Critical Path Inc, the San Francisco-based e-mail hosting company, is switching storage suppliers for its next phase of growth, and will announce today a strategic partnership with EMC Corp. For the past two years, Critical Path has been using Network Appliance Corp’s network attached storage systems, but is now making the transition to move is 40Tb of storage capacity over to EMC’s line of Symmetrix storage systems.
What works at one million doesn’t always work at ten million said Matt Hartwell-Herrero, infrastructure product manager with Critical Path. We wanted a more centralized storage model, for large, centralized chunks of data. NetApp has more of a modular approach. Critical Path says it chose EMC because it needs to be able to offer carrier class service offerings to its portal, ISP, web hosting and enterprise customers. Although it uses servers from Sun Microsystems Inc in its two US and two European data centers, it chose not to go for Sun storage after an evaluation period.
For its main data centers Critical Path will use dual Symmetrix 3930 systems, holding between 9Tb and 14Tb in three racks. Elsewhere it will use Symmetrix 3830s with up to 3.5Tb capacity. It also uses the VXfs file system from Veritas Corp, and has written its own custom load balancing software.
Critical Path expanded from hosting 1.4m mail boxes in the first quarter of the year up to 4.2m in Q2. It plans to offer a redundant mailbox on a different system for each user. It is also implementing full hardware RAID mirroring through the EMC deal. The company uses Level 3 Communications Inc and Exodus Communications Inc for co-hosting deals in San Francisco and Washington DC. There is a European data center in Germany and another coming on line in the UK. A third overseas center is planned.
Last week Critical Path also signed a deal with Tokyo-based Misui & Co Ltd to sell its services to Japanese companies.
