NetApp, Telephone Co. Team

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- StoreVault, a NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) division, today announced that a locally owned and operated telephone company, Chariton Valley, deployed the StoreVault S500 all-in-one storage solution to meet its growing challenges with increasing storage capacity, performance demands, and unreliable backup and recovery.

Chariton Valley provides state-of-the-art communications services such as telephone, wireless, Internet, and cable TV to businesses and residents of Northeast Missouri. As a small business, Chariton Valley lacked a dedicated storage expert. The company undertook an ambitious project to upgrade its technology infrastructure to deal with its fast-growing and changing business.

One of the biggest challenges Chariton Valley faced was its significant data growth. With 90 employees and 45 servers managing 2TB of data, management became complex and cumbersome, with an infrastructure that included HP servers with internal storage and Adaptec Snap Servers. Large amounts of data generated by call data records (records used for logging and billing calls) and user files were scattered throughout the network, pushing Chariton Valley to its capacity limits.

We were a small company that was still very behind the technology curve and dealing with a lot of change,” said Jesse Estevez, network operations director with Chariton Valley. “Our mandate is that we don’t throw away any data, but we lacked a centralized strategy to manage all the scattered data on the network living on multiple servers. Our data growth caused huge problems and created a headache in data management as users filled up hard drives quickly. And just keeping the servers functional became a nuisance — file shares containing accounting and call record data failed at least twice a year, shutting them down completely.”

Network Appliance Inc.