RELDATA announced that PKWARE has selected RELDATA to provide high performance storage for nearly 19 TB of engineering and development data, which support the company’s product innovation projects. Using RELDATA unified storage, PKWARE is able to efficiently support its advanced engineering team as they develop new data compression and file management solutions in a virtualized environment.

As the inventor and continuing innovator of the ZIP standard, PKWARE, Inc. is known globally as the expert in data compression and file management. Its SecureZIP and PKZIP are used by more than two hundred government agencies and thirty thousand corporate entities, including ninety percent of the Fortune 100. Organizations in financial services, banking, government, healthcare, and retail use PKWARE solutions daily to protect sensitive data, meet compliance requirements, avoid liability risk, and reduce their overall costs and operational overhead.

“As a software company our lifeblood is in our software development data,” said Matt Little, IT Manager PKWARE. “It’s what keeps our engineering group innovative and moving faster all the time. Most vendors didn’t want to listen to our storage needs, until we discovered RELDATA. They understood that we didn’t need a 700 Series BMW, when a 300 Series was met the requirements. RELDATA gave us the storage performance and reliability our engineering environment needed, without imposing a feature overload penalty.”

“For organizations such as PKWARE that require flexible, high performance storage, RELDATA storage systems are the ideal solution,” said Victor Walker, CEO of RELDATA. “Our enterprise-class unified storage solution eliminates barriers to compatibility and reliability and we deliver this cost-effectively. Our solutions are configured to our customers' needs to maximize their investment. And where IT personnel experience the typical limitations of traditional storage for server virtualization, where IO performance restricts the ability to take full advantage of virtualization, RELDATA's solution provides optimum performance in virtual infrastructures.”

To support its product development organization, PKWARE has more than two hundred virtual machines. The company uses its virtual infrastructure for research and development work for new product innovations. This requires separate configurations for each of the technology partners PKWARE works with to assure performance and compatibility. These virtual machines are also used to perform quality assurance regression testing for all the operating system platforms used by PKWARE customers.

As the PKWARE’s research and development environment continued to grow, it needed a new storage solution to cost effectively retain its core intellectual property data. Yet, the majority of solutions evaluated by PKWARE were overpriced and didn’t specifically meet their needs as an engineering organization.

PKWARE purchased two RELDATA 9240i units and uses them for both NAS and SAN storage in its engineering environment. They have been impressed with the high value, reliability and performance of the storage systems used through iSCSI. The company is now considering a move to RELDATA storage for its business line operations and applications.

The RELDATA 9240i, powered by the RELDATA virtualization operating system, RELvos, is a highly integrated solution that allows for the rapid deployment of IT systems based on networked storage architecture. The 9240i can provision block and file storage through a single automated management interface. In less than an hour, organizations can architect multiple, scalable shared storage pools for on-demand IP SAN and NAS.