"We were conscious that our server farm was growing, and that we had all of these islands of RAID storage; what we really wanted was to get that all into one big pool," O'Mahony said. "So instead of having little ponds, we wanted a lake of storage."

Another problem was reliability, because if one server went down there was no fail-over or load balancing.

"With RAID you can't shuffle the data around easily, you can't manage it," O'Mahony said.

"We wanted, and our user community expected, a higher uptime from the network. We were probably around three nines for uptime and if the dream is five nines then we wanted to be closer to that."

Acer installed a 10TB SAN which is connected to eight Acer Altos R510 servers running Novell's cluster services in two, 4-node clusters.