Demon Internet Services, Europe’s largest independent ISP, announced a strategic partnership with Network Appliance, the US-based manufacturer of dedicated data-access appliances.
Demon is currently spending in excess of $1 million to become the world’s largest installation of Network Appliance’s (NetApp) NetCache products.
Cliff Stanford, managing director of Demon Internet, said: “NetApp
appliances’ unprecedented price/performance, reliability and ease of
management made them the unquestionable choice for our data access
product standard.”
Standardizing completely on NetApp’s caching and filing appliances,
Demon Internet will deploy its core Internet services–mail, news, Web
hosting, FTP, caching, and internal testing–on NetApp systems. Demon
said it has been working closely with the manufacturer to fine-tune the
NetCache family of products. The two companies plan to continue their
working relationship in the future.
Dan Warmenhoven, president and CEO of Network Appliance, commented: “NetApp understands that international ISPs have critical performance constraints that need to be resolved while minimizing extraordinary bandwidth costs. As a leading, innovative ISP in Europe, Demon is the ideal partner in creating a quality of service solution for European Internet customers.”
Demon users will need to make a browser adjustment to register for the
cache, but they will notice the improved performance, the ISP reported. According to Demon, one NetCache C630 appliance does the work of multiple standard Unix systems, and during tests offered the highest throughput of all the equipment being evaluated.
Demon now has more than 160,000 paying subscribers and hosts more than 40,000 Web sites.
