digital RAID was the only logical choice.

Rod Bishop, Customer Service Director, KRCS

As specialists in data storage systems United Digital have, not for the first time, impressively demonstrated  their professional support level that is an essential element of storage solutions supplied by KRCS. A recent case is a typical example – a KRCS customer operating on a 24/7 production basis suffered a major failure on one of their RAID systems on a component that that did not have a redundant equivalent. The result was that production was threatened and was in danger of eventually stopping if a fix could not be provided quickly. The failure occurred early one afternoon. KRCS was able to speak to UD technical support who immediately diagnosed the problem and recognised the difficulty the customer faced. Despite of the fact that the equipment in question did not even come from United Digital in the first place, they arrived at the customer site the following working day at start of business with a full set of spare parts and the RAID was up and running within an hour with no loss of data.

The ability of United Digital to support their products in a responsive, timely and professional way has always been key to developing and retaining the ongoing commitment of our customers to KRCS support services. Having United Digital as a partner for the provision of high end storage solutions enables us to offer a business solution of hardware and ongoing support on which our customers can confidently rely.