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SnapScale's Patented Peer Set Protection Technology Brings High Availability and Scalability to Protect LISA's "Always-on" Storage Infrastructure

SAN JOSE, CA-(Marketwired - May 11, 2015) - Sphere 3D Corp. (NASDAQ: ANY), a virtualization and data management solutions provider, today announced that LISA (Inter-University Laboratory of Atmospheric Systems), a joint university between Paris-Est Creteil, Paris Diderot and CNRS, has selected SnapScale, one of the industry's simplest and largest scale-out solutions, as primary storage to protect all of its scientific research data. LISA research focuses on understanding the functions of terrestrial and planetary atmospheres and the impacts related to the changes of the atmospheric composition due to human activities.

LISA (http://www.lisa.univ-paris12.fr/fr), a division of the internationally recognized Observatory of Earth Sciences EFLUVE and the IPSL research federation for environment and climate research, is implementing a broad set of instruments for conducting physical and chemical measurements in the laboratory and in the field of gaseous and particulate atmospheric compounds. LISA required a highly-available storage solution for scientific data generated through its research collected from field instruments, simulation chambers, processing of inversion of satellite data and modeling data. Sphere 3D's SnapScale enterprise scale-out storage clusters scale to hundreds of petabytes in capacity in a single storage pool, while providing multi-tiered data integrity and protection. LISA is using SnapScale to manage their unstructured data generated from extensive measurements, analysis, and simulation modeling.

SnapScale was chosen by LISA over other competitive solutions for the simplicity of deployment, the unique data protection architecture, and versatile scalability. Both scale-up and scale-out capabilities are supported for matching performance and storage capacity growth as needed. SnapScale provides the high availability that LISA required to tolerate multiple disk failures, or the failure of nodes, and through software refreshes without any disruption of service. SnapScale uses Sphere 3D's patented Peer Set protection technology that drastically reduces any service degradation caused by offline data reconstruction normally experienced with traditional scale-out solutions.

LISA started with 65 TB of SnapScale storage using partially populated X4 nodes. Recently, they have added drives and nodes with ease and no service disruption to grow their storage deployment to over 400 TB. The SnapScale infrastructure allows them to grow their storage cluster to several hundred PBs. A new case study that describes LISA's selection of SnapScale for scalability, simplicity and resiliency is available at http://ow.ly/MsGkl.

"High availability of our storage infrastructure is critical to our research activity and the reason we chose SnapScale," said Cyril Pennanech, who is responsible for IT services and networking at LISA. "We were also very impressed by the simplicity and scale of SnapScale. Since our initial deployment, we have seamlessly added capacity, and we expect SnapScale to continue growing as our data grows."

LISA initially employed a scale-out system built using partially populated SnapScale X4 systems. SnapScale's scale-up feature allowed the customer to increase performance and capacity by simply adding more drives. When new nodes were added, they automatically "learned" their configuration from the cluster, resulting in zero operational overhead for LISA. In addition, the SnapScale cluster remained fully functional during this expansion, and automatically self-balanced the data to scale performance and capacity. SnapScale allows customers to infinitely scale capacity and performance of the storage cluster.

"The LISA scientific research institute's experience with our SnapScale enterprise scale-out solution exemplifies how customers with rapid data growth achieve on-demand and granular scaling of capacity and performance without adding management complexity," said Nilesh Patel, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Sphere3D.

Transtec was chosen to deploy the SnapScale solution for their advanced technical expertise in design and implementation. Transtec serves universities, research institutes and development departments with a passion for delivering solutions in high performance compute and virtualization environments. They focus on enterprise solutions that deliver simplicity, scalability and performance.