Digital Island Allies For More Space

Digital Island, part of the Cable & Wireless tribe is expanding its territory in the areas of storage solutions.

The San Francisco-based 2Way Web services provider Wednesday says it has signed deals with Compaq Computer and EMC Corp. to be able to expand and contract its online storage space as needed.

The agreement will incorporate Houston, Texas-based Compaq’s StorageWorks Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC’s Symmetrix.

The idea is to get both companies to pony up some of their storage platform technology to help Digital Island’s 2Way Web Services offerings, particularly within the 2Deliver family of services, which operate from a distributed network computing architecture.

In return Compaq and EMC get to tap into Digital Island’s 2Deliver Web services to accelerate their e-business applications on their internal and external Web sites.

“The decision to use EMC and Compaq’s storage solutions in Digital Island’s 2Deliver services will enable customers to make better use of shared storage resources within our distributed content delivery network,” says Digital Island president and CEO Ruann Ernst. “This extends our ability to support new and emerging Internet and multimedia applications at the edge of the Internet.”

Digital Island says it will locate both Compaq and EMC-based storage solutions in global data centers and provide 24x7x365 operational support.

“They (Digital Island) have shown they has the technology, track record, and financial strength necessary to deliver complex Web services on a global scale,” says Compaq executive vice president of Sales and Services Peter Blackmore. “The combination of Compaq’s leading server and storage solutions with Digital Island’s 2Way Web Services will allow customers to more efficiently deliver rich content and high-quality audio and video over the Internet.”

With the agreement in place, Digital Island will be able to let customers rapidly “right size” storage without a large capital outlay, allowing purchase of additional storage capacity in blocks as small as 55 Gigabytes. Additional storage capacity can be purchased as business needs dictate, delivering a scalable “pay as you go” infrastructure that keeps costs in line with growth.