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Auspex Systems, Inc., a provider of Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions, today announced that the Clerk-Recorder’s Office of Contra Costa County in California has purchased and installed an Auspex NS2000 data server to expand its system for storing government records.
The contract is a product of Auspex’s new strategy of augmenting its direct sales force in the Americas and Europe with storage-focused channel partners recruited in part from Bell Microproducts, one of the world’s largest storage-centric value-added distributors. In January, Auspex signed a distribution agreement with Bell Micro permitting the recruitment of Bell Micro’s VAR customers to become Auspex resellers. The Contra Costa sale was executed by AtPac, a computer solutions provider to the government sector that purchases Auspex’s network attached enterprise storage systems through Bell Micro. AtPac is the leading County Clerk-Recorder vendor in California.
“Auspex’s NAS server eliminated the need to purchase a far more expensive general purpose server, gave us greater expansion capabilities, dramatically cut our backup time, and greatly simplified the process of maintaining our data storage systems,” said Barbara Chambers, Assistant County Recorder for Contra Costa County. “Instead of rebooting our servers monthly, for example, we now have to reboot only every five to 10 years.”
Located in the San Francisco Bay area, Contra Costa County had outgrown the two standard servers it used to store and retrieve vital statistics, marriage licenses, real property information and other public records for its 930,000 residents. One server housed the electronic document image files created by AtPac’s CRiis(TM) (Clerk-Recorder Imaging Information System) application for automating the document recording and filing process; the other ran the CRiis(TM) database application. Stephen Weir, now in his 12th year as the county’s elected recorder, asked his staff to find better and more cost-effective storage technologies.
AtPac encouraged the county to consider network attached storage because it is optimized to move file data efficiently, reduces administrative overhead, and costs less than a new general purpose server and disk storage. The county selected the Auspex NS2000 over competitive systems because of low price and a parallel processor architecture that nearly doubles the throughput of other NAS products by separating network and storage tasks.
The county’s Auspex NS2000 was configured with 500 GB of storage, with optional expansion up to 9 terabytes that will accommodate the county’s projected space requirements for decades. It replaces one of the Clerk- Recorder Office’s original servers, centralizing storage on a single low- maintenance box that has saved technicians several hours of upkeep per week. Installation was completed in one day.
