AccessIT is based in Morristown, New Jersey. The company also provides related services to help theaters track the planning and profitability of movies, among other things. Central to the company's business plan is its Internet data center facilities to help store and manage and move digital content to subscriber sites quickly and efficiently.

And, of course, storage plays heavily in the scenario, especially for such large files as movies and educational video. Erik will talk more about the storage piece of what AccessIT is doing and will explain why the company recently changed storage providers.

Johanna Ambrosio: Erik, welcome and thank you for being here today.

Erik Levitt: Thank you.

Ambrosio: I was hoping you could describe more about your Internet data center facilities, what are they and how many of them are there?

Levitt: Johanna, we have 10 Internet data centers around the country: five on the East, three in the Midwest, Los Angeles, and one in Texas. The data centers are for primary colocation and disaster recovery for carriers, corporate clients, law firms, and a number of other service providers.

Ambrosio: And so, how does storage fit into that? How much are you managing currently and what is that growth curve look like over the next year or two?

Levitt: Well, we have storage in our Los Angeles data center and in our Brooklyn facility here in the East Coast. We use a Magnitude Xiotech 3D array and that array has, in the East Coast, 15 terabytes of storage, on the West Coast about 7 terabytes of storage. We have a variety of companies on the array including financial and legal customers on the East Coast and on the West Coast we use the array as a launch point for our digital cinema offering.

Ambrosio: Okay. I understand you recently changed storage providers. Could you tell us what you were doing and why you made the switch?

Levitt: We were using a larger EMC Symmetrix array. Because of the aging technology, it couldn't meet the price points of the market. Once we switched to the Magnitude, our service offering became a lot more competitive.

Ambrosio: In other words, you wanted to change the pricing structure of your own service for your customers?

Levitt: As well as changing the pricing structure with the newer technology, we're also able to provide more diverse forms of service, including the use of SATA disk, which is more competitive in the disaster recovery market, as well as later fiber channel drives, which have higher capacity and greater flexibility.

Ambrosio: How does that play into the digital media or digital content world?

Levitt: Well, for digital content, it's very important to have very high speed, very reliable storage. The content that's delivered to us is loaded onto the array and then needs to be accessed instantaneously from a variety of transport sources. Because these files are quite large, rapid access is absolutely essential.

Ambrosio: And you're able to deliver that rapid access with the new Xiotech system. Is it comparable to what you were getting with the Symmetrix?

Levitt: The Symmetrix array was used primarily on what we call the MSD side, which is our managed services division for not so much delivery of digital content, but corporate clients. We actually implemented our movie distribution on the digital cinema side immediately on the Xiotech array.

Ambrosio: For your corporate customers have you seen any change in terms of performance or any other...?

Levitt: Well, now that we have the new fiber channel drives, there's been a substantial improvement in performance, as well as in reliability.

Ambrosio: Can you be more specific in terms of what those points are?

Levitt: There are a couple of very important points when it comes to storage in the corporate market. One, of course, is price point and the ability to deliver large quantity of disk in such a way that the clients find it cost effective. The second aspect, of course, is flexibility. With our corporate clients we're able to, on the Xiotech, we're able to deliver tiered storage where we can do disk-based backup and check points on the higher capacity SATA disk at a substantially lower price point while still delivering their primary storage on fiber channel disk.

Ambrosio: I see. So, how are you defining success then in terms of this new storage environment?

Levitt: In the new storage environment we see a dramatic increase in the flexibility. We see a dramatic increase in the reliability of the disk. And moving forward, our plans are to deliver the full array of services including file storage, iSCSI and a variety of other applications.

Ambrosio: Okay, and on the digital media side?

Levitt: On the digital media side, we're looking mostly at very high-speed, reliable, long-term storage, as well as short-term storage. We also see ourselves positioning our storage product for near-line storage for what are called the post houses, who are working on the digital re-mastering and digital imaging of the content. In those areas, we're more interested in the ability to quickly provision and deliver disk because they work on a project basis. In our delivery platform, we're very interested in maintaining the content in a secure way and then delivering it as needed to the exhibitors.

Ambrosio: Okay, sounds exciting.

Levitt: It is.

Ambrosio: Thanks for being our guest today, Erik. I appreciate your time.

Levitt: Thank you.

ITworld.com, Voices