The equipment will be located in SMS's suite at Telecity in Manchester, England. It will be used to provide backups of customer's data from the many servers SMS is now running, as well as SMS' CRM system. The equipment was installed in December and came online in January.

"It is not just the rapid growth in our user base that made us upgrade to NetApp - it is addresses the need for a really robust storage solution that gives our users confidence for the future," says Colin Smith, managing director of SMS. "Hosting solutions without first class infrastructure are not solutions at all."

SMS is based in Warrington, UK and currently has thousands of customer email accounts running on its servers. The company recently announced plans to recruit more sales and support staff.