Managing Records By The Millions At Salesnet

"It was like going from a two-lane road to a 12-lane highway." That's how Rich Perkett, cofounder and CTO of Boston-based Salesnet, describes the transition from network-attached storage to a Xiotech Magnitude 3D storage management system—and "a 12-lane highway" was exactly what the company needed.

As the world's leading provider of on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) software, a fast-growing alternative to premise-based CRM software, Salesnet manages literally millions of customer records for thousands of clients worldwide. These records are retrieved 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so the last thing the company can afford is bottlenecks in data access.

Since its founding in 1999, both the company and its databases have grown dramatically. But adding capacity to traditional RAID enclosures had created "islands of data and unplanned fire drills" according to Perkett. "Our hosted CRM solution gets a tremendous amount of traffic. Virtually every action taken by one of our customers is a significant database call, a report request, or something similarly complex. We needed a centralized enterprise storage solution with the scalability and flexibility to accommodate substantial growth."