Proact, a storage and archiving specialist, has built a new storage platform for  Axis Communications. This new solution was implemented recently to provide  enhanced access to information, a higher security level and greater flexibility.

The Swedish company Axis Communications is a world leader in the field of network video monitoring and a driving force behind the move towards digital video surveillance. The company employs approximately 700 staff, around half of whom are based in Sweden, which is also where a large part of the development work takes place. The source code material and other development data which are at the company’s disposal are its most important resources.

- We needed a stable and secure storage environment for our Swedish operations, in order to ensure access to information. We looked at a number of alternatives, but Proact’s solution was head and shoulders above all the others in terms of flexibility, functionality and cost level, says Daniel Lopez, who has been in charge of implementing the system at Axis. In the past, Axis used to rely on storage across a number of servers, which involved a great deal of manual work and a lot of emergency call-outs from the IT department in order to secure operation.

The platform and solution delivered by Proact is built on a disk-based system from Netapp and can easily be expanded, should capacity needs so require. In addition, all stored material is duplicated in another place, which provides a high level of protection in the event of fire or other disasters. Axis has now consolidated and integrated all its business-critical systems into the platform, for example, the business, file server, e-mail and other critical systems which are used in its development work.

The new storage solution enables the taking of continuous snapshots, i.e. instantaneous shots or backups, of the information. This means that the employees can recover “lost” documents themselves by simply retrieving the most recent snapshot. Our staff is waxing lyrical about this function, says Daniel Lopez.

- The new platform has enabled us to secure our IT infrastructure, which at the same time has generated great possibilities for developing our operations and making them more efficient, by building SLA levels, for example. This wasn’t possible with our old solution. What is more, we can now carry out storage much more flexibly, depending on our operational demands, says Daniel Lopez.