Salesforce Storage

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is the boozy, bluesy, ragged brilliance of The Faces, that poor man's Rolling Stones fronted by rock genius Rod Stewart and future uptown Stone Ronnie Wood. No band in history ever sounded like they were having more fun than The Faces, and if the performances were sloppy and drunk, well, everybody had a good laugh and that was the main thing:

Cross Country Automotive Services has announced that the performance of its Instant Dispatch software has earned the company its sixth consecutive annual CRM Excellence Award from Technology Marketing Corporation's Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

Cross County provides driver and vehicle assistance services in North America, which includes connected vehicle (telematics) services provided through its business unit. Instant Dispatch was developed by Cross Country as a way to try to decrease the time it takes to locate and dispatch the towing and emergency roadside companies that provide help to a disabled vehicle by the side of the road, while capturing customer information and real-time vehicle data.

Company officials say that by sending vital information directly to the towing company, Instant Dispatch results in service vehicles arriving at the scene of a disabled vehicle or a potential emergency situation "an average of four minutes earlier." The company also claims that with Instant Dispatch, "customer satisfaction has seen an increase from 88 percent to 92 percent, as measured by survey data."

CRM Excellence Award winners are selected on the basis of their product or service's ability to help extend and expand the customer relationship to covering the entire enterprise and the entire lifetime of the customer, according to CRM officials.

"In today's challenging business environment, retaining customer loyalty has never been more critical, particularly among automotive-related businesses," said Charles Cavolina, Cross Country's senior vice president of Service Delivery. The company is headquartered in Medford, Massachusetts.
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Navatar Group, a global Salesforce.com partner in financial services, has announced several new customers, including KStone Partners, Kelvingrove Partners and Zebra Capital. The firms are using Navatar's customized CRM for Hedge Funds, a cloud computing application to manage hedge fund and fund of funds operations.

Navatar CRM for Hedge Funds is built and run entirely on the Force.com platform from Salesforce.com and is available on the Force.com AppExchange. The product is designed to facilitate operational functions of hedge funds, with tools to manage investor relations, manage fundraising, track investments, track fund portfolio, generate investor reports and send fund information and newsletters.

"Cloud computing is a no-brainer in enabling Hedge Funds to do more with less," says John Quinlan, Head, Sales & Operations, Kelvingrove Partners.

The Navatar product is built and run on the Force.com platform, which company officials say gives it "the benefits of the platform for building cloud computing business applications," as the Force.com platform has security and sharing models, workflow, analytics, customization, integration, and other features.

Navatar CRM for Hedge Funds is 100 percent natively built on Force.com, which means that all of the customer data, as well as all the code is hosted by Salesforce.com as opposed to any external servers. All customers share the same code base, but still have the ability to create their own customizations.

"Within a day, hedge funds can now use this cloud computing application to manage their operations at a very low cost. There is no hardware and no software required," says Alok Misra, Principal, Navatar Group. Navatar CRM for Hedge Funds is now available for a 30-day free trial on the Force.com AppExchange.

Navatar Group, founded by veterans of Deloitte Consulting, deals in cloud computing advisory and implementation services and products. 
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ONStor, a vendor of clustered NAS products for enterprises and "content-rich organizations," has announced an addition to its Pantera line of integrated storage systems, the Pantera LS 2100 series.

The LS 2100 series is a family of unified IP storage products that provide both iSCSI and NAS support in a single system. Targeting small and mid-sized enterprises, the Pantera LS 2100 packs an array of data management features, what company officials call "self-healing capabilities," and storage management designed for cost savings. ONStor has also incorporated the Zettabyte File System and open source technology into the Pantera LS series systems.

"By moving to OpenSolaris/ZFS, ONStor is on track to be a disruptive force in the storage industry," says Simon Robinson, research director, storage, the 451 Group, adding that he thinks ONStor's "unified message" will play well with small and midrange enterprises "because those organizations desire a single system to handle all of their storage requirements, not multiple silos that require separate management."

Many SMEs use multi-vendor storage systems spread throughout the organization, making storage management difficult and costly. This product's designed to solve that problem.

"Our initial focus was on allowing our customers to choose storage from any vendor for use with ONStor's NAS gateways," says Bob Miller, CEO of ONStor, adding that he believe ZFS "will become the predominant file system standard in enterprise environments."

The Pantera system has RAID Z and RAID Z-DP (RAID 5 and 6) capabilities, as well as unlimited, instantaneous snapshots and block-based incremental replication. The Pantera LS 2130 is scalable up to 48 drives of SAS or SATA and has a list price of $36,000 with 15TB of SATA storage. The Pantera LS 2150 is scalable up to 96 drives of SAS, SATA and SSD and has a list price of $39,500 with 15TB of SATA storage. For more information, visit.

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Infobright, an open source data warehousing company, has announced that Infobright Enterprise Edition and Infobright Community Edition have been certified by Sun Microsystems for use with the Sun's Unified Storage product line.

The vendor also released the results of its performance testing with the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System, which demonstrated up to 92 percent increase in query performance compared to the same tests conducted with a competitive storage device, Infobright officials say.

The testing was conducted using a real-world scenario for data analytics. It consisted of 64 different queries running repetitively for several hours against an 8TB Infobright database, varying the number of concurrent users from 1 - 16. The hardware environment included a Sun Fire X4450 server using NFS to connect to a Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System and demonstrated what Infobright officials say was "consistently faster results than a competitive SAN based storage unit."