Having gone into full production only last year, Exanet have made an immediate impact in the graphic arts in America and Europe. President of the company’s digital media division Melvin Ettinger says that every one of the companies that has installed the Exanet system have made between 10 and 20 per cent productivity improvements. He estimates that all will achieve ROI within six to 18 months.

Exanet differs from other storage systems because of its simplicity. It is the first storage system to independently scale its system, and it works with standard, off the shelf hardware. Because the hardware is easily accessible, there are no problems for the company to stock parts in Australia, for example.

“It helps customers to make money, number one by making them more productive,” Ettinger says. “They are able to get work out faster because the system is faster.

“The other factor is total reliability, and how do you put a number on that. Our system can’t go down.”

Ettinger draws the analogy of a flight he took last year, where the first engine went down after takeoff. The pilot said he could have finished the flight with the one remaining engine and it probably would have been fine, but there was no point taking the risk. It’s the same thing with a storage solution, he says, so redundancy is built into all Exanet systems.

“If you’ve just got one server, it’s going to fail. You just know it.”

Ettinger says the company had made a recent visit to Australia where it had demonstrated the product to six graphic arts companies.

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