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2011-01-17T22:36:00.000-05:00

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SANsymphony 7.0 Selected as 2010 Products of the Year finalists for Storage Management

2011-01-14T11:51:00.001-05:00

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid5_gci1525938,00.html

Many will look back on 2010 as the year of big storage acquisitions, but the wheeling and dealing was only part of the story. Data storage vendors turned out a slew of ingenious enterprise data storage products to address some of the key issues users have been grappling with in their storage shops.

From nearly 200 entries, the judges of Storage magazine's and SearchStorage.com's 2010 Products of the Year awards have selected and announced their finalists.

Storage management tools: 2010 Products of the Year finalists

Jan 2011 | Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com Contributors

Here are the eight finalists in the storage management tools category in Storage magazine's and SearchStorage.com's 2010 Products of the Year competition. The category covers storage resource management (SRM) and SAN management software, performance monitoring, file systems, volume management, virtualization software and security software. Finalists are listed below.

DataCore Software Corp. SANsymphony 7.0

DataCore SANsymphony 7.0 storage virtualization software adds non-stop high availability (HA) to let users do maintenance, upgrades and expansion, and address system failures without disrupting applications. Also new are support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), "advanced site recovery' (ASR) to enable IT shops to fail over physical and virtual servers to multiple remote and branch offices, and efficient space reclamation for thinly provisioned storage.

Balesio AG FILEminimizer Server balesio FILEminimizer Server

Gluster Inc. GlusterFS 3.1 GlusterFS 3.1

Nasuni Corp. Nasuni Filer 2.0 Nasuni Filer 2.0

Nexenta Systems Inc. NexentaStor 3.0 NexentaStor 3.0

Quantum Corp. StorNext 4.0 StorNext 4.0

Quest Software Inc. vFoglight Storage 1.0 vFoglight Storage 1.0

Rackspace Hosting Inc. Cloud Files Rackspace Hosting Cloud Files

See DataCore Real-World Case Studies and Breakout Sessions on Elimintating Downtime at the VMware User Group New England Meeting; 1000 attendees expected to attend Gillette Stadium event

2011-01-12T12:19:00.006-05:00

VMware User Group New England Meeting
Eliminate Storage-Related Downtime and Bottlenecks in Virtualized Environments

VMware vSphere solutions let you work around server hardware hiccups and workload congestion, but the shared storage on which they depend will soon prove to be your biggest single source of outages and slowdowns, with 10 to 100 times greater consequences.

Attend the DataCore breakout session “Eliminate Storage-Related Downtime and Bottlenecks in Virtualized Environments” and learn how to:

  *   Eliminate single points of failure for 100% Uptime
  *   Gain a 200% performance boost
  *   Attain additional performance from your storage resources
  *   Realize 60% cost savings
Hear real world case studies and discover how your colleagues are reaping the benefits of a virtualized storage environment.

  *   American Society of Health-System Pharmacists
  *   Dinwiddie County Government
  *   Town of South Windsor
Don’t miss the opportunity to meet the DataCore team and enter our drawing to win DataCore storage virtualization software.

The DataCore Software Team

Register Now!

January 20, 2011
8:00 am – 6:00 pm

Location

Gillette Stadium
1 Patriot Place
Foxborough, MA 02035

DataCore Session
Blue Level – Room 24

1:00 pm Breakout Session 1
2:00 pm Breakout Session 2
3:00 pm Breakout Session 3

 Register Today!

The Next Big Industry Push is VDI

2011-01-07T05:08:00.002-05:00

Check out the latest post form Jon Toigo at: http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=3264

…One of the problems I have been detecting in the literature is the same issue we saw in server virtualization: the gotchas of hidden cost. In addition to software and operating system licensing fee structures, the industry will need to sort out the enabling software for virtualizing desktops themselves. But the really big cost is — you guessed it — storage.

I have read with amusement and disdain the papers by leading storage hardware vendors stating that, from a storage cost perspective, you can stand up 5000 desktop images on their array for a fraction of what a physical desktop costs. They usually tout $100 desktops versus $400 physical PCs. Big cost savings there, right?
Not really. The reason why they use 5000 virtual PCs to achieve their groundbreaking cost reductions is that it is the only way they can amortize their box of disk drives and value add software. NOBODY IS GOING TO VIRTUALIZE 5000 DESKTOPS!!!

Sorry for shouting. I guess there are some companies out there with that many PCs. However, the truth is that VDI will likely advance incrementally — tens or maybe a couple of hundred PCs at a time. This is especially true at the outset of the trend, with early adopters and experimenters.

So, the truth of most of these claims that 5000 desktop images can be stored for a quarter of the price of an equal number of physical PCs is quite self serving — and, more importantly, falls apart in the real world.

The question shouldn’t be how many VDIs can I stack up to amortize my storage investment, it should be, how much cost can I take out of distributed desktops if I virtualize a few dozen? The benchmarks of the EMCs, NetApps, et al never go there.

But DataCore Software does. In case you missed their announcement today, here’s the news — at least the preliminary bits that were released today.

My friends at DataCore have just completed what I regard as the first meaningful benchmark on the cost of desktop virtualization from a storage hosting perspective. I like what Ziya, George, Bettye and the gang have done — a lot! In fact, I thought it was important enough to fly down there with a camera and shoot a video interview on the subject. They have posted the videos to their site but I will be placing them at the C-4 Summit in Cyberspace by end of week.

Here is an extract of what I just wrote about it for Storage Magazine in the Netherlands…

Late 2010 saw a succession of “proof of concept” papers coming from the storage brand name vendors touting cost models for VDI that were a fraction of the acquisition price of physical PCs. One three-letter vendor boasted that a 5000 PC environment could be effectively hosted on its storage array for roughly $50 US per box.

Once you get past the wow factor, however, you quickly realize that the storage vendor’s benchmark is rather self-serving. The benchmark ignores the cost of desktop OS and application software licensing, hypervisor licensing, server hardware, network enhancements, and storage cabling requirements to focus narrowly on the cost per VDI using the vendor’s storage gear. Moreover, a business will need to stack up a full 5000 virtual PCs in order to amortize the cost of the storage rig and achieve the cost-per-virtual-desktop advanced by the vendor.

Truth be told, virtually no one is going to virtualize 5000 desktops all at once – not even the large insurance companies or government research labs that actually have desktops in those numbers. It is more likely that companies will tread cautiously when pursuing a desktop virtualization strategy, virtualizing only a handful of machines at a time so that the real cost and efficacy of the strategy can be clarified. Until that happens, buying a huge EMC, IBM, HDS, etc. storage rig to support 5000 virtual PCs at sub-$100 each will not return its investment. In fact, companies pursuing this course will likely find out the hard way that the easiest path to doubling or tripling desktop computing costs is to virtualize their desktops on expensive infrastructure.
I wish everyone would read CTO Ziya Aral of DataCore Software’s wonderful benchmark on VDI and storage. His goals were not to amortize a specific storage rig (DataCore sells storage virtualization that works just as well with Joe’s JBODs as it does with VMAX or USP). He wanted simply to understand the capacity and performance requirements for desktop virtualization – especially in the 100 to 500 virtual machine range that will be much more common in the real world.

DataCore Software demonstrated pretty persuasively, and without trying terribly hard, that you could stand up that range of VDIs on a virtualized storage platform for about $35 per desktop. They also discovered that the low cost could be maintained as you grew infrastructure using storage and servers configured as part of a star topology – stars later serving as a building block for scaling. That price included all of the redundancy and failover capabilities touted as “enterprise class” hosting by the brand name storage rig vendors – leveraging only the secret sauce of DataCore read/writable snap shots created from virtualizing underlying storage.

There were many non-intuitively-obvious findings in DataCore’s research that I will only summarize here. For one, a Microsoft Windows 7 machine will boot in less than 198K of memory – so there is no real advantage to throwing a ton of RAM at the system. For another, most desktops require very little physical storage: so, when you begin doing VDI, you need to stop thinking as though you are deploying a physical PC with parameters dictated by “boundary conditions” (i.e., configuring according to what the most data intensive application or user might require in terms of storage capacity).

Bottom line: DataCore’s benchmark proves that it doesn’t require an overpriced “enterprise class” storage rig to virtualize desktops in a cost-effective way. All that it really requires is common sense and storage virtualization software, preferably from DataCore Software, which [will shortly release a new and revamped version of its flagship storage virtualization wares].

We are off to a great start in 2011. Maybe DataCore’s research will cajole the hardware guys to get real about their cost estimation around VDI. For now, a sub-$35 price tag is pretty compelling.

Interesting Technologies that could come of age in 2011. Storage Virtualization Software #1

2011-01-06T05:08:00.002-05:00

http://www.storagetopics.com/2011/01/interesting-technologies-that-could.html

In my last blog I noted that the promise of the New Year encourages a flurry of predictions each trying to foretell next year’s technology winners and losers. Just as with New Year’s resolutions, I have tried to avoid engaging in this end of year ritual despite my last blog that may have created a contrary impression...

To me interesting predictions are those that reach beyond the safety of conservatism. Being bullish is risky but what is the point of predicting the obvious. So in the spirit of sticking myself out there on the proverbial limb my selection of technologies to watch in 2011 are; Storage Virtualization Software, Cloud Storage Gateways and Autonomic Software Architectures.

#1. Storage Virtualization Software: Not what is traditionally thought of as storage virtualization; for example HP’s EVA or a 3Par array. Storage virtualization software is a hardware independent software product, designed to deliver storage virtualization that replicates the many advantages VMware, Microsoft’s HyperV and Citrix et al has delivered to the server world.

How? By looking at what is traditionally consider to be platform based controller functions and physical storage virtualization as a portable software program that is abstracted from the physical layer and hence hardware independent. Very interesting concept and one that I anticipate will generate some interesting responses from the traditional storage vendors.

Companies to watch; DataCore, a 10+ year old company that could have a break out year in 2011, and for those interested in content addressable storage, Caringo.

DataCore Software: 2011 Perspectives on the Shifting Economies of Storage Virtualization Software, Private Clouds and Virtual Desktops

2010-12-27T16:15:00.000-05:00

"The business return on investment of a pure ‘software infrastructure,' where you pay once for intelligent software to manage, protect and get more from your storage assets - as they come and go from generation to generation and brand to brand - is a value proposition that is as compelling as it is inevitable."- George Teixeira, President and CEO, DataCore Software

Read the top 5 predictions for 2011 from DataCore Software at: http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/12/16/datacore-2011-perspectives-on-the-shifting-economies-of-storage-virtualization-software-private-clouds-and-virtual-desktops.aspx

Virtualization Review SuperCast: The Time to Virtualize Storage is NOW!

2010-11-30T07:12:00.000-05:00

In this FREE supercast event, now available on demand, learn why storage virtualization is quickly moving from nice-to-have to need-to-have status and how to successfully deploy and optimize virtual environments.

Title: The Time to Virtualize Storage is NOW

Keynote: Jon Toigo, CEO Toigo Partners International, Chairman Data Management Institute
Storage expert Jon Toigo is a columnist for Enterprise Systems and contributing writer for Virtualization Review. He is a consultant, blogger and author of 15 books on business technology, disaster recovery and data storage.

Join industry leaders for a free supercast designed to help you understand the growing need and value of virtualized storage, as well as tips and strategies for implementation and optimization.

Featured Presentations include:
Secrets to 100% Uptime in a Virtualized Environment by DataCore

InformationWeek Landmark Report on Storage Virtualization: How To Break Free From Tier 1 SAN Vendors

2010-11-27T11:08:00.003-05:00

We've all grown comfortable with the server virtualization model, where you buy intelligent software and run your choice of hardware. Why should storage be any different? It shouldn't, and a number of vendors are providing the means to finally sever this bond. By offering flexible, standards-based storage virtualization and management software that will run on any x86 platform, DataCore, FalconStor and others extend a tantalizing promise: Pay once for intelligent software and run it on the hardware of your choice. Get the software virtualization layer in place, and the possibilities are endless...

http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/virtualization/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000296

Virtualization Begets Virtualization: Extending Efficiency and Business Agility

2010-11-22T08:33:00.000-05:00

Interesting article:
http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/08/virtualization-begets-virtualization-extending-efficiency-and-business-agility/

Storage virtualization is often combined with server virtualization. Storage virtualization (functionality that takes multiple storage systems and treats those devices as a single, centrally-managed pool of storage) provides an additional opportunity to reduce IT costs and optimize efficiency—especially as server virtualization proliferates. ESG research indicates that among current server virtualization users, 86% report they have storage virtualization initiatives as a top spending priority over the next 12 to 18 months. The combination often amplifies the benefits of both forms of virtualization: lowering costs, improving resource utilization, increasing availability, simplifying upgrades, and enabling scalability.

As organizations become more comfortable with one form of virtualization, they don’t have to make great intellectual or philosophical leaps in order to grasp the concept of virtualizing other data center domains. Oftentimes, IT organizations undertaking complete data center refresh initiatives have virtualization as top of mind and would look to extract all possible efficiencies in one fell swoop by deploying virtualization in multiple technology areas.

Non-Stop NAS filers, benefits from true High-Availability: DataCore Brings Unprecedented Storage Scalability, Performance and High-Availability to Microsoft Clustered File Shares, Hyper-V Failover Cluster CSVs and Metro Clusters

2010-11-13T09:51:00.000-05:00

Spotlights Customer Use Cases, High-Availability NAS and Cluster Best Practices
At the recent Microsoft Tech-Ed Europe 2010, DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization software, demonstrated major breakthroughs to enhance the availability, scalability and performance of Failover Clustering in Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2 with Hyper-V™. Several case studies and white papers are available to highlight how IT organizations can benefit operationally and financially from these joint solutions.

The two most common use cases for DataCore in Microsoft Failover Cluster scenarios involve virtualizing and mirroring storage resources across physically-separated storage devices for:

• Clustered Shared Volumes (CSVs)
• Clustered File Shares

Many DataCore customers at the event explained the technical aspects behind their real-world implementations. Featured among them was the Swiss-based hospital, Regionalspital Emmental (RSE) AG, where DataCore software fully virtualizes the shared storage infrastructure for RSE’s Exchange, SQL and medical applications. RSE operates 15 physical servers and over 50 virtual machines running on top of Hyper-V.

“Server virtualization from Microsoft Hyper-V combined with storage virtualization software from DataCore form an integral part of our IT strategy, significantly lowering costs for hardware, energy and administration,” states Falko Gieldanowski, Head of IT at RSE AG. "We are currently saving around 30% by better optimizing the use of our time and resources and from the resulting increase in productivity – and we anticipate further savings over the lifetime of our infrastructure."

What’s New: HA NAS - Eliminating Storage-related Downtime for Clustered File Shares

One of the topics that was spotlighted during Tech-Ed Europe 2010, was how to keep storage from becoming a single-point-of-failure for clustered file shares. DataCore explained how its software along with Microsoft's built-in capabilities could be combined to provide a true high-availability NAS capability, best of all no additional software or hardware are required to implement the capability. For more information and further details on how to achieve high-availability NAS, please contact: info@datacore.com .

Non-Stop Data Access: Virtualizing and Speeding-up SANs for CSVs

US-based Stockbridge Capital Group deploys DataCore storage virtualization software with Microsoft Hyper-V to meet their business continuity needs. Two synchronously- mirrored DataCore nodes keep the storage infrastructure, especially the CSVs, highly available to ensure non-stop data access from a cluster of seven (7) Hyper-V servers hosting over 25 virtual machines. Prior to virtualization, Stockbridge had well over 30 physical servers.

“DataCore’s storage virtualization solution offers all of the high-end features, including enterprise-class high availability, but at an affordable price,” comments Stephen Pilch, COO, Stockbridge. “DataCore software lets us easily leverage our investment in existing and new technologies and empower our virtual servers to meet non-stop business needs while fitting our budget. It is a perfect match for us.”

The virtualized storage configuration services the needs of Stockbridge’s Microsoft Exchange server along with the file repositories used by all their employees. “We were pleasantly surprised that the iSCSI SAN, because of DataCore, actually performed better than the existing fibre SAN, in terms of its speed and accessibility,” notes Cem Kursunoglu, president at BayNODE. Read the full story here.

Large Scale Metro Clusters Rely on Microsoft and DataCore
Continuum Health Partners ("Continuum") relies on DataCore SANsymphony™ software to virtualize and manage well over 200 Terabytes of storage for the various hospitals in the Continuum hospital network. The DataCore-powered infrastructure supports a community of 14,000 users on over five-hundred (500) servers with storage devices split between different locations in metropolitan New York.

"DataCore storage virtualization software is the key to the virtualization puzzle - offering the flexible storage virtualization dimension needed for any virtualization project - and serving as the perfect complement to server virtualization as well as the perfect enhancement to storage hardware," explains Jill Wojcik, IT Director at Continuum Health Partners.

Microsoft solutions running on the DataCore virtualized infrastructure at Continuum include: Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Cluster Servers (MSCSs. For a more in-depth case study on this deployment, please visit: www.datacore.com/continuum .

To receive a white paper describing the techniques used to provide uninterrupted access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) by synchronously mirroring across storage devices split between hot-hot sites, please download it at: www.datacore.com/metroclusters .

Educational program and discounts up to 50% help foster academic institutions of all sizes benefit from DataCore Virtualization Infrastructure Software for their storage

2010-11-12T08:12:00.000-05:00

For more information, contact a DataCore partner for details or go to http://www.datacore.com/education .

Schools and universities worldwide are using DataCore storage virtualization software to complement their server and/or desktop virtualization projects

The education sector continues to beat a path to DataCore as the cornerstone of a virtualized infrastructure. “DataCore has been an excellent solution that enabled us to virtualize our new and existing storage solutions on the back-end while keeping a single interface and single management point for managing all of our different SAN environments,” states Dustin Fennell, vice president of IT and CIO, Scottsdale Community College. “Beyond this, we have attained better performance with DataCore and we now have the benefit of high-availability.”

DataCore’s software solutions enable the data centers and IT departments within educational institutions to better manage and maximize storage capacity and leverage existing hardware to protect and serve storage assets to Microsoft, VMware and Citrix virtual servers and desktops.

Moreover, because DataCore cares about education and sees it as a strategic investment for the future, it therefore provides qualified academic institutions with access to special promotional offers and extra discounts of up to 50% on DataCore virtualization software packages: http://www.datacore.com/education .

Educational institutions of all sizes are embracing DataCore’s software-based approach to storage virtualization in order to enable them to overcome storage-related funding roadblocks, downtime and performance issues. A sampling of the very newest institutions in the US to embrace DataCore at the heart of their virtualization infrastructures are: American River College, Arizona State University, Bellarmine University, Berkshire School, Capital Community College, Louisburg College, Midwestern University, Mount Anthony Middle School, NY Network, Notre Dame Academy, Rogue Community College, North Star Charter School, Sacramento City College, Scottsdale Community College, Shenandoah School Corporation, Spalding University, University of California San Francisco, Three Rivers Community College, Utica College, Virginia Wesleyan College, Wittenberg University, and others.

In addition to these newer customers, in the USA a host of educational organizations have already deployed storage virtualization using DataCore’s SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ solutions. These include Auburn University, Daytona Beach Community College, Georgia Institute of Technology, Los Rios Community College District, Midway College, Mount St. Mary’s University, Sullivan University, Syracuse University, Texas A&M University at Kingsville, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Illinois, University of Utah - Education Network, University of Utah, School of Medicine, and many, many more – spanning the globe and spanning all levels of education.

The needs of IT departments that support educational institutions can suffer from the same shortfall that every other IT department can: a virtualization project that stops at servers and desktops and therefore misses an important component – storage. “In a K-12 setting, if the school districts are not looking at virtualization, they are cutting their legs out from under themselves,” states Steve Gumm, IT director, Barren County Schools.

Customer Testimonials in Education

Virtualizing storage resources means that institutions can: avoid downtime, planned or unplanned; improve the performance of storage devices; mix current storage devices with newly purchased equipment; and, most importantly, stay within a budget.

Oxford University –
“The DataCore and VMware solution allows us to plug in and support storage and virtual servers as and when we need; ultimately DataCore provides a cost-effective storage solution that we are happy to recommend.”- Jon Hutchings, Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS).

Read full case study: Storage Virtualization at Oxford University

Scottsdale Community College –
“Virtual computing has transformed our entire IT organization – the way we deliver services, the way we support them, and the way our end users consume them. Our previous SAN solution was a bottleneck in this environment and we needed a more high-performing solution. DataCore storage virtualization is a key component to the stability and performance of our virtual computing environment.”- Dustin Fennell, Vice President of IT and CIO, Scottsdale Community College

Barren County Schools –
“For all intents and purposes, we are 100% virtual. The biggest benefit for us was realizing a virtualized data infrastructure. Because we adopted storage virtualization, we now can deploy any storage hardware behind our environment that we want. Beyond this – with DataCore we were able to repurpose old equipment.”- Steve Gumm, IT director, Barren County Schools.
Read full case study: www.datacore.com/barrencounty

Lakota Local Schools –
“With a continually growing enterprise dependent on network based solutions, DataCore allowed us to implement a virtual infrastructure at a fraction of the cost and support of other storage solutions. As a result, we were able to virtualize several central systems, resulting in power, cooling and space savings as well as add additional redundancy.”- Todd Wesley, Network Operations Administrator for Lakota Local Schools.
Read full case study: www.datacore.com/lakota

Rocklin Unified School District –
“We had to put in place a virtual storage network that had the agility to keep up, while also providing the needed fault tolerant failover protection to safeguard our storage and maximize overall system uptime. Now, we have rolled out a new VMware and Citrix infrastructure in support of our applications. And DataCore is the underlying foundation for all of it.”
- Glenn Baker, Systems Engineer, Rocklin Unified School District.
Read full case study: www.datacore.com/rocklin

Saginaw Intermediate School District –
“We were also really won over by the fact that DataCore is an affordable solution for achieving high availability. And the transition from physical to virtual was seamless – nobody even knew it happened. Through DataCore thin-provisioning, we were able to migrate the servers we needed to, during the day, without causing any downtime to a school district.”
- Jeff Johnson, Director of Technical Services, Saginaw Intermediate School District
Read full case study: www.datacore.com/saginaw

For more information, contact a DataCore partner for details or go to http://www.datacore.com/education .

DataCore Platinum Premier Sponsor at LifeBoat Distribution Cross-Channel Connexion 2010 in Atlantic City - Nearly 200 Attendees from Resellers and Virtualization Solution Providers

2010-10-17T23:49:00.004-04:00

DataCore Presentation Attendees

Lifeboat Distribution held its 2010 Partner Business Development Summit in Atlantic City, NJ last week.

Lifeboat's Cross-Connexion 2010 Vendor Fair.

Dan Jamieson, VP & GM Lifeboat Promotes DataCore at the Fair

Nearly 200 represenatives from resellers and virtualization solution providers attended Cross-Connexion 2010 along with 50 vendors.

Dan Hascall, VP DataCore Americas

DataCore was the premier Platinum sponsor and was prominently featured, hosted a private dinner the night before with over 30 select attendees and was showcased during three 1 hour presentations by our own Dan Hascall [VP of Americas Sales] in Ballroom A at the vendor fair at the Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino. Over 70 partner representatives attended the presentations and had an opportunity to learn more about DataCore and our partner program.

Dan Hascall, Bill Ferara and George T. also had numerous meetings with individual partners who wanted to learn more about DataCore.

Bettye and Sabrina worked the booth and also presented software to a couple of lucky winners.

At the end of the night, the resellers in attendence voted and DataCore won the BEST AT FAIR Award.

Congratulations...for a great partner recruitment event!

Vendor Fair

Meanwhile, Bettye, Sabrina, Ben, Bill and the Lifeboat team helped worked the crowd and drive up attendence at Dan's presentation on DataCore.

DataCore Software and Fusion-io Technology Alliance Partnership; Customers Realize Performance Gains and Energy Savings

2010-10-14T09:15:00.001-04:00

This week Fusion-io launched its Fusion-io Technology Alliance Program. DataCore Software is pleased to be a Fusion-io Technology Alliance Partner. Fusion-io’s solid state storage solutions combined with DataCore storage virtualization software achieve new levels of performance, high availability and energy efficiency when the two technologies are deployed together. Customers that are implementing Fusion-io as a server class memory tier across DataCore-powered storage area networks are experiencing unprecedented levels of I/O performance through tiered caching. One example of this is the German company NIEDAX GROUP, which is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electrical installation equipment.

NIEDAX GROUP utilizes DataCore to accelerate storage performance along with high speed NAND flash memory from Fusion-io for its private cloud service. DataCore’s storage virtualization software takes advantage of server RAM memory to cache and accelerate storage I/Os, while the flash memory from Fusion-io acts as another tier of high-speed memory to further accelerate performance for critical applications.

DataCore’s technology enables effective sharing of these devices across the storage pool and provides the ability to use SAN-wide features across different vendor hardware arrays and devices. Thus it is a very cost-effective way to fully utilize all the storage available and to mirror and protect data. According to Oliver Bauer, Team Leader Administration/IT at NIEDAX GROUP. "We gained tremendous performance from adding DataCore and Fusion-io and overall we reduced our energy and cooling costs."

For a more in-depth overview of DataCore and Fusion-io at NIEDAX GROUP, see:
DataCore_Virtualizes_FusionIO_Solid_State_Disks_SSDs_and_HP_Storage_Arrays_into_a_High_Performance_and_Energy_Efficient_SAN_for_NIEDAX_GROUP

Here are similar overviews written in German:
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/business/datacore-niedax

http://www.all-about-security.de/security-artikel/applikations-host-sicherheit/virtualisierung/artikel/11238-energieeffizientes-hochleistungs-san/

For more on DataCore Software and Fusion-io at NIEDAX GROUP, check out the following videos from VMworld TV: http://siliconangle.tv/search/node/george%20teixeira

VMworld 2010 Europe: DataCore Software Eliminates Business Outages in VMware VIEW and vSphere Environments; Showcases Growing Base of VMware and DataCore Customer Successes

2010-10-14T09:06:00.001-04:00

DataCore's software-based storage virtualization and high-availability approach is key to cloud-based and virtualized IT environments

COPENHAGEN – At VMworld Europe 2010, DataCore Software is providing insights into new developments and highlights a growing number of applications and solutions being deployed at customer sites in conjunction with DataCore’s VMware-certified storage virtualization platforms. DataCore is highlighting the seamless integration of complementary technologies for private and public cloud computing. In addition, DataCore is showcasing cost-effective customer SAN deployments – virtualized with DataCore and VMware vSphere and VIEW – that are proven to meet the demands for virtual server and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) that need high-availability, fast performance and archival solutions.

"At VMworld Europe 2010, cloud, desktop and storage virtualization are high on the agenda of attending end users and solution providers. The greater flexibility and high performance requirements for storage in virtual desktop infrastructures are also usually associated with high costs that can jeopardize the completion of virtualization and consolidation projects,” says Christian Hagen, Vice President of EMEA Channel & Sales Operations at DataCore Software. "DataCore overcomes the cost barrier. Our software solutions enable the integration of existing and new storage regardless of the underlying brand of storage hardware. The software revalues existing storage devices with the highest reliability and performance and transforms it into cost-efficient, flexible, shared storage – especially for VDI environments and other critical applications. We are seeing strong demand for our cost-effective solutions in this area."

Storage Virtualization Software is Key to Cloud Performance

Current projects emphasize the growing need for high performance and highly available storage for the cloud. Case in point – DataCore Software recently implemented its SANsymphony™ software at Waterstons. This major IT service provider offers cloud hosting services from a purpose-built Tier 3 data center in the North of England. Based on Dell storage hardware, VMware and DataCore's SANsymphony software – configured in a redundant configuration, it offers all the high availability and resilience that Waterstons' high-end cloud hosting service requires. Through SANsymphony's built-in agility and thin-provisioning software, Waterstons' clients can access storage “on-the-fly” from the VMware server farm. Andrew Kershaw, Technical Director at Waterstons, explains, "Through our cloud-based service, we are able to offer new and innovative ways of supporting clients and solving their business and technology problems. With the VMware and DataCore combination, we can respond to demands extremely quickly and on a very flexible basis, which often is simply not the case with traditional infrastructure."

Host.net, one of the largest hosting services in the USA, delivers private cloud computing services for companies ranging from SMEs to large enterprises, utilizing a true software-based approach to attain the greatest flexibility and to deliver 100% uptime. "We chose VMware, DataCore and Cisco in the core design of our vPDC platform because each vendor delivers the very best virtualization component in their respective areas of competence," says Jeffrey Slapp, Vice President of Virtualization Services for Host.net. He states that many companies have signed on as new customers because of the competitive advantages they have achieved with this combination of technologies and architecture.

The German NIEDAX GROUP, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electrical installation equipment, utilizes DataCore to accelerate storage performance along with high speed NAND flash memory from Fusion-io for its private cloud service. The software takes advantage of server RAM memory to cache and accelerate storage I/Os, while the flash memory from Fusion-io acts as another tier of high-speed memory to further accelerate performance for critical applications. The software approach enables effective sharing of these devices across the storage pool and provides the ability to use SAN-wide features across different vendor hardware arrays and devices. Thus it is a very cost-effective way to fully utilize all the storage available and to mirror and protect all the data. "We are happy with our DataCore investment and we are benefiting from the many functional and financial benefits of putting it in use," states Oliver Bauer, Team Leader Administration/IT at NIEDAX GROUP. "We gained tremendous performance from adding DataCore and Fusion-io SSDs and overall we reduced our energy and cooling costs."

Compliance and Virtual Archives with DataCore and iTernity

At VMworld Europe 2010, DataCore continues to work with and integrate with an ever- growing base of important applications that impact the storage environments. A flexible and independent virtualization software layer is a prerequisite for value-added applications and functions such as archival and compliance software. Successfully tested and proven in a number of joint customer projects, DataCore’s SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ have been deployed successfully in conjunction with iTernity™ Compliant Archive Solution (iCAS™) in a certified architecture that supports long-term archiving.

With the DataCore and iTernity solutions, users are able to obtain an expandable, secure and cost-efficient archiving solution that meets regulatory compliance and archival demands in VMware virtual environments.

VMworld 2010 Europe takes place at the Bella Center Copenhagen, Denmark from Oct 12th – 14th. Meet the DataCore experts for virtualization at booth No. 81.

DataCore Software Fuels Growth, Adds Key Virtualization Industry Veterans to Scale Channel Operations as New Partners "Catch the Storage Virtualization Wave"

2010-10-11T02:07:00.001-04:00

http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/10/08/datacore-software-fuels-growth-adds-key-virtualization-industry-veterans-to-scale-channel-operations-as-new-partners-catch-the-storage-virtualization-wave.aspx
DataCore Software, today announced that the company has continued to attract top talent from VMware and Citrix in key executive positions to fuel growth and to take the company to the forefront of the virtualization market space. DataCore has hired Dan Hascall as the new Vice President of Americas Sales, promoted Martin Clancy to the position of Chief Financial Officer, and appointed Johan Vanhaeren as the new regional director covering the Benelux countries.

“With over 6,000 customers worldwide and nearly 20,000 licenses shipped, we are tapping the wave of virtualization that has spread from servers and desktops to storage,” comments George Teixeira, president and CEO, DataCore Software. “Storage virtualization software, like its server and desktop virtualization cousins, is all about software that lives beyond the life of storage devices that come and go over time, making users’ storage investments better and more economical. Adding these industry veterans to our management team comes as we prepare an even more aggressive push to the reseller community and to virtualization users. We are hiring experienced virtualization industry leaders to fuel our growth as storage virtualization takes center stage and becomes more and more mainstream – both in the enterprise and in the Cloud.”

Widely recognized as the software leader in storage virtualization, DataCore has continued its double digit growth despite recessionary times. DataCore’s software solutions enable data centers and IT departments to better manage, consolidate and maximize storage capacity as well as to leverage existing hardware in order to protect and serve storage assets to VMware, Microsoft and Citrix virtual servers and desktops.

DataCore Doubles North America Sales Team; Hires Dan Hascall, New Vice President of Sales for the Americas
Building for growth in North America, in 2010 DataCore has doubled its North America sales team and hired Dan Hascall, formerly of VMware, to lead it as the new Vice President of Americas Sales. Hascall came to VMware in 2006 and helped develop VMware’s channel model and was responsible for the company’s Western Channel region. “DataCore is well-positioned for major success in both the network and Cloud computing models,” states Hascall. “And my question to users is simply ‘Why haven’t you virtualized your storage?’ Virtualization applies equally well to servers, desktops and storage. With DataCore, the move to storage virtualization is painless and partners can offer real value and strategic business agility to their customers. DataCore storage virtualization is the critical foundation that makes it easy for customers to move along the virtualization journey.”

Finance & Operations Expertise with a Channel Mindset: DataCore Promotes Martin Clancy to Chief Financial Officer
Martin Clancy has been promoted to Chief Financial Officer at DataCore Software. Clancy came to DataCore from Citrix Systems, a marquee virtualization vendor with a blue-chip reseller community and an extraordinarily channel-oriented mindset. In his twelve years with Citrix, Clancy served in a variety of financial and operations roles, the last one being Senior Director, Finance & Product Operations for the Desktop Division.

“DataCore is seeing a lot of growth and the numbers are compelling,” notes Clancy. “The appetite for virtualization technologies stems from the fact that these technologies give organizations that use them freedom. But from the perspective of CFO, I look at the tangible business benefits that virtualization brings, and they are incredibly persuasive on the storage-side. Virtualizing storage resources means that institutions are not locked in to a particular storage vendor and therefore gain greater purchasing power; they can avoid downtime, planned or unplanned; improve the performance of storage devices; mix current storage devices with newly purchased equipment; and, most importantly, stay within a budget.”

Worldwide Momentum in the Channel: DataCore Hires New Director of the Benelux Region
DataCore has also appointed Johan Vanhaeren, based in Belgium, as director for the Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg) region. Vanhaeren was the former country manager for Citrix in the Benelux region. “Just like its storage virtualization and desktop virtualization counterparts, DataCore storage virtualization software is changing the way resellers, solution providers and virtualization administrators manage and deploy virtualization projects and Clouds,” said Vanhaeren. “And this adoption is worldwide in its scope. The virtualization phenomenon knows no boundaries.”

Adds Teixeira, “More companies and institutions of all sizes are experiencing first-hand the power that comes from embracing DataCore’s software-based approach to storage virtualization, which includes achieving the highest degree of availability, flexibility and openness for their storage. We will continue to build our leadership team and company to help bring the benefits of DataCore storage virtualization to customers worldwide, helping them to evolve their current storage environments to attain the added benefits of virtualization.”

Citrix Synergy 2010: DataCore Virtualization Software Improves Availability and Performance While Overcoming the High Capital and Operational Costs of Storage for Virtual Desktops

2010-10-11T01:19:00.000-04:00

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=16289

At Citrix Synergy 2010 in Berlin, DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, is highlighting how joint Citrix and DataCore customers have benefited from performance gains, improved availability and cost efficiencies resulting from virtualizing their desktops, servers and storage. DataCore delivers a cost-effective storage infrastructure for Citrix Virtual Servers and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) by avoiding the need to “rip and replace” existing storage and SANs, thereby avoiding large, upfront capital expenses and greatly reducing ongoing operational costs.

“For more than two decades, Citrix Systems has been deploying virtualization solutions. This experience pays off; with our continuous advancements in desktop and server virtualization, we are making this technology accessible to a broad customer base,” says Jens Luebben, Managing Director Germany and Area Vice President Central Europe at Citrix Systems Inc. “After having successfully launched Citrix Technology Alliance last year, we continue to work joint projects with DataCore that have been proven in practice. Together with storage virtualization partners like DataCore, we want to use Citrix Synergy 2010 to respond to the most pressing questions about virtualization.”

Virtual Desktop Infrastructures along with Citrix XenServer, XenDesktop and XenApp require failsafe and centralized storage solution, but in many cases this is jeopardized due to the high costs involved. With DataCore's storage virtualization, users can easily create cost-effective "shared" storage for virtual servers and desktops from new and existing storage capacities. Customers benefit from investment protection, higher capacity utilization, better performance and affordable, high availability storage.

By virtualizing disk storage devices from different brands and vendors, DataCore™ software eliminates incompatibilities across generations, models and manufacturers and maximizes the joint value of these resources. Thus, storage-related disruptions, bottlenecks and financial hurdles which threaten virtualization projects, can be eliminated. This reduces costs, minimizes risks and increases productivity.

Virtualization is Three-Dimensional: Efficiency Impacts Desktops, Servers and Storage
Many successful installations with Citrix and DataCore worldwide illustrate the three-dimensional virtualization spanning desktops, servers and storage. Clemens Albrecht, Head of IT at Plakanda Management AG, a service provider of outdoor advertising in Switzerland, says, “We are very pleased with our decision to implement a virtualization strategy with Citrix and DataCore. With the combination of SANmelody™ and the Citrix XenServer and Citrix Essentials we benefit from having dynamic storage management, reduced administration and long-term cost savings.”

German hospital Muldental is also relying on a virtual infrastructure based on Citrix and DataCore. “Virtualization with DataCore and Citrix has reduced our hardware and software costs, simplified the administration and provided the flexibility for responding to requests quickly and efficiently. We can import updates for hundreds of identical desktops in a few minutes, or set up a special server such as one for the endoscopy department. DataCore's storage virtualization software ensures that our IT is continuously operating. A fact that we greatly depend on,” says Thomas Enderlein, IT Manager at Muldental.

See more information on effective storage solutions for Citrix with DataCore Software at http://www.datacore.com/solutions/govirt-citrix.asp .

Wall Street Journal Blog: When Consolidation Fosters Innovation -6 Companies worth Watching includes DataCore Software

2010-10-07T01:01:00.000-04:00

6 Companies to Watch, check the list: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/09/29/when-consolidation-fosters-innovation-among-start-ups/

Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing for the storage virtualization firm DataCore Software Corp., says “our pitch to buyers is, whoever they buy their storage infrastructure from, we can help them maximize the value of that infrastructure.”

Fujitsu & DataCore Storage Virtualization Software

2010-09-14T09:44:00.000-04:00

ChannelPros: DataCore Software and Fujitsu Technology Solutions Validate Integration of Products
Fujitsu has validated the integration of its data center storage and server systems with DataCore storage virtualization software, in order to minimize the risks for enterprises switching to virtualized and cloud storage architectures. http://www.channelprosmb.com/article/20444/DataCore-Software-and-Fujitsu-Technology-Solutions-Validate-Integration-of-Products/

SearchStorage: Fujitsu bundles DataCore storage virtualization software
DataCore Software Corp. said Fujitsu has validated its SANsymphony storage virtualization software, and Fujitsu will sell the integrated DataCore software on its Eternus storage systems and Primergy servers. http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1519941,00.html

Fujitsu UK Web site: Fujitsu Maximises Flexibility Of Storage Architectures With DataCore Storage Virtualisation
http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/news/pr/fs_20100909-01.html

Fujitsu German Blog: More flexibility for Storage architectures with DataCore Storage Virtualization
http://blog.de.ts.fujitsu.com/?p=1416
Fujitsu is now offering its server and storage systems with integrated storage virtualization software from DataCore. This makes the transition to virtualized storage pool architectures greatly simplified.

Network Computing: Fujitsu Maximizes Business Continuity And Flexibility Of Cloud Storage Architectures With DataCore Storage Virtualization
http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/datacore-software-fujitsu-maximizes-business-continuity-and-flexibility-of-cloud-storage-architectur.php

SNS -UK: Fujitsu maximises flexibility of storage architectures with DataCore storage virtualisation
http://www.sns-uk.co.uk/news_full.php?id=15628

Spanish: Fujitsu maximiza la flexibilidad de las arquitecturas de almacenamiento Cloud con DataCore Storage Virtualization
http://www.infomercados.com/actualidad/noticia/ibero-news/fujitsu-maximiza-la-flexibilidad-de-las-arquitecturas-de-almacenamiento-cloud-con-dat-/20100913/31874/i/

French: Fujitsu optimise sa continuité d’activité avec DataCore
http://informaticien.be/articles_item-8366-Fujitsu_optimise_sa_continuite_drsquoactivite.html

German: Flexible Storage Clouds: "Fujitsu Eternus"- und "Primergy"-Systeme für "DataCore SANsymphony"
http://www.itseccity.de/?url=/content/markt/channel-news/100914_mar_cha_datacore.html

Fujitsu and DataCore Software Partner for Virtualized Storage

2010-09-10T09:09:00.000-04:00

eWeek Storage Report: Fujitsu, DataCore Partner for Virtualized Storage

One could say that Fujitsu as a company is a bit cautious about change and in choosing its partners. But that would be a massive understatement.

Being cautious in international business is undoubtedly a very good thing. Note that Fujitsu is one of the world's true IT powerhouses.

However, good quality, second-generation storage virtualization has been available and used in production by many enterprises for more than four years. Companies like Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, NetApp and a slew of others already have snapped up their own such suppliers and incorporated their wares into their catalogs.

Thus it is indeed news that Fujitsu now has a storage virtualization software partner. On Sept. 9 it was announced that Fujitsu has validated DataCore storage virtualization software to run on its storage arrays and servers.

Thus, the two will produce high-end Fujitsu Eternus and Primergy systems featuring DataCore SANsymphony and make them available immediately through local channel partners.

DataCore said the combination enables easy real-time provisioning of storage within cloud infrastructures. DataCore's secret sauce also adds high availability, making it possible to move data and virtual machines as needed, where needed in a cloud storage architecture.

The new systems will at first become available this fall in Europe -- Austria, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom....

American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Deploys DataCore Software in a Stretch, High-Availability Configuration with VMware to Ensure Uptime and Business Continuity

2010-09-03T08:47:00.005-04:00

American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) www.ashp.org/ has implemented a new stretch cluster and stretch high-availability (HA) storage configuration based on DataCore storage virtualization software and VMware server virtualization software to ensure uptime and business continuity. This new, stretch, dual-node configuration was implemented by DataCore partner Helixstorm, Inc. and together, DataCore and VMware form an HA configuration that spans floors – serving as an industrial-strength production system with fault-tolerance.

The goal is to transition all of ASHP’s data onto the newly configured, fault-tolerant, virtualized environment. “I am now a believer in the software-based approach to high-availability and storage virtualization,” states Jack Spencer, vice president of operations and CIO at American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. “It was not intuitive until I actually saw it. But now that I have, I am no longer skeptical. Going forward, I will put the bulk of all the money earmarked for network storage into expanding the DataCore configuration as well as building in remote disaster recovery.”

Enterprise Scalability, Seamless Business Continuity, Data Resiliency and High Performance That Supports the ASHP Membership
ASHP has 35,000 individual members. The staff at ASHP itself comprises 210 people. All benefit from the uptime the virtualized environment provides, with DataCore at the heart of it all. “The DataCore Software stretch HA solution delivers enterprise scalability, seamless business continuity, data resiliency, and high performance for a cost-effective price tag when comparing it to traditional storage arrays,” states Aaron Schneider, principal and co-founder, Helixstorm, Inc. “The best part about it is that if ASHP lost a floor to power or critical disaster, the users would not experience an outage because of seamless I/O failover to the surviving node. You get high availability right out of the box just by deploying the virtual storage software in two locations.”

The New HA Configuration: DataCore + VMware Form an Industrial-Strength Production System with Fault-Tolerance
The two HA systems are stretched across two floors at ASHP using synchronous mirroring – thereby providing data redundancy. In total, the data pool – near-line and on-line – comprises sixty (60) terabytes at ASHP. Because ASHP publishes 500+ different publications, storage has always been a big requirement. Three years ago, ASHP became interested in the flexibility, ease-of-use, centralized management and reduced costs that DataCore’s software-based approach to managing and virtualizing their storage assets afforded. DataCore was not, however, ASHP’s first step into virtualization. Prior to DataCore, VMware was deployed at ASHP and the virtual machine (VM) farm has grown four-fold over five years.

“We designed and implemented a true highly available SAN solution,” states Eric Henry, CTO and co-founder, Helixstorm, Inc. “It’s a shared nothing environment, which means the disks do not share a backplane with the controllers like traditional arrays. ASHP has eliminated all single points of failure between the application servers and the storage controllers along with increasing the data resiliency by ‘stretching’ the SAN between two floors via redundant fiber channel connections for synchronous mirroring. You just can’t get any better business continuity than that!”

A Mission-Critical Solution and Configuration
Spencer extols the value-added utilities and features of SANmelody as well as its ease of use – chiefly its simplicity in terms of set-up and maintenance. “Trying to carve out a LUN on a big SAN is a true hassle,” explains Spencer. “Then trying to maintain and keep track of the different LUNs – just the maintenance of the configuration – is very complicated. Software-based SANmelody makes it simple. It is elegantly straightforward and simple in terms of removing labor-intensive aspects of SAN maintenance.”

VMworld 2010: DataCore Showcases Why Its Storage Virtualization and Stretch High-Availability Software Eliminates Business Outages that Jeopardize Cloud Computing

2010-09-02T09:50:00.003-04:00

At VMworld 2010 being held in San Francisco at the Moscone Center this week, DataCore is showcasing how fundamental software-based storage virtualization is to cloud computing.

The Mirazon Group's Chief Technical Architect Barry Martin states:

"Cloud computing platforms demand unprecedented uptime due to server and storage consolidation. DataCore's high-availability approach provides zero downtime. This is a tremendous advantage."

Storage Virtualization and Stretch HA Software for Non-stop Clouds
DataCore is blazing a trail by developing storage virtualization software that is a game-changer in terms of how resellers, solution providers as well as companies considering virtualization deployments manage and deploy virtualization projects and Clouds. The game-changer is that by deploying DataCore in a stretch high-availability (HA) configuration, DataCore delivers fault-tolerance that virtually eliminates storage-related outages that jeopardize business continuity and plague virtualization and consolidation initiatives.

"The DataCore Software stretch high-availability solution delivers seamless, enterprise-class business continuity, data resiliency, and high performance at an affordable price tag," states Aaron Schneider, principal and co-founder, Helixstorm, Inc. "Your applications, virtual servers and virtual desktops and VM migrations continue to run non-stop despite back-end storage changes, failures or reconfigurations. Bottom-line, you get a true high-availability, shared storage solution that automatically protects your data and your virtual machines right out-of-the box just by deploying the virtual storage software in two locations."

DataCore in the Cloud: Achieve the Highest Degree of Availability, Flexibility and Openness for Your Storage
Host.net knows intuitively that storage virtualization software is priority one. "Any cloud computing platform, just like any virtualization deployment, needs to have portable software as its building blocks," notes Jeffrey Slapp, vice president of virtualization services, Host.net. "We chose DataCore in the core design of our virtual private data center (vPDC) platform alongside VMware and Cisco because it delivers the very best storage virtualization component."

DataCore storage virtualization software is virtualizing the storage aspect of an all-virtual private data center (vPDC) platform developed by Host.net. Host.net delivers private cloud computing services for companies ranging from SMEs to large enterprises, utilizing a true software-based approach for the greatest flexibility. Check out the Case study here: Host.Net Case Study on Why Host.net Chose DataCore?

Contain Costs, Avoid Risks, Boost Productivity and Extend the Life of IT Investments with DataCore Software
Even though server and desktop virtualization and consolidation have garnered much of the virtualization press to date, now the real focus of concern is turning from how to virtualize and consolidate servers and desktops to how can we do more to mitigate the risk that results from consolidation. The key concerns being, "How do I insulate my business applications from storage related failures and disruptions that can severely impact virtual machine images and data that are key to running the business?" and "How good is my high-availability, disaster recovery and shared storage solutions?"

DataCore addresses these concerns with proven software deployed in thousands of customer sites around the world. DataCore's software virtualizes disks across pools of tiered storage devices enabling users to provision, share, reconfigure, migrate, replicate, expand or upgrade without slowdowns or downtime. Simply put, DataCore:

+Complements your storage and makes it more reliable, faster and better.

+Works across unlike & incompatible storage devices.

+Eliminates storage-related disruptions, bottlenecks and funding roadblocks that jeopardize virtualization and cloud deployments.

Visit DataCore Customers and Partners Onsite at VMworld 2010 [Booth #1607]
Numerous DataCore customers, including Host.net and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, who have deployed DataCore along with top DataCore solution providers will be onsite at DataCore's VMworld booth [#1607] and are available and standing by to answer questions, highlight best practices and explain the DataCore difference. DataCore solution providers and partners onsite include Grove Networks, HelixStorm, Red Level Networks, Sanity Solutions, The Mirazon Group and DataCore's value-add distributor Lifeboat Distribution.

DataCore partner Andy Judge, founder and CEO of Miami-based Grove Networks, encapsulates the value DataCore brings as follows, "DataCore storage virtualization software gives our clients cost savings and flexibility that is not achievable with storage hardware alone. It takes hardware to a higher level - serving as a hardware and productivity 'enhancer' that pays dividends over the short and long term."

VMworld 2010 Photos - DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Makes Clouds Happy!

2010-09-01T10:18:00.000-04:00

Stop by and Visit DataCore Booth 1607 at VMworld - DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Makes Clouds Happy.

2010-08-19T10:25:00.002-04:00

We look forward to seeing you at VMworld 2010.

Always Stays Up - Prevent storage-related disruptions. Keep your clouds running with DataCore's non-disruptive high-availability software.

Never Tied Down - Works across incompatible storage devices. Agile and not tied to specific storage arrays, vendors or devices which 'come and go' over time.

Highly Stretchable - Spans buildings and locations for 'Stretch HA' high-availability and recovery for VMs and data.

Lightning fast - Advanced Caching enables electronic memory speeds to accelerate your workloads and overcome I/O bottlenecks that impact virtual server and virtual desktop performance.

If you are attending VMworld and will be available on Sunday evening, please contact your local DataCore contact if you are available to attend the DataCore VMworld Welcome Reception at the Infusion Lounge in San Francisco from 7:00-10:00 PM.

DataCore virtualizes FusionIO SSDs, HP storage arrays into SAN for NIEDAX GROUP

2010-08-18T09:38:00.002-04:00

DataCore Case Study
DataCore Software has enabled the NIEDAX GROUP to combine traditional storage arrays, already installed, with new high-speed Solid State Disks (SSDs) to create a Storage Area Network (SAN) to meet their growing data center needs. DataCore virtualization software, combined with FusionIO NAND flash memory SSD technology, has achieved a new level of performance, high availability and energy efficiency, running in production at 100,000 IOPS and 600 MB/s (megabytes-per-second) of throughput, while consuming 15 Watts of energy versus 4000 Watts with hard disks alone.

The NIEDAX GROUP, an electrical installation manufacturer, needed to upgrade its systems to meet the growing demands of its ERP system which is based on Microsoft Dynamics. In addition they wanted to migrate their base of over 40 VMware VMs onto a more reliable SAN infrastructure. The major requirement, however, driven by the ERP requirements was for a new SAN storage solution that could deliver higher performance, capacity and availability than the existing hardware SAN.

NIEDAX utilized a consultancy firm to calculate and access its data requirements and found out that if it continued to use a traditional hardware SAN it would need to add and invest in at least another two storage systems, each with a minimum of 40 Fibre Channel disk drives, to achieve the required performance and high availability. This would be a significant investment and add to the ongoing space and energy costs – so alternatives were sought.

Having seen the value of using VMware for servers, NIEDAX wanted to know if there was virtualization solution that could do the same for their SAN storage. Additionally, it also had to meet the ERP performance requirements that were critical.

The company understood the value of virtualization – having evaluated the use of VMware ESX to virtualize a number of machines and realizing the benefits of going green by reducing power consumption and heating costs with servers. So, NIEDAX asked what they could do similarly for their storage. DataCore partner S&L Netzwerktechnik GmbH evaluated the requirements and then suggested and developed an alternative plan that could build on the company’s existing investment and reduce their ongoing costs.

The solution consisted of DataCore SANmelody 3.0 software providing virtualization, performance to accelerate caching software and high-availability mirroring across the pool of storage arrays and SSDs, integration of existing HP EVA Storage Array, integration and additional disks to the HP MSA Storage Arrays, and the addition of high-speed FusionIO SSDs with NAND flash memory to boost performance and lower overall energy requirements.

The DataCore SANmelody 3.0 virtualization software runs on standard servers and enables cost-effective high availability through synchronous mirroring to occur between the heterogeneous mix of SAN hardware. The DataCore solution facilitated NIEDAX GROUP using its existing hardware in combination with the required expansion and new SSDs in order to obtain higher performance and to grow capacity. In a similar manner to what VMware had done for their servers, DataCore virtualized and made their storage hardware more efficient and cost-effective.

“We are happy with our DataCore investment and we are benefiting from the many functional and financial benefits of putting it in use,” stated Oliver Bauer, Team Leader Administration / IT at NIEDAX GROUP. “The SAN now enables flexibility in administration, ease of expansion and the ability to dynamically allocate storage where and when we need it. DataCore caching accelerates overall performance and delivers a much higher data throughput. The software approach ensures the ease of transfer and the ability to use SAN-wide features on different hardware arrays and devices. Thus it is a very cost-effective way to mirror data. For our demanding ERP application, the fact that we could run FusionIO Solid State Disks under the DataCore virtualization and management solution was critical. We gained tremendous performance from adding FusionIO SSDs and overall we reduce energy and cooling costs.”

In terms of background, the demanding databases that support ERP systems, especially in manufacturing applications such as at the NIEDAX GROUP, often do not consume very large amounts of storage. Instead, however, they do require extremely high performance. With the Fusion IO NAND SSD flash memory technology in place, the NIEDAX GROUP was able to achieve 100,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) and rates of 600 MB/s with only 15 Watt power consumption, when running in production. By comparison, if they had used conventional Fibre Channel storage disks alone to achieve these levels of performance, they would have consumed somewhere around 4,000 Watts.

"With the implementation of DataCore‘s virtualization storage software we were able to meet all of the customers technical requirements,” said Alwin Kohl, consultant at S&L Netzwerktechnik GmbH. “In addition, with the combination of DataCore’s virtualization software and FusionIO‘s SSD NAND flash memory we were able to protect NIEDAX’s current investments in their SAN and extend it – making it green and significantly reducing long-term costs for our customer.”

Saginaw Intermediate School District Deploys a Flexible, Virtualized Cloud Infrastructure Using DataCore and VMware

2010-08-17T09:29:00.002-04:00

DataCore Software announced that Saginaw Intermediate School District (ISD) has replaced a legacy SAN and embraced virtualization in its centralized data center built on DataCore, VMware and Xiotech. Moreover, Saginaw ISD’s VMware- DataCore-based cloud for servers and storage serves as both a centralized data center and a hosting service for the majority of school districts in the county.
Download the Case Study on Saginaw VMware and DataCore Cloud Computing

The implementation at Saginaw ISD is one that incorporates DataCore for storage virtualization, VMware for server virtualization, and Xiotech as the hardware platform providing the actual storage. DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualization software powers two SANs that comprise DataCore software and Xiotech servers at two separate data centers, five miles apart, which are configured to mirror to each other. The data pool consists of 10 TBs on each end of the remote configuration.

"Our goal was to virtualize everything and have that supported by storage," states Jeff Johnson, Director of Technical Services, Saginaw Intermediate School District.

Saginaw ISD has deployed seven VMware ESX boxes in the VMware farm - all running on HP servers. These hosts service 35-40 VMs, which span everything from a utility machine running Windows XP - to five SQL servers. For replication purposes, the mirrored site has three ESX boxes that also make up the VMware cloud between the two sites. DataCore is at the heart of the virtualized infrastructure, powering the VMware cloud in Saginaw ISD’s virtual, private data center.
http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/07/27/saginaw-intermediate-school-district-deploys-a-flexible-virtualized-cloud-infrastructure-using-datacore-vmware-and-xiotech.aspx

Be Ready for Hurricane Season: LAN Infotech, Peak 10 and DataCore Host Business Continuity Workshop

2010-08-09T00:35:00.000-04:00

With hurricane season in South Florida well underway, three organizations, namely LAN Infotech, DataCore and Peak 10 partnered to host a comprehensive Business Continuity workshop on Tuesday, June 22, 2010.

Peak 10 hosted the event at their hardened data center in Fort Lauderdale.

LAN Infotech (http://www.laninfotech.com/) kicked off the event with a presentation explaining how to create a business continuity plan should disaster strike. Highlights of the presentation included how to plan the backup of your data and the processes of how to replicate your hardware, software and data. Michael Goldstein comments, “Most companies go out of business in 6 months once they have lost significant data. I recommend you see it as an investment or a competitive advantage rather than an added expense”.

Brooks Butler, Sales Director, DataCore Software, spoke about the significance of a solid, tested disaster recovery plan for companies in Florida. He also talked about how storage virtualization can make disaster recovery cost-effective, simple and practical and within the reach of any organization, no matter the size.

Peak 10's experts shared how a data center services company could aid in a company's business continuity plan by providing a hardened, scalable and reliable IT infrastructure. "During an emergency you don't want to worry about how you will communicate and deliver services to your customers. This is where a professional data center services company can lighten the load on an IT team," said Stefan Pittinger, the vice president and general manager of Peak 10 South Florida. "Peak 10's South Florida location was custom-built to be a data center and provide customers with a resilient infrastructure to support their growing businesses."
http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/74953/

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference Recap

2010-07-20T07:58:00.000-04:00

To see a recap of the Microsoft WPC which took place on July 11-15, go to http://digitalwpc.com/ . You’ll find videos & highlights of the event. Also check out http://rcpmag.com/Blogs/Scott-Bekker/2010/07/11-Takeaways-from-Microsoft-WPC.aspx , for a ‘top 11 takeaways’ list.

The event was very cloud centric – every keynote covered it. Private clouds, public clouds, it was all about the cloud. The good news is that clouds have a silver lining – they all need storage!

Here are some additional links:
https://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2010/jul10/07-12CloudComputingPR.mspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/07/12/realizing-the-promise-of-cloud-with-microsoft.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/wpc/videoGallery.aspx

With over 14K in attendance (9K were partners), DataCore had the opportunity to meet hundreds of folks across the spectrum and from around the world. You’ll see some videos posted shortly on our blogs.
P.S. Yes, that is Steve Ballmer in the picture at http://datacore-virtual-view.blogspot.com/2010/07/microsoft-worldwide-partner-conference.html

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010: Visit the DataCore Booth - Is that Steve Ballmer?

2010-07-13T18:37:00.000-04:00

DataCore is exhibiting this week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference – running July 11-15 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C. DataCore is located in Booth 739 at Microsoft WPC. For more, go to http://digitalwpc.com/ .

If you are attending the conference, please stop by and see how DataCore’s software-based virtualization solutions empower storage and serve as the third dimension to virtualization.

...and yes that is Steve Ballmer the CEO of Microsoft along with Carlos Carreras from DataCore.

Educational Institutions Benefit from Virtualization in 3 Dimensions

2010-07-09T08:20:00.000-04:00

Download Paper: http://www.dabcc.com/documentlibrary/file/Educational-Institutions-Benefit-from-Virtualization.pdf

Many Educational Institutions of all sizes are using DataCore storage virtualization software to complement their server and/or desktop virtualization projects, allowing them to overcome storage-related funding roadblocks, downtime and performance issues.

The needs of IT departments that support educational institutions (like yours) can suffer from the same shortfall that every other IT department can: a virtualization project that stops at servers and desktops and therefore misses an important component, your storage. Virtualizing your storage means that you can: avoid downtime, planned or unplanned; improve your storage devices’ performance; mix your current storage devices with newly purchased equipment; and, most importantly, stay within your budget.

http://www.dabcc.com/downloadfile.aspx?id=1016

Wimbledon 2010: The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club Takes Advantage of DataCore Storage Virtualization, Flexible Provisioning and Disaster Recovery

2010-07-02T10:26:00.000-04:00

“With DataCore’s SANsymphony solution running effectively, we have moved the Club’s infrastructure into the next layer of availability and flexibility. It really has provided a cost-effective alternative that added needed flexibility to our traditional hardware approach.” -Andrew Jones, IT Infrastructure & Security Analyst at All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club

DataCore Software has announced that the prestigious All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, host of the world’s most famous tennis tournament, Wimbledon, is using DataCore’s SANsymphony as its storage backbone.

As one of the world’s top sporting events, Wimbledon attracts the World’s top tennis stars, along with tens of thousands of spectators and millions of viewers via television and the Internet. As such, you would expect there is a complex IT and support infrastructure that supports an IT population that swells from 200 to 6,000 users across a three-week period.

Running everything to do with IT security and data integrity is Andrew Jones, IT Infrastructure & Security Analyst at All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, who is one of seven from the IT Department responsible for the platforms and infrastructure that ensure the smooth running of critical operations at the Club.

Jones noted, “Our initial requirement was to reduce the costs of deploying and running our CCTV system. The system had a very high storage requirement – between 16-20 TBs as a monthly load which we then intended to overwrite – and this was even at a heavily compressed rate.” Footage has also increased dramatically (for instance the new state-of-the-art Centre Court moving roof contains four cameras provide a birds-eye view on Centre Court proceedings). Andrew recognized that pools of data this large needed to be linked into the existing storage area network (SAN), but also recognized that this integration would provide management headaches and significant strain on the present SAN backbone of an IBM Fibre Channel SAN Storage 4300 solution. The IBM SAN was effective and provided great data mirroring, facilitating the VMware ESX server virtualization, but the Club realized that to accommodate this level of generated data, it required a cost-effective, flexible storage solution for CCTV that would have otherwise entailed the purchase of numerous additional trays of disks.

DataCore’s SANsymphony solution was identified as being able to address the Club’s present and future needs; including critically the mammoth expansion on the network usage throughout the run-up, duration and immediately following the Championship. Previously the distinct peaks throughout June and July each year had to be facilitated by additional hardware, which then was effectively unused for the remainder of the year. In addition, the Club took the opportunity to tie-in an effective Disaster Recovery solution (including the implementation of a full-scale, offsite DR emergency center).

The DataCore proposal showed a staggering £15,000 immediate capital savings outlay compared to the alternative of allocating more disks to cope with demand. With such compelling financial and business benefits, the business case was easy to justify to the Board.

The flexibility of the proposal prompted the Club to place an order for three SANsymphony nodes in late 2008, which run on IBM servers and complement IBM standard DS3400 storage arrays. Two were housed in the separate Wimbledon data centers in a mirrored environment for failover purposes and it was proposed that the third would be housed at the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton for full DR purposes.

One of the first noted effects of SANsymphony was the ease of administration. Previously the team had to manage five different interfaces at any one time, controlling everything from switches and storage arrays – to the iSCSI/FC management interfaces. With SANsymphony, Andrew noted, “Everything is now presented to the DataCore virtualization servers, which through a drag and drop interface control all aspects of the SAN. From an administration perspective there is a lot less to monitor, control and manage.”

Even without the full offsite DR plan being implemented, the Club has benefited from SANsymphony’s automatic failover configuration. Ongoing building works around Centre Court at the Club entailed the brief loss of fibre connectivity. The resultant effect on the SAN was negligible. SANsymphony’s auto-failover kicked in, simply switching the servers to the mirrored site and causing no loss of data or applications.

Full Scale DR in progress
The third SANsymphony server has been allocated to the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, some three miles away. This way, in the event of a dramatic loss of functionality (hosting the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament means that security at the Club is treated very seriously), the third SANsymphony can provide asynchronous mirroring and snapshotting. This means that almost instantly – in a full scale disaster – the entire system can be back up and running with only a five minute lag in data availability.

Additional growth is now easy to provide
SANsymphony’s scalable approach provides additional reassurance and room to grow. Adding more storage is now a question of simply purchasing additional licenses. Complex provisioning and rezoning of disks is a thing of the past. Moreover, as data storage grows and retained digital image sizes increase, the team is now confident that in the future they can instantly serve back large files such as video restore.

Andrew summarizes, “With DataCore’s SANsymphony solution running effectively, we have moved the Club’s infrastructure into the next layer of availability and flexibility. It really has provided a cost-effective alternative that added needed flexibility to our traditional hardware approach.”

DataCore Software Wins 2010 Storage Award for "Virtualization Product of the Year"

2010-07-01T09:10:00.000-04:00

DataCore Software Wins 2010 Storage Award for "Virtualization Product of the Year"
http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=15089

DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization software, has once again scooped one of the UK’s top storage awards by winning the Virtualization Product of the Year Award at the prestigious 2010 Storage Awards held last week at the Tower Hotel in London.

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, Northern Europe, DataCore Software, commented, “What DataCore’s SANmelody provides is an agile, virtual storage infrastructure that aligns with the other two key dimensions of virtualization. DataCore does for storage what VMware, Microsoft and Citrix do for servers and desktops. This is the first time this category has been represented at the awards and it illustrates just how important the software storage aspect is to server and desktop virtualization.”

Virtualization projects are 3-dimensional
Servers and desktops deserve much attention, but disks represent a disproportionately large share of recurring capital expenditures and a constant source of upheaval. By virtualizing disks across pools of tiered storage devices, DataCore software overcomes incompatibilities among different generations, models and manufacturers to maximize their combined value. As importantly, it eliminates storage-related disruptions, bottlenecks and funding roadblocks that jeopardize server and desktop virtualization projects. DataCore lets you provision, share, reconfigure, migrate, replicate, expand and upgrade storage without slowdowns or downtime. This helps contain costs, avoid risks, boost productivity and extend the life of IT investments.

In terms of how SANmelody delivers value, the Virtualization Product of the Year Award signifies the readers’ appreciation of how it easily and cost-effectively it converts physical Intel/AMD servers or virtual machines (VMs) into fully-capable, virtualization servers that are able to optimize, protect and manage storage over existing networks to fulfill the needs of application servers.

The Storage Awards were established in 2004 to recognize best-in-breed, easy to use solutions that make the working lives of storage and virtualization managers easier and more effective.

http://www.it-director.com/enterprise/technology/news_release.php?rel=18517

American Health Network: Fail-safe Tested DataCore supports Citrix environment

2010-06-27T08:38:00.002-04:00

http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/business/datacore-american-health-network

“We were intrigued by the ability to apply virtualization to our storage and the possibility of getting high-end data protection for the disk farms behind our Citrix infrastructure, without incurring the high costs generally associated with such functions or sacrificing security. If DataCore can save us $100,000 to $200,000 during this modernization, then we have really struck gold,” comments Stuart Donnelson, data centre server manager, American Health Network.

System Already Fail-safe Tested
DataCore proved particularly vital to AHN’s operations recently when system administrators noticed that AHN lost a major component of their storage infrastructure due to a firmware problems, yet the DataCore software automatically and non-disruptively failed over to its high-availability partner and kept the storage access 'live' to application servers. In fact according to Donnelson, “Not a single user or individual even noticed this failure – except for the few, select people in IT who were previously set up to monitor systems and receive such notices. “It was then that we said – this DataCore product is really pretty darn great.”

Right now, American Health Network has 1,400 users connected to 55 XenApp servers. They expect to grow to 100 servers by the time they get to the next version of their medical records software.

“Importantly, when it comes to XenServer, the core technologies that you are dependent on is the storage and the network,” summarized Donnelson. “Without those two things being very dynamic and flexible, you are essentially back to ground zero.”

Donnelson is quick to point out that DataCore has provided American Health Network with a stable and robust environment: “We have been nothing but pleased with DataCore. The DataCore software is rock-solid. We really haven’t had to do anything to it. And to me every time I don’t have to worry about a platform or a piece of technology, I sleep a little better every night.”

A Virtualization Environment Based on DataCore and Citrix That Meets Business Objectives

2010-06-21T08:48:00.000-04:00

“The virtual infrastructure that encompasses both server and storage virtualization has made my life easier for provisioning new servers and adding disk space,” comments Jeremy Hines, Manager of IS, Evans Fruit Company. “And it is the total virtualized environment, spanning Citrix Xen and SANmelody that makes this possible.”

Founded in 1949, Evans Fruit Company is the largest grower of Red Delicious apples in the state of Washington. The IT infrastructure relied upon to run this top fruit producer has recently gone through an upgrade, whereby DataCore partner Moose Logic has deployed two DataCore SANmelody, software-based, SANs to virtualize storage for Evans, while Citrix XenServers have virtualized the company’s servers. Prior to bringing in DataCore, Evans was reliant on direct-attached storage. Whereas they had some replication set up, it was all based on individual, point solutions for specific servers – Exchange, Payroll, etc

“We pulled all of our data from direct-attached storage over to the DataCore virtualized SAN and changed all of the servers to virtual servers running on Xen,” states Hines. “Now the Citrix XenServers point to the DataCore virtualized storage for both their operating system and all the necessary data storage. This DataCore-Citrix combination works really well.”

The DataCore SAN was implemented prior to virtualizing servers; however, both storage and server virtualization happened in the same month, as a “Step 1” and “Step 2” process. Now running on the highly-available virtual infrastructure are Microsoft Exchange and Windows Share (for Microsoft, Excel, etc.), as well as Payroll, which is a legacy, DOS-application that uses a Btrieve, flat file database.

Three Xen virtual hosts, meaning three physical servers, run all of the virtual machines. Two DataCore SANs running on SUN x4250s are physically separated, albeit in the same building, connected to each other via Ethernet. According to the IT staff, SANmelody makes it much easier to add storage to a machine, which is done by carving a new LUN (logical unit number) and then attaching it to the machine. Doing so immediately provides administrators with what amounts to a new hard drive, the size of which is easily increased. Notes Hines, “You carve out a new LUN, copy the data, and then drop the old LUN. It is pretty straightforward. We really like that in terms of ease-of-use.”

A virtualized, shared storage infrastructure made enormous sense to Hines and his team. Moreover, Hines stresses that thin-provisioning is a feature that enables Evans Fruit Company to forego buying large quantities of disk space up front, only to leave most of it empty.

The efficiency of virtual storage extends to the servers, which are much easier to manage in a virtualized environment. “Replacing a server on physical hardware can be quite the trick,” remarks Hines. “With virtualized servers, I can easily decide that I want to modify the servers or do upgrades. This can be done by live-migrating some servers from an existing node, powering down and old node, plugging in a new node, and transferring the master operations role to the new node. I can then bring the servers up on the new node, and finish replacing the whole cluster that way. This way, I have suddenly upgraded processor and possibly RAM, without having to do anything to make the servers work again.”

As far as the overall implementation itself, Hines lauds DataCore partner Moose Logic. “The virtualization implementation went as smoothly, as quickly and as easily as it did because Moose Logic is as good as they are at what they do,” he notes. “As far as the set-up and the planning of the deployment, they really know their stuff. I just can’t say enough good things about Moose Logic – I am definitely a fan.”

A Key Differentiator: DataCore Redundancy – High Availability Made Easy
Hines emphasizes that DataCore gives him peace of mind due to the synchronous mirroring capabilities – whereby redundancy is assured via two nodes in the same (or stretched, metro-clustered) location. Synchronous mirroring enables Evans Fruit Company to run DataCore storage virtualization software on two separate hosts. He notes that many entry-level SANs that possess two controllers actually have the controllers built into the same box. Two machines in the same casing do not offer the benefits of two separate hosts that can be stretched across a campus or metro region. He is equally impressed that, with DataCore, he can use industry-standard hard drives instead of using proprietary gear that plugs into a vendor’s hardware SAN.

“One of the great things about DataCore is that it is easy to have two copies of SANmelody running on different nodes so that our data is redundant,” notes Hines. “If we lose one node, we are OK. For our XenServers, we have a pool of XenServer hosts – so that any machine can be booted off of any host because they are all linked back to both nodes.”

Beyond this, Hines is equally pleased that DataCore also offers remote (asynchronous) replication, whereby a copy of the SAN can be supported at a very remote, offsite location. He stated that many of the entry-level SANs that Evans Fruit Company considered do not support asynchronous replication. “Having the ability to do asynchronous replication is a big deal for us – and something we will certainly embrace in the future,” comments Hines.

Software-based Storage Virtualization Wins the Day
DataCore’s storage virtualization approach is software-based, an approach shared by Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer towards server virtualization—a key differentiator that appealed to Evans Fruit Company.

“The fact that DataCore offers a software solution was highly appealing to us,” concludes Hines. “Obviously you need good server hardware to run it on, for the sake of reliability. DataCore’s software runs on Windows 2008 x64. It has all the features that a higher-end SAN would have, but is available for a smaller implementation.”

At Tech-Ed 2010 – Continuum Health Partners network (Beth Israel Medical Center, Roosevelt Hospital NY, etc.) Showcase Metro Clustering Using Microsoft and DataCore

2010-06-09T08:47:00.002-04:00

Onsite at the DataCore booth (#442), executives from Continuum Health Partners (“Continuum”) are presenting how DataCore virtualization software has been deployed to manage storage across metro clusters at Continuum, whereby it affords multi-site data protection and failover. The Continuum representatives (pictured below) include IT Director Jill Wojcik and Interim CIO Mark Moroses.

Continuum, like many health networks, was faced with the challenge of making their diverse storage infrastructure available around the clock, across multiple locations. To meet this challenge, DataCore’s SANsymphony™ storage virtualization software is running as metro clusters at two hospitals that are part of the Continuum Health Partners network (Beth Israel Medical Center and Roosevelt Hospital in New York), ensuring business continuity and overcoming downtime and unavailability of data.

“DataCore storage virtualization software is the key to the virtualization puzzle – offering the flexible storage virtualization dimension needed for any virtualization project – and serving as the perfect complement to server virtualization as well as the perfect enhancement to storage hardware,” noted Jill Wojcik, IT Director, Continuum Health Partners.

The bottom-line for this customer is that DataCore makes metro clusters possible. DataCore software runs at each hospital and communicates with its mirrored counterpart at the central data center, where the rest of the organizations’ data is also stored. Either of these installations can automatically fail-over to the other “hot site.”

Microsoft solutions running on the DataCore virtualized infrastructure at Continuum include: Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Cluster Servers (MSCSs). In total, DataCore SANsymphony software virtualizes and manages well over 200 TBs (collectively) for the various hospitals in the Continuum network. The environment supports a community of 14,000 users using over five-hundred (500) servers. For a more in-depth Case Study on this deployment, please visit: www.datacore.com/continuum .

Microsoft Tech-Ed 2010: DataCore Virtualization Software Takes Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft Cluster Servers to the 3rd Dimension

2010-06-07T13:17:00.001-04:00

DataCore Software Highlights Real-world DataCore + Microsoft Successes that Go Beyond Servers and Desktops to Virtualize Storage

NEW ORLEANS – June 7, 2010 – DataCore Software, today highlighted a number of customers that have deployed Microsoft solutions – including Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2 with Hyper-V™ and Microsoft Cluster Servers, among others – in conjunction with a virtualized storage infrastructure powered by DataCore Software.

A sampling of customers, ranging in size, using both DataCore and Microsoft in virtualization infrastructures includes health network Continuum Health Partners (www.datacor.com/continuum ), floral distributor Northwest Wholesale Florists (www.datacore.com/NWF ), and law firm McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams (www.datacore.com/mcnamee ). These companies are but a small sample of the tens of thousands of organizations worldwide using DataCore virtualization solutions.

At Tech-Ed 2010 – Metro Clustering Using Microsoft and DataCore
Onsite at the DataCore booth (#442), executives from Continuum Health Partners (“Continuum”) will be present to describe how DataCore virtualization software has been deployed to manage storage across metro clusters at Continuum, whereby it affords multi-site data protection and failover. The Continuum representatives present will include IT Director Jill Wojcik and Interim CIO Mark Moroses.

Continuum, like many health networks, was faced with the challenge of making their diverse storage infrastructure available around the clock, across multiple locations. To meet this challenge, DataCore’s SANsymphony™ storage virtualization software is running as metro clusters at two hospitals that are part of the Continuum Health Partners network (Beth Israel Medical Center and Roosevelt Hospital in New York), ensuring business continuity and overcoming downtime and unavailability of data.

“DataCore storage virtualization software is the key to the virtualization puzzle – offering the flexible storage virtualization dimension needed for any virtualization project – and serving as the perfect complement to server virtualization as well as the perfect enhancement to storage hardware,” noted Jill Wojcik, IT Director, Continuum Health Partners.

The bottom-line for this customer is that DataCore makes metro clusters possible. DataCore software runs at each hospital and communicates with its mirrored counterpart at the central data center, where the rest of the organizations’ data is also stored. Either of these installations can automatically fail-over to the other “hot site.”

Microsoft solutions running on the DataCore virtualized infrastructure at Continuum include: Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Cluster Servers (MSCSs). In total, DataCore SANsymphony software virtualizes and manages well over 200 TBs (collectively) for the various hospitals in the Continuum network. The environment supports a community of 14,000 users using over five-hundred (500) servers. For a more in-depth Case Study on this deployment, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/continuum .

DataCore and Microsoft Hyper-V Combine Server and Storage Virtualization with Live Migration Functionality
Based in Seattle, Washington, Northwest Wholesale Florists (NWF) is one of the oldest and most respected wholesalers of floral and floral-related products in the Northwest. According to Doug Otani, General Manager, Northwest Wholesale Florists, “Our IT environment is now comprised of a virtual infrastructure whereby DataCore is deployed in conjunction with a clustered Hyper-V system. With a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster, our company now has the ability to live migrate our virtual machines (VMs). Because these VMs can “live migrate” between the two hosts, the DataCore-Hyper-V virtual infrastructure minimizes and even eliminates downtime - when we need to do system maintenance.”

Scott Gorcester, President, Moose Logic, a solutions provider and DataCore partner in the Pacific Northwest, who assured the management team at NWF that the Windows 2008 Server with Hyper-V was the right way to go, added, “The bottom-line is that with the DataCore and Windows 2008 Server R2 with Hyper-V environment, NWF can weather multiple equipment failures and continue to run its business, which ultimately provides peace of mind because the virtual infrastructure avoids unnecessary downtime.”

FREE Whitepaper: Uninterrupted Access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) Synchronously Mirrored Across Metropolitan Hot Sites
In this paper you will learn how DataCore Software solves a longstanding stumbling block to clustered systems spread across metropolitan sites by providing uninterrupted access to the CSV despite the many technical and environmental conditions that conspire to disrupt it. Go to – www.datacore.com/metroclusters .

See DataCore at Tech-Ed – Booth 442
Visit DataCore Booth 442 at Microsoft Tech-Ed 2010 in New Orleans, June 7th – 10th.
• Learn how DataCore storage virtualization software is essential to your Microsoft Virtualization strategy.
• Find out how DataCore and a clustered Hyper-V system can successfully solve your downtime and high availability challenges.

New Paper: Virtualization – Did You Overlook Storage?

2010-06-03T08:28:00.000-04:00

“With the spotlight on server, desktop and application virtualization, it is easy to forget that your approach to data storage must also change.” Download: Virtualization – Did You Overlook Storage?

Visit DataCore Software at Microsoft Tech Ed in New Orleans, June 7 – 10.

2010-06-02T06:48:00.003-04:00

Virtualization projects are 3 dimensional. Server and desktop virtualization software address two of those dimensions. DataCore storage virtualization software is the 3rd dimension.

Visit DataCore Booth 442 at Microsoft Tech Ed North America in New Orleans, June 7 – 10.

· Learn how DataCore storage virtualization software is essential to your Microsoft Virtualization Strategy

· Find out how DataCore and a clustered Hyper-V system can successfully solve your downtime and high availability challenges
· Join thousands of customers worldwide and Go Virtual! with DataCore storage virtualization software

We look forward to seeing you! The DataCore Software Team

American Health Network Adds DataCore Storage Virtualization Software; Provides Business Continuity For Citrix Clients

2010-05-25T20:05:00.001-04:00

StorageNewsletter.com – http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/business/datacore-american-health-network

"We were intrigued by the ability to apply virtualization to our storage and the possibility of getting high-end data protection for the disk farms behind our Citrix infrastructure, without incurring the high costs generally associated with such functions or sacrificing security. If DataCore can save us $100,000 to $200,000 during this modernization, then we have really struck gold." - Stuart Donnelson, data center server manager, American Health Network.

Donnelson is quick to point out that DataCore has provided American Health Network with a stable and robust environment. "We have been nothing but pleased with DataCore. The DataCore software is rock-solid. We really haven't had to do anything to it. And to me every time I don't have to worry about a platform or a piece of technology, I sleep a little better every night."

American Health Network "Strikes Gold" With DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Providing Business Continuity For Citrix XenServer And XenApp Clients

American Health Network (AHN) has completed the 3rd part of their virtualization project by adding DataCore storage virtualization software to their Citrix environment. The integration has been tested in production and proven failsafe. "The success that people in the IT industry are having with virtualization speaks for itself," comments Stuart Donnelson, data center server manager, American Health Network. "In looking at the technologies we had available to accomplish this project, it was clear to us that Citrix XenServer was the right choice, since our primary concern was to virtualize XenApp systems and provide a secure, highly-available environment for our physicians. And the reason we chose DataCore for our virtual storage infrastructure came at the recommendation of Citrix and DataCore partner Hogan Consulting Group."

All of the physicians within American Health Network use a centralized medical record known as a EHR (Electronic Health Record) and billing software called NextGen. AHN publishes NextGen and the rest of the company's production applications through Citrix XenApp - sending these out to AHN's 80 sites throughout Indiana and Ohio. The focus of American Health Network's virtualization project was straightforward enough - to modernize their existing Citrix environment.

AHN's immediate requirements were to replace five-year old servers and in the process, take strategic advantage of server and storage virtualization software.

System Already Fail-safe Tested
DataCore proved particularly vital to AHN's operations recently when system administrators noticed that AHN lost a major component of their storage infrastructure due to a firmware problems, yet the DataCore software automatically and non-disruptively failed over to its high-availability partner and kept the storage access 'live' to application servers. In fact according to Donnelson, "Not a single user or individual even noticed this failure - except for the few, select people in IT who were previously set up to monitor systems and receive such notices. "It was then that we said - this DataCore product is really pretty darn great."

Right now, American Health Network has 1,400 users connected to 55 XenApp servers. They expect to grow to 100 servers by the time they get to the next version of their medical records software.

Solution resilience and Virtualization of Storage: What is DataCore High Availability with Synchronous Mirroring?

2010-05-22T08:33:00.000-04:00

Check out the posts on SANmelody Tunes:

High Availability - Where is your weakest link

It surprises me how often I see companies spending money (large amounts) on technology to make their core business applications resilient to infrastructure failure, but fail to build redundancy into all critical infrastructure components. See complete post and diagrams at:
http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2010/04/high-availability-where-is-your-weakest.html

So, what is DataCore High Availability with Synchronous Mirroring?
In simple terms, DataCore HA with Synchronous Mirroring protects and ensures data from ANY single component failure in the storage solution, including environmental, back-end disks, DataCore storage controllers and IO channels.

Not only that, but additional levels of redundancy can be achieved at each layer of the storage network....read the full post and examine a number of failure scenarios at:
http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2010/04/datacore-solution-resilience.html

Failure resilience scenario's
A Healthy Solution:
Two node configuration, redundant mirror channels, redundant disk channels, redundant app channels.
Can be geographically separated - Whether racks, rooms, building, states.

Citrix TV showcases latest videos from Synergy 2010 on DataCore; Virtualization is 3 Dimensional

2010-05-18T09:00:00.002-04:00

Storage Virtualization: A peek at the 3rd dimension

Virtualization projects are 3 dimensional. Server and desktop virtualization software address two of those dimensions. DataCore storage virtualization software comprises the 3rd dimension.
Dan Crowe of DataCore at Synergy 2010
http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/2180

Citrix TV talks to Bettye Grant from DataCore about the partnership with Citrix.
http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/2153

DataCore serves as the Third Dimension to Virtualization; Provide Storage Virtualization to Davis Hamilton Jackson & Associates and Northwest Assistance Ministries

2010-05-14T08:04:00.000-04:00

Synchronet Picks DataCore Software to Provide Storage Virtualization to Davis Hamilton Jackson & Associates and Northwest Assistance Ministries
http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=14363

“The bottom-line for our customers is that DataCore gives them a very cost-effective entrance into virtualization,” states Gordon Wingate, president, Synchronet. “Storage has always been the piece of the virtualization puzzle that makes virtualization a big investment to bite off for most companies. DataCore has changed that – making the storage aspect both cost-effective and highly reliable.”

“DataCore has been the solution to a substantial cost versus needs conundrum for DHJA,” comments Gary Montgomery, IT Director, Davis Hamilton Jackson & Associates. “The financial markets do not pause because Houston is facing a major storm or because our building happens to be on fire. We have to move when the market moves and downtime is simply not an option when you are managing billions of dollars of someone else’s money. DataCore and Synchronet have given us a cost effective means of meeting the needs of our clients without compromising the quality of our hardware, the integrity of our data, or our ability to provide business continuity under all conditions.”

“DataCore has provided the answer for us – dramatically increasing our backup ability as well as serving as a cornerstone of our virtualization environment and our continuity plan going forward,” explains Pampi Bartels, IT director, Northwest Assistance Ministries.

Citrix Synergy 2010: DataCore Virtualization Software Takes Citrix Projects to the 3rd Dimension; Going Beyond Servers and Desktops to Virtualize Storage

2010-05-13T09:29:00.001-04:00

DataCore Virtualization Software Takes Citrix Projects to the 3rd Dimension; Going Beyond Servers and Desktops to Virtualize Storage http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=14561

New York Hospitals Use DataCore Virtualization for their Storage

2010-05-11T09:12:00.000-04:00

For a more in-depth Case Study on Continuum Health Partners, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/continuum

New York hospitals use DataCore storage virtualization http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1510119,00.html
Beth Israel Medical Center and Roosevelt Hospital in New York City are using DataCore Software Corp.'s SANsymphony storage virtualization software to manage more than 200 TB for the two hospitals, which are part of the Continuum Health Partners network. The hospitals use SANsymphony to synchronously mirror PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) images to Continuum's data center in Secaucus, NJ.

DataCore Virtualization Ensures Uptime and Makes Metro Clusters Possible for Continuum Health Partners – One of the Largest Health Care Providers in the U.S.

http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/04/14/datacore-virtualization-ensures-uptime-and-makes-metro-clusters-possible-for-continuum-health-partners-one-of-the-largest-health-care-providers-in-the-u-s.aspx

DataCore virtualization software has been deployed in two metro clusters at Continuum Health Partners, Inc. (“Continuum”), whereby it affords multi-site data protection and failover. Continuum, like many health networks, was faced with the challenge of making their diverse storage infrastructure available around the clock, across multiple locations. “Our goal here was to deploy a system that would allow us to achieve high availability and business continuity for all of our clinical systems,” states Jill Wojcik, IT Director, Continuum Health Partners. “With DataCore in place and with hardware in two different locations, this has allowed us to make our mission-critical, clinical imaging – along with other systems – highly available.”

New White Paper: Metro Clusters and Virtualization; Uninterrupted Access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) Synchronously Mirrored Across Metropolitan Hot Sites

2010-05-10T12:09:00.001-04:00

Click to download:
WHITE PAPER: Uninterrupted Access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) Synchronously Mirrored Across Metropolitan Hot Sites

For an in-depth Case Study on Continuum Health Partners and Metro Clusters, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/continuum

Meet DataCore at Citrix Summit & Synergy 2010! Virtualize your Desktops and Virtualize Your Storage.

2010-05-09T10:03:00.001-04:00

Is your Virtualization plan 3-Dimensional? Server and desktop virtualization software address two of those dimensions. DataCore adds the 3rd dimension with virtualization software for your storage.

DataCore is a Citrix Ready partner and we invite you to visit our Booth 500 at Synergy. Stop by to learn why storage virtualization software is essential to your Citrix virtualization strategy and how you can start getting the most from your storage. With DataCore you’ll get the fullest use, the highest availability and fastest performance from your storage investments. You’ll also find it more economical to buy, provision, manage, protect and maintain your physical and virtual IT environment today and in the foreseeable future.

If you are interested in scheduling a meeting with DataCore at Summit or Synergy, please contact us by email to Sabrina.Gelado@DataCore.com or call 954-377-6021.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Also, don't miss the session featuring a DataCore partner and end-user!
Steve Greenberg, President of Thin Client Computing and Dustin Fennell, CIO of Scottsdale Community College speak on Desktop Virtualization. Click Here for details.

Sincerely,
The DataCore Software Team

DataCore serves as the Third Dimension to Virtualization

2010-05-01T09:34:00.002-04:00

Article: http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=14363
“The bottom-line for our customers is that DataCore gives them a very cost-effective entrance into virtualization,” states Gordon Wingate, president, Synchronet. “Storage has always been the piece of the virtualization puzzle that makes virtualization a big investment to bite off for most companies. DataCore has changed that – making the storage aspect both cost-effective and highly reliable.”

With DataCore storage virtualization software, customers gain storage hardware flexibility and improved disk space utilization. Importantly, DataCore users do not have to spend a lot of time and money ripping out and replacing perfectly good disks to set up a shared storage infrastructure. A case in point is Northwest Assistance Ministries (http://www.namonline.org/ ), a new DataCore and Synchronet customer.

Northwest Assistance Ministries
Northwest Assistance Ministries (NAM) is a one hundred-person staffed, community-based, non-profit organization that provides nine critical social services programs to the Houston area – offering a food bank, a clothing store, a women’s shelter, a children’s learning clinic, a basic human services program, meals on wheels, senior services, and more . Rather than each church in northwest Houston duplicating services when it comes to caring for the underprivileged, the churches formed NAM as a cooperative in which they could pool their resources to offer these necessary services collectively to roughly 120,000 households.

What prompted NAM to “go virtual” was the fact that the IT Department knew it needed to do a hardware refresh and was looking at a very cost-effective way to migrate to an infrastructure that was easier to manage so that they could cut operating costs. The IT team at NAM comments that prior to DataCore they were having persistent problems with their tape backup drive failures. The team was looking for a solution to provide consistent backups for all of the organization’s databases as well as local disk drive data.

“We are absolutely devoted to doing the most with the funds we are given,” explains Pampi Bartels, IT director, Northwest Assistance Ministries. “DataCore has provided the answer for us – dramatically increasing our backup ability as well as serving as a cornerstone of our virtualization environment and our continuity plan going forward.”

NAM has migrated physical servers to VMware – virtualizing multiple servers thus far onto a VMware host platform (an HP DL185), supported by a DataCore SAN that also runs on an HP DL185 server. Now the donor database, the volunteer database (both Blackbaud Raiser's Edge), the financial database (Blackbaud Financial Edge) and a client database all run on the virtualized infrastructure along with SQL server and Microsoft Office.

Davis Hamilton Jackson & Associates
DataCore storage virtualization software lets users provision, share, reconfigure, migrate, replicate, expand and upgrade storage without slowdowns or downtime. It eliminates storage-related disruptions, performance bottlenecks and funding roadblocks that jeopardize virtualization projects. A case in point is Davis Hamilton Jackson & Associates – “DHJA” – (www.dhja.com), another new DataCore and Synchronet customer. Houston-based DHJA is an institutional asset management firm founded in 1988. Along with many other Houston-based businesses, DHJA started to reassess its business continuity strategy after Hurricane Ike hit in September of 2008. Along with these continuity needs, the firm had a number of physical servers that were “end of life.” DHJA knew it needed the business continuity and it knew that it had to replace aging hardware.

The financial services firm had been introduced to virtualization and put a plan together that initially involved deploying a traditional, hardware-based storage area network (SAN). Once the economic downturn hit in full force, however, the firm could not cost-justify paying the high cost of a hardware-based SAN.

Business Continuity-driven: Meeting Business Objectives with DataCore
“Once we had engaged with DataCore as a partner and understood the power of portable, software-based, storage virtualization, we revisited the project with DHJA and informed them that we could do the entire virtualization project for the cost of what the hardware SAN alone would have cost,” explains Wingate. “The upshot is that we have been able to deploy a total virtualization deployment encompassing both virtualized servers using VMware as well as virtualized storage with DataCore for what a traditional hardware SAN would cost.”

Now DHJA has fully virtualized VMware servers running on two hosts. An HP DL185 server runs DataCore SANmelody as the SAN, serving up storage to those two VMware hosts. These virtualized servers reside in Synchronet’s data center, whereas one server still resides at DHJA’s main location for Active Directory domain control.

In total, eleven (11) physical servers have been reduced now to just four as a result of this virtualization initiative. The system is currently running 11 virtual machines (VMs) and supports a user community of 30 users. A 20 megabyte (MB) metro fiber connection connects DHJA to the data center.

Very shortly, this deployment will encompass VMware virtualization workstations too, which is currently in a pilot project. Once that goes live, wherever DHJA employees are working they will be able to access their systems through this fully virtualized, Synchronet-hosted IT infrastructure.

“DataCore has been the solution to a substantial cost versus needs conundrum for DHJA,” comments Gary Montgomery, IT Director, Davis Hamilton Jackson & Associates. “The financial markets do not pause because Houston is facing a major storm or because our building happens to be on fire. We have to move when the market moves and downtime is simply not an option when you are managing billions of dollars of someone else’s money. DataCore and Synchronet have given us a cost effective means of meeting the needs of our clients without compromising the quality of our hardware, the integrity of our data, or our ability to provide business continuity under all conditions.”

Virtualization’s Third Dimension – Storage Virtualization
“By switching over to the DataCore model the whole project became incredibly cost-effective,” concludes Wingate. “For the cost of just replacing a few servers, DHJA now has a full, high-availability infrastructure. DataCore has made embracing virtualization a very easy decision for this customer.”

DataCore storage virtualization software overcomes the major storage-related obstacles and upheaval that slow down or stop virtualization projects from getting off the ground or being successful when deploying a virtual infrastructure.

Link: DataCore Takes Virtualization to the 3rd Dimension.

Drive Down Server Virtualization’s Storage Costs

2010-04-13T08:28:00.000-04:00

http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/P3207/34p07/34p07.asp&guid=

As a potential first step to meeting shared SAN requirements across virtual servers, Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing at DataCore Software ( http://www.datacore.com/ ), suggests using portable storage virtualization software to make the disks inside the existing physical servers shareable. “The storage virtualization stack will run inside its own virtual machine (VM) or right on top of the hypervisor. From there, it first virtualizes formerly dedicated drives into shared iSCSI resources accessible from multiple VMs over a conventional LAN.”

...At the point where application workloads consume more than 75% of the physical server resources and the number of servers grows, DataCore’s Gonzalez advises moving the storage virtualization software into a pair of small dedicated servers that can handle the expanded capacity and I/O demands of the bigger environment. This, too, is straightforward, as the software licenses are fully portable from virtual to physical machines. Achieve further cost containment by relocating the original internal drives behind the storage virtualization nodes before any more storage is added.

...Many of the storage applications are dual mode, meaning they can reside in either a virtual machine or a dedicated physical host. DataCore’s Gonzalez believes this gives SMEs the best of both worlds. SMEs can start small, leveraging internal disks, and then as the production environment ramps up, they can move the storage to a dedicated system. Throughout that process, shared storage is available, but cost and complexity are kept to a minimum.

Key Points:
• Shared storage is critical for maximizing the benefits of server virtualization, and now it is also affordable for the small to midsized data center.
• Leveraging the server virtualization project itself either through the use of virtual machines or by repurposing legacy servers is a key element in driving out costs.
• Simplicity is as critical as reducing hard costs; SME personnel typically wear multiple hats, and integrating storage management into the virtual server management console reduces complexity significantly.

Virtualization's Third Dimension: Everything Channel Awards DataCore Software the 2010 Five-Star Partner Program Rating for Its Commitment to the Channel

2010-04-06T09:20:00.000-04:00

http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/03/31/virtualization-s-third-dimension-everything-channel-awards-datacore-software-the-2010-five-star-partner-rating-for-its-commitment-to-the-channel.aspx

DataCore Partner Program Recognized as Exceptional by Leading Channel Authority

DataCore Software, announced it has been recognized by Everything Channel as one of North America's top information technology (IT) vendors for its DataCore Partner Program. Additionally, the DataCore Partner Program was awarded a Five-Star rating, representative of an exceptional program.

DataCore Takes Virtualization to the Third Dimension
The Five-Star recognition is significant since DataCore has recently undergone a major push to make it easier for partners to reap the rewards and benefits of having DataCore storage virtualization solutions in their arsenal of product offerings. A new Solution Advisor Resource Center includes a wealth of sales training and positioning tools and materials to help resellers and solution advisors grow their virtualization business with DataCore's storage virtualization solutions - http://www.datacore.com/partner/resources/ .

"We are very pleased that Everything Channel has recognized DataCore as a Five-Star Partner Program winner," states Bill Ferara, director of channel sales for the Americas, DataCore Software. "The word is getting out that DataCore storage virtualization software overcomes the major storage-related obstacles and upheavals that slow down or stop virtualization projects from getting off the ground or being successful when deploying a virtual infrastructure. We are confident that resellers will profit from adding DataCore storage virtualization to its business portfolio, particularly since storage virtualization software has become more and more a strategic part of any virtualization deployment."

New DataCore and Hyper-V White Paper: Uninterrupted Access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) Synchronously Mirrored Across Metropolitan Hot Sites

2010-03-25T14:49:00.000-04:00

Failover Cluster support in Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V provides a powerful mechanism to minimize the effects of planned and unplanned server downtime. It coordinates live migrations and failover of workloads between servers through a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). The health of the cluster depends on maintaining continuous access to the CSV and the shared disk on which it resides.

In this paper: Uninterrupted Access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) Synchronously Mirrored Across Metropolitan Hot Sites

You will learn how DataCore Software solves a longstanding stumbling block to clustered systems spread across metropolitan sites by providing uninterrupted access to the CSV despite the many technical and environmental conditions that conspire to disrupt it.

DataCore Software's SANmelody Storage Virtualization Solution Wins 2010 Network Computing Award: Wins Storage Product of the Year

2010-03-18T08:38:00.000-04:00

DataCore Software's SANmelody Storage Virtualization Solution Wins 2010 Network Computing Award: Wins Storage Product of the Year

http://www.it-director.com/technology/data_mgmt/news_release.php?rel=16495

STORAGE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
WINNER: SANMELODY - DATACORE
Keith Joseph of Datacore accepted the Storage Product of the Year award

DataCore Software has once again scooped one of the UK's top networking awards by winning the Storage Product of the Year Award at the prestigious 2010 Network Computing Awards dinner held last week at the Tower Hotel in London. DataCore's SANmelodyTM, beat stiff category competition from finalists EMC, Compellent, LSI, CA, amongst others.

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, Northern Europe, DataCore Software, commented, "It's tremendous recognition from the UK's network managers and administrators who nominated and voted for SANmelody in force. In total, over 7000 votes were cast for the Awards, so it is a real honour in light of the stiff competition we were facing."

The Storage Product of the Year Award signifies the readers' appreciation of SANmelody and how it easily and cost-effectively it converts physical Intel/AMD servers or virtual machines (VMs) into fully-capable, virtual storage servers that are able to optimise, protect and manage storage over existing networks to fulfill the needs of application servers.

In addition, SANsymphonyTM, the enterprise version of SANmelody, came runner up as Data Centre Solution of the Year.

The Network Computing Awards were established in 2004 to recognise best-in-breed, easy to use solutions that make the working lives of network managers easier and more effective.

In SAN We Trust: Virginia's Dinwiddie County Government Deploys DataCore Storage Virtualization To Empower VMware; Sets A New Level Of Uptime For Critical Applications

2010-03-15T09:34:00.000-04:00

Computer Technology Review:
To read the complete story, please visit: http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=229:virtualization&id=8351:virginias-dinwiddie-county-government-deploys-datacore-storage-virtualization-to-empower-vmware&Itemid=2701140

DataCore Software has been deployed along with VMware vSphere for the government of Dinwiddie County in Virginia. "We were convinced that we needed a SAN to support our objective of server consolidation with VMware as well as our desire to achieve uptime," explained Norman Cohen, IT Director, Dinwiddie County Government. "We are so impressed with the new virtualization environment and DataCore's role as the virtual storage dimension to everything that we are actively encouraging other county governments in our state to do what we have done in our VMware-DataCore deployment."

"DataCore's storage virtualization software solution has allowed us to springboard into the world of virtualization – particularly enabling us to leverage the benefits of VMware," noted Cohen. "The most important component of our virtualization deployment has to do with virtualizing our disks with DataCore. We can now utilize disk space – no matter where those disks reside on campus. But storage virtualization does so much more than delivering shared storage by way of pooling disks. With DataCore, our IT environment has attained high-availability and fault-tolerance, by way of the remote replication that is made possible by the two DataCore-powered SANs."

Lifeboat Distribution Names DataCore Software "Beacon Partner of the Year" for 2009 Virtualization Business in the Americas

2010-03-08T14:10:00.000-05:00

http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/03/04/lifeboat-distribution-names-datacore-software-beacon-partner-of-the-year-for-2009-virtualization-business.aspx
Lifeboat Distribution has honored DataCore™, presenting the company with Lifeboat’s coveted “Beacon Partner of the Year” award for 2009. Lifeboat Distribution is an international specialty software distributor for virtualization and other technically sophisticated products.

“In selecting DataCore Software as Lifeboat’s Beacon Partner for 2009, we recognize the strategic value that DataCore’s storage virtualization software brings to our reseller partners,” said Dan Jamieson, vice president and general manager, Lifeboat Distribution. “Simply put, DataCore completes the three dimensions of virtualization – desktops, servers, and storage – that value-added resellers and hosting providers require for total virtual solutions.”

Taking Virtualization to the 3rd Dimension
This announcement follows on the heels of VMware Partner Exchange 2010 in which a cadre of resellers and solution providers championed DataCore Software as the 3rd dimension to their Virtualization practice – heralding DataCore™ storage virtualization software as strategic to their server virtualization and desktop virtualization business. Link: DataCore Takes Virtualization to the 3rd Dimension.

DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Delivers 100% Uptime to iomart hosting

2010-03-08T12:04:00.000-05:00

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=13727
iomart hosting, one of the UK's fastest growing managed services providers, is using DataCore's SANsymphony™ solution to provide the high-availability backbone for iomart's hosted customers.

Richard McMahon is the company's Infrastructure Manager responsible for all hardware and software deployments and services within the group. Twenty-five people operate from within iomart's five (5) state-of-the-art data centers located in London, Maidenhead, Glasgow, Nottingham and Leicester. All centers are linked via Dark Fibre or GigE connections.

"Our 100% uptime guarantee is not a marketing ploy - it's iomart's motto and mantra. We live and breathe it to facilitate our customers' business models. Therefore total high-availability is top of our priority list," he stated.

Recently, to help clients facilitate cloud computing, iomart launched a dedicated, virtualized server service, offering VMware dedicated servers capable of running multiple operating systems and applications from one physical server.

With these services in mind, the challenge that iomart faced was managing 30 terabytes (TBs) of storage across a heterogeneous environment in the City of London and Maidenhead data centers. To meet this objective, iomart approached DataCore, EMC, NetApp and 3PAR for proposed solutions. The suggested environment from DataCore involved using standard x86 hardware, highly specified due to their being of a hosting nature, each having 128GB RAM for caching, 4 Quad Core Processors and 8GB HBA's for connectivity. The disk that sat behind the server was classified as a low-end commodity disk. On top of this hardware, DataCore's SANsymphony solution was used in a mirrored SAN-SAN configuration to virtualize and manage the environment across a fibre link. In total, the solution was less than a one-third of the cost of the equivalent software and hardware alternative proposals.

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, DataCore Software picks up the story: "Cost savings were not the most important factor in iomart's search. What they really wanted was to achieve total control of the environment and have the ability to migrate customer data between storage systems and disk types and to easily replicate to remote sites. This they found with DataCore's SANsymphony."

Mirrored high-availability (HA) between sites over 20 miles away also provides iomart with enhanced disaster recover (DR) capabilities. In their configuration, the environment is distributed throughout several locations and ensures that they have a fully distributed, HA model but across DR geographies.

DataCore's synchronous replication functionality operates on a forced cache coherency model, based on a grid architecture that replicates the I/O block between the cache on each DataCore server before sending the acknowledgement to the application server and committing the data to disk. This overcomes the problems associated with clustered storage, while allowing iomart a greater degree of performance and flexibility.

McMahon concludes, "What we have achieved with SANsymphony is totally flexible, highly performing SAN-to-SAN mirroring, but straight out-of-the-box and backed by a decent price point. We can now move data 'at will' between vendors and seamlessly achieve LUN virtualisation across RAID arrays. No other solution offers us this."

http://www.myhostnews.com/2010/03/datacore-storage-virtualization-software-delivers-100-uptime-to-iomart-hosting/

Virtualization should be 3D: DataCore

2010-03-01T07:53:00.002-05:00

Virtualization should be 3D: DataCore
http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/virtualization-should-be-3d-datacore/140005-pg1

DataCore Software is evangelizing a virtualization strategy that entails server, desktop and storage concurrently from the outset to avoid performance bottlenecks. IDC’s Dave Pearson calls storage virtualization the “support” technology

Storage technology vendor DataCore Software Corp. is touting a three-dimensional approach to virtualization that encourages organizations to address server, desktop and storage concurrently from the outset when building a virtualized environment.

Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing with the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company, said focusing on just server and desktop at the beginning while neglecting storage will lead to negative consequences in the long run.

“Leaving out any one of those dimensions creates shortcomings and obstacles for that customer downstream,” said Gonzalez.

The number of dependencies on the storage infrastructure are magnified with server and desktop virtualization, said Gonzales. Specifically, performance bottlenecks occur when desktops and servers are consolidated and an increased number of inputs and outputs are driven against the storage pool, he explained.

Gonzalez said problems encountered down the road due to bad planning are one reason IT departments hesitate to move Tier 1 workloads to a virtual environment. “As soon as they scale out to actually meet the workload demand, that’s when they hit upon it … and that’s when people start to rethink whether they were doing the right thing by virtualizing,” said Gonzales.

According to Dave Pearson, senior analyst for storage at Toronto-based IDC Canada Ltd., storage virtualization is a relatively new, albeit key, component of virtualization. But he said the storage component is still a “support” technology led in most cases by server virtualization.

Pearson said storage virtualization forms part of what he calls "virtualization 3.0," where it’s not just about getting rid of physical machines and improving processes anymore. “It’s now part of optimizing the entire solution, making sure you’re really getting your money’s worth out of the hardware that you’re committing to these virtualization projects,” he said.

However, while Pearson agrees storage is a vital component of an organization’s virtualization strategy, he said such a 3D approach is hardly a novel idea to IT pros involved in large virtualization projects.

The 3D approach is “just really another tool that’s being added to the box of tools for virtualization,” said Pearson. Besides DataCore, Fremont, Calif.-based 3PAR Inc., among others, is in the market.

DataCore is relying on its community of resellers to evangelize this 3D virtualization approach because, according to Gonzales, customers still require a lot of education on the topic.

Gonzales said the “second phase of adoption” of virtualization to areas like business continuity, risk mitigation and disaster recovery, is beginning to shine a spotlight on storage. “All of those many machines and many users and many virtual workloads now become so centred on how the storage environment behaves and how well that virtual view of storage remains intact as you move through generations of hardware,” he said.

Pearson said storage virtualization is growing more quickly in importance than server virtualization, but not at the same level overall.

ACW Insights: How to add value to your virtual environments

http://www.blog.acw-group.com.sg/2010/02/how-to-add-value-to-your-virtual.html

Virtualization should be 3D: DataCore

http://www.theoutsourceblog.com/2010/02/virtualization-should-be-3d-datacore/

Video: Storage Virtualization and DataCore (Jon Toigo Interviews Ziya Aral)

2010-02-25T09:36:00.004-05:00

Video: Storage Virtualization and DataCore (Click on link below for Video Interview)
http://esj.com/articles/2010/02/16/video-datacore-storage-virt.aspx?sc_lang=en

Ziya Aral , CTO and co-founder of Ft. Lauderdale, FL-based storage virtualization software vendor, DataCore Software, offers an analysis of server and storage virtualization that blows the socks off of the marketspeak one usually hears or reads from industry analysts and vendors. That's because he has been part of the evolution of the technology over the past three decades.

Says Aral, in this interview recorded for the C-4 Summit Cyberspace Edition, virtualization was -- and is -- inevitable. He notes that embedding software on hardware became a costly and inefficient design choice years ago -- especially as hardware architecture became more standardized. Software complexity required its migration to a computer so it could be maintained and improved without requiring the costly replacement of the underlying hardware platform.

He argues that DataCore's key innovation was to conceive of the "storage application" as any other computer application, separating it from the storage hardware layer -- the costly and complex value-add array controller. The benefits of such abstracting storage services into a virtualization layer would be to deliver a rich set of services that could be applied across hardware without concern for the vendor badging of the hardware itself. Software and hardware could scale independently.

Performance and management also improve with virtualization, Aral notes, citing the success of DataCore customers for proof. To hear the rest of Aral's fascinating analysis, check out the C-4 Project (http://www.c4project.org/ ), where Aral is part of an on-going "summit in cyberspace."

Host.net combines DataCore Software, VMware and Cisco to provide new cloud computing platform

2010-02-18T00:11:00.001-05:00

Link: Host.net’s Cloud Computing – Enterprise Virtual Solutions Overview

Search Storage: Host.net combines DataCore Software, VMware and Cisco to provide new cloud computing platform

DataCore Software announced that its storage virtualization technology is helping to power a cloud computing platform by Host.net. The Host.net platform also includes VMware server virtualization and Cisco Nexus virtual network technologies. With this platform, private clouds can be built on virtual servers from VMware vSphere, Cisco and DataCore storage virtualization. Each virtualization technology comes with different capabilities such as converged networking from Cisco, synchronous mirroring from DataCore and the ability to quickly grow storage from VMware.
http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid190_gci1379793,00.html#

“We chose VMware, DataCore and Cisco in the core design of our cloud platform because each vendor delivers the very best virtualization component in their respective areas of competence,” said Jeffrey Slapp, VP of Virtualization Services for Host.net. “In three months’ time, dozens of companies have signed on as new customers because of the competitive advantages we have achieved with this combination of technologies and architecture.”

Cloud Agility through Hardware Independence

“It seems to me that any cloud computing platform needs to, at its very core, be based on portable software,” stated George Teixeira, President and CEO, DataCore Software. “Many clouds are being built from a hardware vendor-specific mindset. What is wrong with this picture? Well, the whole point of cloud computing is delivering cost-effective services to users – and that demands the highest degree of flexibility and openness, versus being boxed in to specific hardware platforms that may not adapt to changes over time. Aren’t clouds, after all, supposed to be soft and agile?”

Because the Host.net vPDC platform is comprised of software-based technologies, the company’s offering is not tied to any specific hardware. This avoids the problems associated with building clouds with a hardware provider sandwiched between virtual servers and virtual networks, enabling flexibility far beyond any cloud offering dependent on hardware vendors like IBM, EMC and NetApp. It also essentially eliminates any capital expenditure outlays from the customer.

“With or without a recession, companies are looking for cost-effective infrastructure solutions. A software-based cloud architecture helps answer that need,” said Lenny Chesal, Executive Vice President of Host.net. “This makes it a direct, positive impact on the customer’s bottom line as well as overall efficiency, enabling companies to do more with less.”

Link: Host.net’s Cloud Computing – Enterprise Virtual Solutions Overview

Stainless steel [North American Stainless] provider virtualizes with DataCore, VMware

2010-02-16T07:47:00.000-05:00

Search Storage - Stainless steel provider virtualizes with DataCore, VMware
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1379370,00.html

DataCore Software Corp. said North American Stainless in Ghent, Ky., is deploying its SANmelody storage virtualization software along with VMware vSphere to consolidate servers and storage.

VMware vSphere and DataCore Software's Storage Virtualization Are Making Both Disaster Recovery and "Hands Free" Maintenance Possible at One of North America's Largest Stainless Steel Manufacturers

http://www.datastorageconnection.com/article.mvc/North-American-Stainless-Deploys-DataCore-0001?VNETCOOKIE=NO
DataCore Software announced its SANmelody storage virtualization solution has been deployed along with VMware vSphere at one of the world's premiere providers of stainless steel - North American Stainless in Ghent, Kentucky. The company's IT department was trying to cope with an already increasing server spiral that encompassed ten (10) servers - all of which were over five years old. "We felt VMware would give us more options than simply adding more physical servers," stated Judy Pieper-Young, Manager - Information Systems, North American Stainless. "Now with VMware combined with DataCore, we can simply add more virtual machines on-the-fly and it only costs us a new server license - instead of having to purchase a whole new physical box."

A Virtual Infrastructure That Delivers Value as Promised
The IT landscape has gone a diet, so to speak, since the advent of virtualization at North American Stainless. Today, the company relies on four (4) physical servers and 35 virtual machines (VMs). The system supports 1,400 end-users.

"The appeal for us in going virtual in terms of servers was straightforward," explained Pieper-Young. "Knowing that we were facing a situation where we were in need of adding even more servers – we chose to embrace virtualization so that we could actually reduce the number of physical servers. But we did not want to stop at servers. In order to achieve a completely virtual infrastructure, we selected DataCore along with VMware to serve as a total virtual infrastructure spanning both servers and storage."

North American Stainless manufactures stainless steel 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. Therefore, beyond an initial desire to add more capacity by adding virtual storage to the mix was an overarching objective to have a disaster recovery plan in place. For disaster recovery, the company now has two SANmelody nodes that are mirrored so as to offer synchronous replication. "If for any reason we have a server crash, the virtual infrastructure enables us to get up and running within seconds," noted Pieper-Young.

The two, redundant SANmelody SANs that are mirrored are connected to redundant switches that are in turn connected to four VMware ESX hosts, to remove any single point of failure. Now North American Stainless has redundant, high-availability SANs that are synchronous – connected with a direct-attached fibre link. With this in place, the company can withstand a full hardware failure at a server level, at a switch level as well as a SAN level and still be up and running, in production. Other than a facility failure, North American Stainless now has 100% uptime.

The IT Landscape – Virtualization Powers Mission-Critical Applications

The virtual infrastructure powered by VMware and DataCore supports the company's Oracle ERP system servers (including payroll), several SQL servers, Blackberry® server, fax servers, print servers as well as user data. The ability to add VMs "on-the-fly" was a primary objective in going virtual. This is made possible through the combination of VMware vSphere's live migration functionality and the DataCore SAN. With VMware and DataCore run in tandem, the IT team at North American Stainless is able to do testing on applications and do so in way that the any testing procedures for new applications are segmented from the overall system. This is accomplished with DataCore SANmelody serving as a complete virtual storage infrastructure and storage management system – whereby multiple terabytes of storage can be both partitioned in units for a specific use as well as aggregated for general consumption.

Both SANmelody nodes are running on IBM 3650 servers as are the VMs on the two additional servers.

"When we first engaged with North American Stainless, they had isolated, stand-alone servers with local storage on each server – and this was growing," explained Pat Sigg, Regional Vice President of Sales at Software Information Systems (SIS), a DataCore partner. "What was needed was a storage sub-system with the flexibility and high-availability needed to support a virtual environment."

SIS wanted to deploy VMware and was convinced that to get the most out of the virtual machines running on the virtual infrastructure that shared storage was needed as the underpinning for everything. SIS saw the implementation at North American Stainless as an integrated approach that was "all in" in terms of a fully virtual environment – servers and storage- for its customer.

"It was clear to us that the storage sub-system had to provide extra functionality and it was also clear that any of the hardware-based, fibre appliances were going to be well into six figures in price," added Sigg. "This was not the path that we or the customer sought to take. Instead, what we found in DataCore's portable, software-based, SANmelody SAN solution was that it offered all the functionality needed – including high availability and zero points of failure – all at reasonable cost. For the price point, what you get in functionality with DataCore convinced us and sold the customer."

Virtualization Taking Off – Virtual Infrastructure Takes Hold in Other Departments
In North American Stainless' Level II area, the manufacturer's machinery is hooked to devices – such as product lifecycle management (PLM) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) – that serve as IT systems which do nothing short of run the production at the plant. This department is also putting in an entirely virtual infrastructure as well – also encompassing both servers and storage. These truly mission-critical, manufacturing-centric, IT systems will now run on the VMware-DataCore virtual infrastructure too.

Creating DMZs in the Cloud

2010-02-15T12:18:00.000-05:00

http://www.ctoedge.com/content/creating-dmzs-cloud
One of the things being heavily pitched toward anybody building a cloud computing service these days is the value of highly integrated servers. The thinking goes that the higher the level of integration, the lower the cost to maintain and run the system.

But there is another argument that speaks to the need to isolate specific sets of services inside a larger cloud computing service. For example, if you go with an integrated server, you pretty much have to move in lockstep with that vendor for all your servers, networking and storage. If there is a major advance in any one of these areas, a chief technologist running a cloud computing service on an integrated server might not be able to take advantage of it until the vendor upgrades the entire system. Given the long-term nature of cloud computing services and the level of cut-throat competition, that might not be the strategic way to go.

Instead, vendors such as DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization software, argue that cloud computing services should, for example, isolate services like storage using a software-only approach that makes it realtively easy to create pools of storage by mixing and matching storage hardware from multiple vendors. This approach helps creates a “demilitarized zone” between technologies that allow IT organizations to continue to leverage multile vendors to take advantage of ongoing advances in technology.

According to Augie Gonzalez, DataCore Software director of product marketing, this approach also provides the ability to leverage inexpensive cache on the server to drive performance, versus relying on limited amounts of expensive cache on the storage arrays. Gonzalez also points out that as software offering, DataCore can offer the same level of integration with cloud computing offerings such as Cisco Nexus virtual switches and VMware’s vSphere management software.

So all things being equal, the question becomes is it worth mortgaging the future to gain some short term gains in system administration that can probably be achieved anyway without locking in the hardware?

VMware Solution Providers herald DataCore Software as the 3rd dimension to their virtualization practice

2010-02-15T11:41:00.007-05:00

DataCore™ storage virtualization software deemed strategic to their Server Virtualisation and Desktop Virtualization business

As the doors closed on last weeks VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, DataCore Software assessed the strategic value that its storage virtualization software brings to VMware solution providers. Simply put, DataCore fulfills the 3rd dimension required by VMware value- added resellers (VARs), service and hosting providers to complete their virtualization offerings. “Failing to include storage virtualization software to address IT storage challenges results in an incomplete, two-dimensional solution,” comments Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing, DataCore Software. “Virtualization solutions must concurrently address server, desktop and storage challenges presented by the many variations of hardware that get deployed over the course of multiple years.”

With DataCore storage virtualization software, VMware customers gain storage hardware flexibility and improved disk space utilization. Importantly, VMware users do not have to spend a lot of time and money ripping out and replacing perfectly good disks to set up a shared storage infrastructure. DataCore Software enables solution providers to easily repurpose their customers’ existing hardware into a highly-available storage network that supports VMware features like VMotion and remote site disaster recovery (DR) – perfectly complementing their virtual servers and desktops with virtualised storage.

Testimonials from VMware VARs

The following testimonials reveal just how important DataCore is to meeting customer needs in virtual IT infrastructures and cloud initiatives.

“Virtualization is a 3-dimensional puzzle,” states Pat Sigg, Regional Vice President of Sales at Software Information Systems (SIS), a VMware partner. “What we consistently find when engaging in virtualisation deployments is – first and foremost – the need to virtualize storage resources with the flexibility, high-availability and performance to support numerous virtual servers and desktops without single points of failure. It is this 3rd dimension to virtualization – the storage virtualization dimension – that DataCore brings to our virtualization practice.”

“As a VMware partner specializing in virtualization solutions, what we have found is that to really get the magic out of VMware, you need DataCore storage virtualization – be that hardware independence as well as just an astonishing degree of flexibility – that combine to literally pave the way for each of our virtualization deployments to perform as promised,” comments Chuck Renfro, CEO, ThinkingCap Technologies, LLC. “The bottom-line is that DataCore is vital in enabling our virtualization customers to meet their business objectives – chief among which is realizing high-availability.”

“Virtualization projects are three-dimensional,” explains Andy Judge, Founder and CEO of Grove Networks, a VMware Enterprise Partner. “Server and desktop virtualization software address two of those dimensions. DataCore storage virtualization software is as important, financially and operationally, to a successful virtual infrastructure project as are the server and desktop virtualization aspects.”

Virtualizing Storage in the Cloud: “Priority One”

Any cloud computing platform, just like any virtualization deployment, needs to have portable software as its building blocks – providing the highest degree of flexibility and openness. DataCore partner Host.net knows intuitively that storage virtualization software is priority one.

“We chose DataCore in the core design of our virtual private data center (vPDC) platform alongside VMware and Cisco because it delivers the very best storage virtualization component,” notes Jeffrey Slapp, Vice President of Virtualization Services for Host.net. “Virtualizing the storage is paramount to us for two reasons. First, we required a solution that would allow us to expand storage resources rapidly and non-disruptively to meet increasing demand. Second, we needed a solution that could leverage various hardware storage platforms simultaneously in order to keep pace with technology changes. Accomplishing both allows us to provide high-end enterprise-level services while remaining agile and cost-effective.”

VMware Partner Exchange 2010 ran from February 8 -11 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.

HP confirms Hyper-V LeftHand appliance in 2011; DataCore already shipping Virtual SAN Appliances

2010-02-15T10:33:00.002-05:00

HP confirms Hyper-V LeftHand appliance in 2011, DataCore already shipping Virtual SAN Appliances
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/15/hp_lhn_hyper_v/
HP is going to have VSA running under Hyper-V within a year.
... DataCore already provides its SANmelody software as a Hyper-V-based software appliance. Darth Redmond will be encouraging other companies to follow suit, citing HP as evidence that the storage force really is with Hyper-V.

To download DataCore's Virtual SAN Appliance, please visit:
http://www.datacore.com/VSAppliance/

DataCore adds support for logical volumes up to 1 PB and the Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) standard

2010-02-11T08:14:00.000-05:00

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/datacore-adds-support-for-logical-volumes-up-to-1-pb/

DataCore kicked off 2010 with updates to its SANSymphony and SANMelody storage virtualization software, adding support for logical volumes up to 1 PB and the Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) standard...

DataCore director of product marketing Augie Gonzalez said that as with last year’s 1 TB “mega-cache” support, the logical limit is beyond where most customers will be looking to stretch today. But the previous 2 TB limit had grown impractical for making RAID sets out of the latest 1 TB and 2 TB SATA disks.

“The logical volume expansion and thin provisioning allows users to say, ‘I don’t care how big the volume will be in the future’,” Gonzalez said. “Rather than defining LUNs up front and then having to make changes later, you can immediately set up a large volume and expand the storage with no applicvation or infrastructure changes.”

A DataCore service provider customers says adding ALUA support will improve management in his storage environment. Joseph Stedler, director of data center engineering for cloud computing and managed IT service provider OS33, said he uses DataCore’s SANSymphony software to host back-end storage for his SMB customers. Right now SANSymphony is running on IBM System x servers in front of IBM DS3400 arrays and Xiotech Emprise 5000 storage devices, mirroring between redundant sets of the tiered hardware. The logical volume expansion will be especially helpful in cutting down on backup administration overhead, Stedler said.

“With two terabyte volumes, we had to present things in 2 terabyte chunks to our Veeam [backup] server,” he said. “With a larger primary volume we could have fewer backup targets to manage.”

Stedler said the addition of ALUA support will be even more important for creating multipath I/O in OS33’s VMware environment. “ALUA solves a major pain for everybody running DataCore with VMware,” he said. “The way VMware understood it before was active-passive only. DataCore was able to do active-active failover but with VMware you’d have to run multipathing with the most recently used path. The new release is fully compliant with ALUA, so VMware can view it as active-active.”

Stedler said he’s looking forward to the addition of more granular scripting capabilities for the software in future releases.

DataCore Storage Virtualization Now Super-Sizes Virtual Disks to 1 PB

2010-01-07T08:10:00.001-05:00

DataCore Increases Virtual Disk Size to 1 PB
http://www.channelprosmb.com/article/15739/DataCore-Increases-Virtual-Disk-Size-to-1-PB/

Twitter: DataCore Software Super-Sizes Virtual Disks with Its Latest Storage:
http://twitter.com/DataCore/status/7163944766

Virtual disk capacity leaps in response to greater storage demands http://www.prosecurityzone.com/Customisation/News/IT_Security/Backup_Data_Recovery_and_Disaster_Recovery/Virtual_disk_capacity_leaps_in_response_to_greater_storage_demands.asp

DataCore Software Super-Sizes Virtual Disks DataCore Software Super-Sizes Virtual Disks with Its Latest Storage Virtualisation Software Release
http://www.it-director.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=15147

DataCore Software Super-Sizes Virtual Disks with Storage Virtualization
http://au.sys-con.com/node/1232015

DABCC: DataCore Super-Sizes Virtual Disks
http://www.dabcc.com/channel.aspx?id=208

2 TB max VVol size ... busted!
http://www.datacore.com/forum/thread/785/re-2-tb-max-vvol-size-busted-.aspx#post787
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: StorageNewsletter [mailto:maleval@StorageNewsletter.com]
Subject: DataCore's Virtual Disks Up to 1PB

THE TOP NEWS OF THE DAY
DataCore Super-Sizes Virtual Disks (Up to 1PB)
With its latest storage virtualization software
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/software/datacore-super-sizes-virtual-disks
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DataCore increases size of virtual disks - From two terabytes to one petabyte
http://www.cbronline.com/news/datacore_increases_size_of_virtual_disks_091229

DataCore boosts storage virtualization options
http://hosting.onestopclick.com/technology_news/datacore-boosts-storage-virtualization-options_19533397.htm

Computer Technology Review: DataCore increases virtual disks with latest storage virtualization software release
http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8127:datacore-increases-virtual-disks-with-latest-storage-virtualization-software-release&catid=231:storage-software&Itemid=2701181

Recent DataCore Tweets:
http://tweetmeme.com/search?q=datacore

New Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) Option for DataCore SANmelody targets ROBOs and Remote Offices

2010-01-05T11:58:00.002-05:00

See ASR description:
http://www.datacore.com/downloads/ASRbackgrounder.pdf

DataCore Software Adds Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) Option for SANmelody
http://www.channelprosmb.com/article/15736/DataCore-Software-Adds-Advanced-Site-Recovery-ASR-Option-for-SANmelody/

ASR was first developed around SANsymphony to enable larger data centers and organizations to simplify remote site recovery while leveraging readily available IT assets between different sites. In releasing ASR for SANmelody, DataCore is providing a more cost-effective solution for smaller businesses and remote site deployments.

ASR makes distributed disaster recovery (D-DR) flexibility more practical for all organizations, thereby opening the field of users to smaller businesses. ASR can be tailored to whatever a company's cost structure allows.

"With ASR, DataCore has developed a distributed and cost-effective way to have IT assets at remote offices and branch offices (ROBOs) take over for the main data center when the central machines are unable to meet processing obligations," explains Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing, DataCore Software. "Whether that is during planned facility outage or an unexpected disaster makes no difference. There are major cost savings from repurposing ROBO IT assets and personnel for business continuity."

Gonzalez also says DataCore's approach has an added benefit: regular disaster recovery tests and refresher training can be performed at the branch location during periods of slow activity, while the main data center processing continues undisturbed."

ASR for SANmelody builds on DataCore's universal storage virtualization software to move IT operations from a central site to one (or more) distributed contingency locations--and back again. While SANmelody ASR can be used between two sites, the far more likely scenario is a "hub and spoke" model in which a SANsymphony ASR license will be used in the central site, with connections to multiple remote offices/branch offices running SANmelody ASR.

This solution allows organizations to spread DR responsibilities across several smaller sites. Additionally, the solution makes no distinction between physical and virtual servers, unifying their DR operations in a common, automated process. And, ASR for SANmelody does not depend on duplicating equipment offsite, such as disk arrays and specialized networking gear.

Desktop and Storage Virtualization are the next "Big Wave"

2010-01-04T10:46:00.004-05:00

David Marshall from Infoworld/VMblog has posted a series of interviews on 2010 predictions.
DataCore and 2 DataCore solution providers - Helixstorm and Mirazon Group share their outlook on 2010 trends. Read the full article at:

http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/12/31/desktop-and-storage-virtualization-are-the-next-big-wave.aspx

Desktop and Storage Virtualization are the next "big wave"

DataCore Software's CEO George Teixeira shares his viewpoint on 2010. Plus, representatives from two DataCore solution advisor partners weigh in on what they see coming in the virtualization space in 2010.

George Teixeira - President & CEO of DataCore Software

Prediction: Consolidation was the driver of the first wave of virtualization. In 2010, both storage and desktop virtualization will go mainstream.

Prediction: The growing cost disparity between Hypervisors and traditional SANs and shared storage arrays, needed to support virtual infrastructures, will slow down the pace of virtualization adoption.

Prediction: Microsoft Hyper-V has created another wave - the whole Microsoft world -that is embracing virtualization and this trend will continue to accelerate in 2010.

Prediction: This will be the year of virtual desktop proof of concepts (POCs) and pilots; greatest challenge to success is overcoming the cost of storage and the ability to scale storage effectively.

Prediction: Because virtual servers are starting to become a commodity - this puts even more importance on getting the storage piece right.

Montreal-based law firm Stikeman Elliott LLP Uses a DataCore Virtual storage area network to meet backup and disaster recovery needs

2009-12-30T09:36:00.002-05:00

Excerpts from Search Server Virtualization article: http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1373949_mem1,00.html?ShortReg=1&mboxConv=searchServerVirtualization_RegActivate_Submit&

"With about 3 TB of virtualized server data and another 2 TB of email and database data that needed to be backed up daily, Montreal-based law firm Stikeman Elliott LLP faced a growing problem. Virtual storage area network backups were taking 24 to 48 hours, and not all of the data was getting backed up properly."

What was needed, said Marco Magini, a network system specialist for the firm, was an almost instantaneous backup system. The firm chose DataCore Software Corp.'s SANmelody software, a virtual storage area network (SAN)...

SANmelody solved several other IT challenges, including disaster recovery shortcomings and high-availability needs for virtualized servers, Magini said. "I was not looking for storage virtualization. We had plenty of storage to fill our needs." But once the application was installed, we uncovered a host of new unexpected capabilities, he said.

...The 1,200-employee law firm is using the product in its Montreal headquarters and will roll it out to six other offices around the globe.

Magini said he's still finding new ways to get performance gains using SANmelody. "We started small," he said. "It's not that you don't have faith in the products, but when you are moving business-critical data, you want to be sure it can handle it."

SANmelody also allowed the IT department to make use of all types of unused legacy disks. When added to the system, SANmelody's management system views them as one massive disk for storage. That allowed Magini to reuse about 50 old 72 GB drives that were sitting on a shelf.

Mark Bowker, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., said it's not unusual for a planned server or storage virtualization project to affect other IT needs. "People typically begin projects for something as simple as server consolidation or resource utilization," Bowker said. "But they find other infrastructure is needed. Once they start rolling out virtualization, they find there are other benefits to be had," including disaster recovery and improved backup capabilities.

Happy Holidays from DataCore Software, Check out the latest PSP3 release for SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0

2009-12-22T09:34:00.000-05:00

SANsymphony 7.0 PSP3 & SANmelody 3.0 PSP3 are released.
For more info, please check the DataCore support site.
http://datacore.com/support/support_home.asp

For a Blogger's view of SANmelody 3.0 PSP3, check out the SANmelody Tune's site.
http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2009/12/psp3-for-sanmelody-30-release.html

Host.net a BroadbandOne Company offers Cloud Computing Solution - VMware, DataCore and Cisco - vServers, vStorage and vNetworks

2009-12-16T08:34:00.001-05:00

Check out the new Cloud solution offering from Host.net that features DataCore Software for virtual storage.

Virtual Servers & Virtual Storage for Enterprise Scalability: http://www.host.net/Uploads/HostnetCloudInsertV10.pdf

Deploying DataCore Storage Virtualization Software And Microsoft Hyper-V

2009-12-14T08:31:00.001-05:00

Deploying DataCore Storage Virtualization Software And Microsoft Hyper-V
http://www.datastorageconnection.com/article.mvc/The-Sweet-Smell-Of-Server-And-Storage-0001

"What we have found with the DataCore and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 + Hyper-V combination is a virtual infrastructure that is redundant, reliable, flexible and expandable," stated Mary Toupin, Office Manager, Northwest Wholesale Florists. "Moreover, the redundant storage with DataCore complements the redundancy built into the VM system. We are very pleased with the way the system has performed."

A Virtual Infrastructure that Combines Servers and Storage – with Live Migration Functionality
As their trusted technology advisor, NWF relies on the IT counsel and direction from Moose Logic. Moose Logic's recommendation was that what it needed was a more resilient, highly-available system leveraging virtualization and storage area network (SAN) technology, while at the same time improving the performance of NWF's key applications – Macola, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Office as well as a few other applications to support point of sale, credit card swipes, etc. The objective was also to improve data protection for NWF – through a backup solution and other measures.

According to Doug Otani, General Manager, Northwest Wholesale Florists, "Our IT environment is now comprised of a virtual infrastructure whereby DataCore SANmelody is deployed in conjunction with a clustered Hyper-V system. With a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster, our company now has the ability to live migrate our virtual machines (VMs). Because these VMs can ‘live migrate' between the two hosts, the DataCore-Hyper-V virtual infrastructure minimizes and even eliminates downtime – when we need to do system maintenance."

The original desire to upgrade its IT infrastructure was driven by the fact that NWF was moving to a new warehouse – and needed to do that while running operations from the existing warehouse. NWF looked to Moose Logic to design a new IT infrastructure system and provide a smooth transition. In this case, Moose Logic thought that there were a number of benefits in deploying Hyper-V, even before the release of Windows Server 2008 R2. However, after the R2 release of Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V has been infused with live migration functionality – which was not in Hyper-V prior to R2. "As a reseller, the combination of DataCore with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V gives our firm and this customer a lot of flexibility," commented Scott Gorcester, President, Moose Logic, a solutions provider and DataCore partner in the Pacific Northwest. "Using DataCore storage virtualization combined with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V in joint configurations is already proving to be a great combination for both resellers and users alike."

Re-purposing Existing Hardware and Deploying Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V

Knowing that there were two sound pieces of hardware that could be re-purposed, Moose Logic recommended a solution based on Windows Server 2008 R2 running Hyper-V. The firm built the customer two Hyper-V servers with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, running in a failover cluster. Coupled with the clustered pair of Hyper-V servers is a pair of DataCore SANmelody servers – one on an existing HP DL 380 G5 that was repurposed after adding new disk drives and more memory and the other on a new HP DL 380 G5 server to match the existing one. These G5 servers became the SAN nodes. This system went live at the customer's new location on October 1, 2009. Thirty-plus (30+) users benefit from the system daily.

Delivering Peace of Mind and Avoiding Unnecessary Downtime

"The bottom-line is that with the DataCore and Windows 2008 Server R2 with Hyper-V environment, NWF can weather multiple equipment failures and continue to run its business, which ultimately provides peace of mind because the virtual infrastructure avoids unnecessary downtime."

Barren County Schools Deploys DataCore Storage Virtualization to Support VMware and Provide a Complete Virtual Environment

2009-12-07T08:02:00.000-05:00

http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/news-full.php?id=13668&result=datacore

"This is not one of those products where we were sold more than we bought," concluded Gumm. "With DataCore SANmelody, we bought more than we were sold. We are getting far more out of it than I thought we would, which is a wonderful thing."

"The biggest benefit for us was realizing a virtualized data infrastructure," stated Steve Gumm, IT director, Barren County Schools. "Because we adopted storage virtualization, we now have a front-end piece whereby we can deploy any hardware behind it that we want. We can bring in an additional SAN if we want – whatever vendor we choose – and still use the DataCore product. We can just fold those SANs into our infrastructure and it would be seamless to the end user. Beyond this – with DataCore we were able to repurpose old equipment."

"For all intents and purposes, we are 100% virtual," commented Gumm. Barren County Schools has two data centers – one primary and one secondary. VMware vSphere is currently running on two, new PowerEdge servers. The Xiotech storage arrays are in both data center locations – the primary one and the "offsite," or secondary, data center. The two locations contain a similar, mirrored, environment which includes two DELL vSphere servers and a Xiotech array which are attached to the SANmelody SAN server. To get to this, Barren County Schools migrated everything it had on an existing EMC SAN to the DataCore and Xiotech based SAN in a live environment using SANmelody to do so. The IT team mapped LUNs from the old SAN to the new SAN and while in production migrated all of the data to the new location.

DataCore Software: Who really Invented Thin Provisioning?

2009-12-01T04:22:00.000-05:00

The original post on the subject on DrunkenData:
http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=1162

More recently:
Check out DataCore Software, the company that invented thin provisioning. Yes, ‘invented’, the first company to ship the network-wide thin provisioning capability, ala a SNIA defined Sparse Volume, back in 2002, well before 3Par, the company credited with the term “thin provisioning”. DataCore and 3Par were several years ahead of and have several years more experience in, thin provisioning, than the competition.

DataCore also provides space reclamation for any host O.S. type and does what 3Par, Compellent, NetApp, HDS and all the other hardware centric storage providers DON’T do, DataCore allows the end user to choose who’s disk and what type of disk technology they want to use, freeing them from the shackles of the storage silo model of having to fill all those expansion trays and drive slots from the given company, where the first time buyer sweetheart deal is long gone.

Test Drive it now!Try thin provisioning with your disks or storage array, a 30 day trial download is available at: http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmel_trynow_form.asp

Plus, given the fact it’s openly running on industry standard commodity hardware, it’s always at least a generation ahead of all the ’specialized’ array controller heads, that are also running on commodity hardware in reality. Add to that the flexibility that type of solution provides when it comes to adding interfaces (iSCSI, FC), increasing interface density, speed (the first 8Gb FC target on the market), cache size, etc., you can’t find a better overall value.

Dave Brown: http://www.cinetica.it/2009/10/14/start-thin-stay-thin-think-thin/

Eweek: Live Migration Coming into Play in System Refreshes

2009-12-01T01:13:00.000-05:00

http://blogs.eweek.com/storage_station/content/general/live_migration_coming_into_play_in_system_refreshes.html Storage virtualization provider DataCore Software is now deploying its SANmelody system in conjunction with the second release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, working in clustered Hyper-V systems.

The news here is that a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster now has the ability to "live-migrate" the virtual machines, meaning two cluster nodes have read/write access to the disk at the same time. This wasn't possible in the first release.

The time and money savings of this feature are potentially significant. Live migration elicited a lot of interest recently when DataCore showcased its storage virtualization software at Microsoft's TechEd Europe show in Berlin.

"What this DataCore-Hyper-V setup does is to minimize or even eliminate downtime, when we need to make system changes," said Jack Weisberg, IT director of an early adopter, the New York law firm of McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams. "So far this system is working very nicely. Plus, everything is redundant. We have redundant storage with DataCore. And we have redundancy built into the VM system."

When making the purchasing decision to replace some legacy hardware and software, Weisberg said it boiled down to DataCore's SANmelody versus an HP/LeftHand Networks system.
"In comparing both systems, we found both to be strong in terms of their capability of avoiding single points of failure," Weisberg said. "But I really like not being tied to specific hardware -- something DataCore enables. It was very important for us not to get locked into older platforms, when there is newer hardware available on the market that we could use with SANmelody."Using DataCore, the storage solution provider, P&J Computers, was able to use its preferred hardware of choice -- in this case, enterprise-class 6GB SAS drives. DataCore enabled administrators to add a couple of 10GB NICs (network interface cards) in these servers at a very low cost.

So, there's some real-world decision making at work. Is that something you're looking at for 2010?

DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Proves to Be a Great Fit for Microsoft Hyper-V and Cluster Deployments

2009-11-23T09:51:00.003-05:00

Case in Point - Law Firm McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams
http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/11/16/datacore-storage-virtualization-software-proves-to-be-a-great-fit-for-microsoft-hyper-v-and-cluster-deployments.aspx

Microsoft Hyper-V and DataCore Software's Storage Virtualization Are Winning New Customers Together by Successfully Powering Virtual Infrastructures

DataCore Software announced its SANmelody storage virtualization solution has been deployed along with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ at the law firm McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams. "McNamee/Lochner" is one of the largest law firms in Albany, New York. "The combination of DataCore with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 for Hyper-V allowed us a lot of flexibility to deploy the best solution possible at McNamee/Lochner with the available hardware," stated Kelly M. Knowles, Network Engineer, P&J Computers, Inc.

Hardware Independence - Optimized by Virtualization

McNamee/Lochner had reached a point where the firm needed to increase its storage capacity. "Our storage was growing at a much faster rate than it had in the past," noted Jack Weisberg, IT director, McNamee, Lochner, Titus and Williams. "Moreover, the hardware that we were running on was out of warranty - so we were looking to get something new." Since 2004, the firm had been using a clustered SAN - an HP MSA 1000. Initially, a key requirement in a new system was something that had a solid approach to redundancy, as well as one that offered ease of expansion.

Whereas LeftHand Networks was an early front-runner, since it seemed a logical replacement to the MSA SAN, P&J Computers presented DataCore SANmelody to the firm as well. "In comparing both systems, we found both to be strong in terms of their capability of avoiding single points of failure," noted Weisberg. "But I really like not being tied to specific hardware - something DataCore enables. It was very important for us not to get locked into older platforms, when there is newer hardware available on the market that we could use with DataCore SANmelody."

With DataCore, P&J was able to their preferred hardware of choice - in this case enterprise-class disks 6 GB SAS drives. Knowles praised the ability of DataCore to enable administrators to add a couple of 10 GB NICs in these servers for a very low cost as "tremendous."

P&J Computers - Trusted Solution Providers

DataCore partner P&J Computers, Inc., a data storage and IT service provider, sees the DataCore and Microsoft Hyper-V combination to be not only a good fit - but a great opportunity for both resellers and users alike. It also showcases P&J Computers' ability to be one of the first to implement the latest Windows Server 2008 R2 technology, which was released to the manufacturer (RTM) in July and was just released publicly in October 2009.

P&J Computers is engaged in several accounts where they are deploying DataCore storage virtualization, Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V in joint configurations. What the partner saw in the new R2 release of Windows Server 2008 release was an opportunity for McNamee/Lochner to take some of the complexity out of its existing environment. What was imperative to making this possible was the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the live migration functionality - which was not in Hyper-V prior to R2.

A Virtual Infrastructure - Combining Servers and Storage to Support Mission-Critical Applications

DataCore SANmelody is now deployed in conjunction with a clustered Hyper-V system. Moreover, with a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster McNamee/Lochner now has the ability to "live migrate" the virtual machines (VMs). Both cluster nodes have read/write access to the disk, at the same time. Running on this infrastructure, there are four (4) VMs that can "live migrate" between the two hosts. Currently, the second node at McNamee/Lochner is located onsite, albeit in a separate rack. "What this DataCore-Hyper-V set-up does is to minimize or even eliminate downtime, when we need to make system changes," noted Weisberg. "So far this system is working very nicely. Plus, everything is redundant. We have redundant storage with DataCore. And we have redundancy built into the VM system."

The multi-Terabyte data pool at McNamee/Lochner and the system is currently supporting 130 users. A third node - running Microsoft Data Protection Manager - is deployed for back-up. The applications McNamee/Lochner uses run on HP DL 380 G6s (dual processor, quad core with Nahalim). The 24 GB of memory can be expanded to 144 GB, if need be. "All the bread and butter applications for running McNamee/Lochner's business will run on this by year-end," noted Knowles.

The next phase of the migration will entail moving what was clustered on Windows 2003 on the old SAN into the virtual environment as well. Space is allocated and P&J Computers just needs to schedule a date to do the cut-over.

Value Protection That Meets Business Objectives

In embracing a virtualized approach, McNamee/Lochner is looking three or four years down the road. Therefore DataCore's "Carry Forward Value Protection Program" - which translates to "Buy - Upgrade - And only pay the difference" - is for McNamee/Lochner a real insurance policy, whereby they might look at new hardware and still keep the same software. "I love this policy that DataCore offers," commented Weisberg. "I am entitled to upgrade the hardware I use with DataCore storage virtualization software. Rather than be forced to scrap my MSA 1000 SAN when it is at its end-of-life, with DataCore I can just buy new hardware and I can continue to use the software - on any new environment I choose. I really think this is awesome."

"We were looking for something redundant, reliable, flexible and expandable," summarized Weisberg. "The DataCore-Hyper-V combination really fit our needs. I certainly like the virtual environment. I also really like having redundant storage. And having seamless failover was key for us as well."

About McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams

Based in Albany, New York, McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams is one of the Capital Region's oldest and largest law firms with multiple practice areas ranging from civil litigation to business transactions, reflecting a diverse clientele. For more, visit www.mltw.com .

About P&J Computers, Inc

For connectivity, network and data center solutions, P&J Computers has served as a complete source for IT solutions since 1984. www.pjcomp.com .

DataCore Software: Create a virtual SAN for Hyper-V

2009-11-20T07:00:00.001-05:00

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1374013,00.html#

DataCore released a version of its Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) this week for Microsoft Hyper-V environments. The product allows customers to access Hyper-V features such as live migration, dynamic load balancing and high availability without having to purchase an external storage area network (SAN) storage.Using locally attached internal disk drives, the DataCore VSA creates a virtual iSCSI SAN that can pool up to 1 TB of capacity.

VSA includes the ability to "thin provision" VM storage to save capacity, create snapshots for instant volume cloning and speed up application performance by leveraging surplus server memory.DataCore VSA comes as a virtual appliance in Microsoft-standard Virtual Hard Disk format, and can be downloaded from the DataCore website for a free 30-day trial.

DataCore Virtual SAN Appliance Software Lets Customers Experience New Migration and Clustering Features in Microsoft Hyper-V without Buying a New SAN

2009-11-18T07:57:00.000-05:00

http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/news-full.php?id=13508&result=datacore

DataCore Software says that customers who don't have a SAN can now experience new features in Microsoft Hyper-V including live migration, dynamic load balancing and high-availability, simply by downloading DataCore's pre-configured Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA).VSA makes it possible for two physical servers to share disks and that is something of great significance to Hyper-V users – since many Hyper-V capabilities require just that. The DataCore VSA comes in a standard VHD format for Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ and Microsoft Hyper-V.The VSA can be downloaded at http://www.datacore.com/msvsappliance/ .

Fully operational in just a few minutes With DataCore's Virtual SAN Appliance Microsoft Hyper-V users can quickly:

Utilize Microsoft virtualization environments with an iSCSI SAN created from their server's internal disks. No need for new hardware!
Pool up to 1 Terabyte of disk space "Thin Provision" storage to the virtual machines. See how much capacity it saves!
Leverage DataCore's "mega cache" capability – this speeds up performance for Exchange, SQL and others applications using surplus server memory to cache I/Os from the virtual SAN
Use Snapshots for Instant Volume Cloning and Fast Disk-to-Disk Backups Create a SAN from their server's internal disks

DataCore™ Virtualizes Storage for Microsoft Hyper-V Users "Why wait until you can roll in a SAN?" said Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing at DataCore Software. "When DataCore can virtualize the physical storage from internal or direct-attached disks to make it behave like a shared storage pool."

Microsoft and DataCore Software Combine to Address ‘Real-World' Site Recovery

2009-11-17T08:54:00.000-05:00

http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/news-full.php?id=13495&result=datacore
Market Forces: New Virtualization Drivers; Comprehensive Solutions

Despite the tough economic times, Microsoft has noted recent studies which have reported that over 30% of businesses surveyed this year indicated DR will be their main driver for virtualization.

These reports show a continued shift, as IT professionals look at addressing new challenges beyond test/dev and basic server consolidation scenarios in deploying virtualization technologies.Microsoft has clearly recognized the importance of site recovery solutions in terms of addressing real-world user scenarios and the benefit of partnering to provide end-to-end solutions that together overcome the limitations of single-vendor, specific site recovery solutions such as VMware's SRM.

Microsoft and DataCore Software Combine to Address ‘Real-World' Site Recovery

Taking machines from one site and replicating them to another site before a calamity unfolds is not new. But buyer beware. Many other disaster recovery products are limiting in that they assume recovery, from one environment to an identical or very similar environment or they support only a subset of the infrastructure. Often physical servers are not supported or require a separate solution from applications and virtual servers. DataCore ASR enables users to execute site recovery operations in a way that is fundamentally different from existing solutions in the marketplace today by bringing the data center together into a single solution.

Microsoft Virtualization Pavilion Showcases DataCore’s Advanced Site Recovery Software; New Capabilites for Microsoft Hyper-V

2009-11-16T08:51:00.000-05:00

Microsoft Virtualization Pavilion Showcases DataCore’s Advanced Site Recovery Software; Extends Disaster Recovery and Clustering Benefits of Microsoft Hyper-V
http://www.it-director.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=14301

DataCore Software was featured last week within the Microsoft Tech-Ed Virtualization pavilion. DataCore showcased its ground-breaking Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) solution for virtual and physical IT infrastructures. Unlike other site recovery approaches that are limited to a specific vendor's virtual machine recovery, DataCore ASR enables both physical and virtual servers to be protected across multiple sites. The combination of DataCore ASR and Microsoft Hyper-V™/ Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2 Failover and Clustering features enables businesses to embrace "real-world" Distributed Disaster Recovery (D-DR) – allowing organizations to cost-effectively spread disaster recovery (DR) responsibilities across several smaller sites.

Microsoft and DataCore Software Combine to Address ‘Real-World' Site Recovery
Taking machines from one site and replicating them to another site before a calamity unfolds is not new. But buyer beware. Many other disaster recovery products are limiting in that they assume recovery, from one environment to an identical or very similar environment or they support only a subset of the infrastructure. Often physical servers are not supported or require a separate solution from applications and virtual servers. DataCore ASR enables users to execute site recovery operations in a way that is fundamentally different from existing solutions in the marketplace today by bringing the data center together into a single solution.

"The industry is conditioned to think of DR as a one-to-one proposition. This places unreasonable demands on a single recovery site that mirrors the main site," argues Augie Gonzalez, product marketing director at DataCore Software."But most organizations aren't structured that way. They look more like a hub and spoke, with smaller branches emanating from the central data center. For this reason, DataCore's Advanced Site Recovery distributes the disaster recovery workloads among these smaller entities, allowing each of them to accept a more manageable role in keeping the business going."

DataCore Software Updates Storage Virtualization Free Trial Software; Performance Acceleration, Migration Tools + iSCSI, Fibre Channel, FCoE Support

2009-11-08T08:23:00.000-05:00

DataCore Software Updates Storage Virtualization Free Trial Software; Performance Acceleration, Migration Tools + iSCSI, Fibre Channel, FCoE Support
http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/11/03/datacore-software-updates-storage-virtualization-free-trial-software-includes-performance-acceleration-migration-tools-and-support-for-iscsi-fibre-channel-and-fcoe.aspx
DataCore Software announced that it has updated its Free Trial software, which is architected to optimize and manage users’ storage. This free trial of SANmelody™ iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel SAN evaluation software, comes with performance acceleration, content migration, snapshot and thin provisioning – all included. The evaluation software enables data centers and IT departments to consolidate and maximize their disk capacity utilization. SANmelody simplifies management and leverages existing storage hardware and networking to efficiently serve the storage needs for Windows, Netware, MacOS, UNIX, and Linux systems as well as Microsoft, VMware and Citrix virtual servers and desktops.

The Free Trial software http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmel_trynow_form.asp supports group snapshot and cloning, simple content migration and iSCSI and Fibre Channel as well as FCoE.

FCoE Connectivity - Access Fibre Channel storage pool via the LAN switching infrastructure. Application servers and other storage consumers can now access SANmelody nodes equipped with Fibre Channel SAN connections using their Ethernet Network Interface Cards (NICs). This capability takes advantage of the new Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocol and FCoE-compliant switches.

Group Snapshot and Clone Command - Synchronize online snapshots across inter-dependent volumes. This capability coordinates multiple snapshots to occur at the same time across a group of related volumes. It ensures point-time synchronization of file systems and application data that reside on different disks. Fast and efficient disk-to-disk backups across volumes are greatly simplified – plus it ensures that clones created on new equipment are an exact replica of their predecessor.

Content Migration - Relocate active drives into the virtual storage pool. This feature enables existing drives formatted with NTFS file systems to be incorporated easily into the SANmelody storage pool. These physical drives are first un-mounted from the application servers where they were once active, and then reconnected behind a SANmelody node. The SANmelody node acts as an intermediary between the application server and these drives. To take full advantage of SANmelody advanced virtualization features, their contents may be copied to virtual disks using snapshots. The relocated drives can then be wiped clean and included in the physical storage pool as additional capacity, or they may be decommissioned.

See the following announcement on recent DataCore SANmelody enhancements – link: http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_live.asp?date=10/14/2009

With the SANmelody evaluation software, users can:

· Pool up to 1 Terabyte of disk space.
· Support a mix of iSCSI/Ethernet, FCoE and Fibre Channel connectivity.
· Speed up application performance with “Mega-Caching” – using surplus server memory to cache I/Os from the virtual SAN.
· "Thin Provision" storage.
· Use Snapshots for Instant Volume Cloning and Fast Disk-to-Disk Backups
· Create a SAN from your server's internal disks. No need for new hardware!

Special Offer: Go Beyond the Evaluation “Free Trial” Package with a Feature-Packed, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery SAN Software

For users who need to go beyond the “starter” Free Trial version because their requirements are more demanding, DataCore is offering special promotions on “Feature-Packed SAN Software,” which provide additional, more advanced features such as auto-failover, high-availability mirroring and asynchronous IP Mirroring.

To learn more, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmelody_buy.asp
For info on Customer Promotions: http://www.datacore.com/customerprograms/ or contact DataCore directly at: info@datacore.com

SearchStorage: School district maintains uptime - DataCore SAN Management plus Xiotech

2009-11-08T07:14:00.000-05:00

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1373639,00.html

The Barren County, Ky., school district discovered it could make good use of management features such as thin provisioning and remote mirroring even if they're not included natively with its storage arrays. As part of a virtualization project, the district installed an Emprise 5000 storage system from Xiotech Corp. and DataCore Software Corp.'s SANmelody software to increase uptime and decrease the impact of maintenance on its users.

Barren County school district includes around 4,600 students and 700 faculty. IT Director Steve Gumm and his team handle a high school, middle school, seven elementary schools, the board office, a day care location and four other buildings...

Gumm revamped his storage setup over the summer after the district virtualized all 30 of its servers with VMware. Gumm thought it would be a good time to modernize his storage network, which consisted of a four-year-old EMC iSCSI SAN. The district first went to its server vendor Dell and took a look at an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. But Gumm wasn't comfortable with the idea of failing over between EqualLogic controllers in different sites during frequent network upgrades.

...Barren installed two 16 TB Fibre Channel systems in separate buildings and Gumm uses SANmelody to manage them with the uptime he wants.

"With SANmelody, we can thin provision those SANs," he said. "We're not utilizing all the space, and thin provisioning lets us use just what is needed at the time. We also use it for data mirroring between both locations. If we need to do maintenance or I need to re-boot my SAN for whatever reason, we drop the SAN here, failover, do our maintenance, failback, and we're up and going."...

"We can manage whatever maintenance needs to be done, whenever we need it," Gumm says of his new setup. "The biggest benefit coming down the road is we're not going to have to do forklift upgrades. When it comes time to add storage, we won't have to rip out the unit. We can add to the unit and allow DataCore to manage where we move data to."

Homecare Homebase deploys VMware, Citrix and DataCore virtualization solutions

2009-10-30T10:14:00.002-04:00

Homecare Homebase [HCHB] deploys DataCore storage virtualization solutions
...HCHB empowers the homecare and hospice industry to be more effective in providing healthcare to patients. Currently 4,375 office workers and over 11,000 field agents rely on applications running on HCHB’s IT systems infrastructure. Everything HCHB customers do is mobile and all of the applications HCHB offers these agents in the homecare industry are both mobile and real-time.

“The combination of the VMware platform along with the DataCore SAN has really given us a lot of flexibility to more rapidly deploy consistent images of systems – especially in the Citrix farm,” explained Chris Kane, director of technical operations, Homecare Homebase. “In addition, the VMware-DataCore combination has given us much improved VMotion capability – where the SAN enables us to do maintenance on the host in the middle of the day, if we have to.”

...“We quickly outgrew the storage we had – both in terms of the amount of space presented by those units as well as the performance of those units,” noted Kane.HCHB has a big Microsoft SQL Server shop and tended to back-up its customer information using these snap units at each site to replicate for disaster recovery purposes. According to Kane, the units were just not able to keep up with the back-up planning and also the synchronization of the data. “The storage we had before DataCore became troublesome,” commented Kane. “We were in desperate need, not only of space, but also of reliable storage.”

...On its own, HCHB looked at EqualLogic from Dell, LeftHand from HP, as well as EMC and NetApp.Noted Kane, “The DataCore SAN solution suits our IT administrative style better than the other solutions we saw. The more we looked at traditional SAN solutions – encompassing hardware, software and professional services – for us, these weren’t the type of solutions that we have typically dealt with. We have a lot of skilled technology people in house and we like to be able to get our hands on every piece of technology we bring in. The fact that DataCore is Windows-based gives us a little more control – particularly being able to manage the hardware ourselves. Moreover, DataCore gave us a full, high availability solution. Not to mention that DataCore is very competitive price-wise – so all of this made DataCore the best choice for us.”

...Virtualizing the Citrix environment with VMware and DataCore running in tandem has provided a real, tangible benefit in terms of system maintenance and administration. Before – with the physical, Citrix environment, the IT team at HCHB was very limited in terms of what they could do with those systems during the working day.“Just the patch management aspect of keeping up with all the physical boxes has been greatly improved in the virtual environment because we can deploy patch templates versus having to constantly update from Microsoft or other vendors,” added Kane.With the SAN in place, the virtual environment at HCHB has delivered real benefits to customers and system administrators alike. These benefits are a direct result of the improvements made possible through these new virtualization capabilities. For instance, HCHB as a whole is able to roll out new services more rapidly and consistently. The current databases and applications that HCHB uses internally to run its business, such as file servers (documentation that support internal needs) or Microsoft Office Sharepoint (that supports customers), have benefited, either directly or indirectly, from the VMware virtual infrastructure and the DataCore storage virtualization SAN.

...“It has been very rapid growth for us recently,” summarized Kane. “And I am very, very happy with the performance we are getting both out of VMware and the DataCore SAN at this point. The SAN has made a world of difference to us. There were many choices for a SAN – from a variety of SAN vendors. For us, DataCore was the right fit. DataCore gives us the ability to select and maintain the hardware of our own choice. It gives us the ability to have a fully redundant, highly available SAN – not just at the controller-level, but at the storage-level itself. That, combined with the price point DataCore’s portable SAN software offers – even when having to purchase hardware and licensing – is still much more effective than anything else we found on the market.”

New Capabilities for DataCore SANmelody

2009-10-22T12:14:00.001-04:00

New Capabilities for DataCore SANmelody
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/software/datacore-sanmelody-30
Aimed at SMBs eager to upgrade their disk subsystems and storage network infrastructure

DataCore Piles on Resources for VARs (note also DataCore featured on newsletter sent by Channel SMB pros – see bottom of this email).

2009-10-22T12:13:00.001-04:00

DataCore Piles on Resources for VARs
http://www.channelprosmb.com/article/14641/DataCore-Piles-on-Resources-for-VARs/;jsessionid=BF7AD2B261245AC04F57A62E1A43EC16
In the last several months, storage virtualization and recovery innovator DataCore Software has initiated new services and support as well as new products to help SMBs optimize storage solutions.

DataCore Video - 6 years old - content applies

2009-10-21T12:15:00.000-04:00

DataCore Video - 6 years old - content applies
Take a look at the following video from DataCore Software created over 6 years ago, the content in this clip is more relevant today that ever. It demonstrates how far ahead DataCore Software was at that time and shows that their core ...DataCore SANmelody tunes - http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/

Virtualization and “the new availability” -John Abbot -The 451 Report

2009-10-16T08:31:00.001-04:00

Good post on availabity in the virtual world:
http://datacenterjournal.com/content/view/3254/40/

Long established techniques addressing application resilience, data availability and disaster recovery are being challenged by server virtualization technologies from companies such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. Where do we go from here? ...

Who’s selling what? So who are the market players? The virtualization infrastructure vendors – VMware, Microsoft and Citrix Systems in particular – continue to build functionality to increase availability into their core products, threatening in some cases to squeeze out competition from third-party vendors. A core part of what they offer is the live migration of virtual machines, which can move workloads to a different server while they are running. This has the potential to eliminate the need for planned downtime altogether.

But there is still plenty of room for other vendors to operate. They range from storage array vendors with their own hardware-specific tools (such as EMC, Hewlett-Packard and NetApp) to software-based replication vendors (such as Double-Take Software and NeverFail).
The storage vendors typically provide the best performance, but require an investment in expensive networked storage resources. Modular, iSCSI-based storage systems such as HP's LeftHand and Dell's EqualLogic are capitalizing on the new demand for availability, attracting customers that have previously been frightened away from shared storage by the complexities and expense of classic fiber channel-based storage networks. A related approach is that of the storage virtualizers, such as DataCore Software...

New SANmelody Capabilities Help SMBs Upgrade Storage Infrastructure without Disruption

2009-10-14T12:13:00.003-04:00

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=12339
The new features are aimed at small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) that are eager to upgrade their disk subsystems and storage network infrastructure, but fear the broad business disruptions that such changes typically bring.
The new features, now shipping, in SANmelody 3.0 enable:

Non-disruptive Substitution - Replace storage arrays in the background.
Copies the contents of a designated storage array (or individual drive) to the unit that will replace it while applications continue to use the logical volumes. The new array (or drive) transparently takes over once it matches the contents of the original drives so that the older drives can be taken offline without impacting users.

Redundant Pathing - Configure network paths between storage virtualization nodes.
These paths may be diversely routed to ensure that if one primary network connection is broken or taken offline, synchronous mirroring between nodes will continue uninterrupted over the alternate connection.

Prioritized Recovery - Prioritize resynchronization of mirrored disks.
Ensures that the most critical, volumes are resynchronized first when a node or its storage is taken off-line during an upgrade or unplanned outage.

Group Snapshot and Clone Command - Synchronize online snapshots across inter-dependent volumes.
Coordinates multiple snapshots to occur at the same time across a group of related volumes. This ensures point-time synchronization of file systems and application data that reside on different disks. It ensures that clones created on new equipment are an exact replica of their predecessor.

Content Migration - Relocate Active Drives into Virtual Storage Pool.
Enables existing drives formatted with NTFS, Unix, Linux and other file systems to be incorporated into the SANmelody storage pool. These physical drives are first un-mounted from the application servers where they were once active, and reconnected behind a SANmelody node. The SANmelody node will then act as an intermediary between the application server and these drives. To take full advantage of SANmelody advanced virtualisation features, their contents may be copied to virtual disks using snapshots or synchronous mirroring. The relocated drives can then be wiped clean and included in the physical storage pool as additional capacity, or they may be decommissioned.

FCoE Connectivity - Access Fibre Channel storage pool via the LAN switching infrastructure.
Application servers and other storage consumers can access SANmelody nodes equipped with Fibre Channel SAN connections using their Ethernet Network Interface Cards (NICs). This capability takes advantage of the new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol and FCoE-compliant switches.

New SANmelody 3.0 Product Review in Network Computing

2009-10-13T08:19:00.001-04:00

New Product Review of SANmelody 3.0 in Network Computing.

VMware, Hyper-V virtualization leave others in the dust

2009-10-12T08:26:00.004-04:00

Interesting post:

The data derives from TechTarget's "Virtualization Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey" of 666 IT professionals that have deployed or are evaluating virtualization. Data was collected between June and September 2009.

To no one's surprise, survey respondents reported using VMware Inc. over other virtualization software by a wide margin: 72.4% identified some VMware edition as their primary virtualization platform (ESX 2.x to 4.x or VMware Server), compared with 14.8% that cited a Microsoft offering (Hyper-V or Virtual Server).

Blowing away the competition But despite a fair amount of buzz, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Virtual Iron Software Inc. and open source Xen variants barely registered. Each came in at about 1% market share. OS-level and partitioning-based virtualization platforms (HP VSE, IBM mainframe partitions, Solaris Containers, and Parallels Virtuozzo) fared even worse, failing to garner a mention by even 1% of respondents.

VMware is the 800-pound gorilla, and everyone wants to vote for the winner...
Read more: http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1369150,00.html#

TechWorld: SANmelody Product Review

2009-10-08T08:22:00.001-04:00

TechWorld: SANmelody Product Review
http://review.techworld.com/san/3203642/promise-vtrak-e610f-and-datacore-sanmelody-30-san-review/?view=overview

TechWorld: SANs tuned for virtualisation
http://review.techworld.com/storage/3203647/sans-tuned-for-virtualisation/?view=conclusion

Anaheim Memorial and San Gabriel Valley Medical Centers Implement DataCore Storage Virtualization

2009-10-07T08:20:00.001-04:00

Anaheim Memorial and San Gabriel Valley Medical Centers Try Virtualization
http://www.healthmgttech.com/NewsItem.aspx?id=2375

Far West Technologies Performs Network "Miracle" - Rebuilds a Hospital's Entire Network and Systems Infrastructure in Five Days using DataCore SAN software http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=12124

DataCore Software Partner Far West Technologies Implements Compliance, Virtualization and Business Continuity Solutions for Anaheim Memorial and San Gabriel Valley Medical Centers http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/news-full.php?id=13100 http://linux.sys-con.com/node/1128241

ComputerWorld Test Center: SANs tuned for virtualization pack nice surprises

2009-10-06T08:23:00.001-04:00

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138935/Test_Center_SANs_tuned_for_virtualization_pack_nice_surprises?taxonomyId=0&pageNumber=1
Virtualization is moving further into the datacenter all the time, with even critical large-scale applications like Exchange and databases now being virtualized. Whether you're using virtualization to make large applications more manageable or to consolidate many small applications, a server with lots of RAM, lots of processor cores, and lots of I/O is a good thing.

And so is a SAN packed with features that ease the management of storage for virtual machines.From a storage viewpoint, each virtual machine uses a file to simulate a physical hard disk. This file, a VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk Format) under VMware or VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) under Microsoft, can be located on a server's internal drive or on a SAN. There are several advantages to putting the file on a SAN: The file can be duplicated using the storage's snapshot function, the file can be moved easily from one hardware server to another for scalability or fault tolerance, and the storage itself can be more easily made fault tolerant.

I tested five midrange SAN systems that deliver the goods for virtual environments: the Compellent Storage Center 4.0, the Dell EqualLogic PS4000, the HP StorageWorks 2000sa G2 Modular Smart Array, the Pillar Axiom 600 from Pillar Data Systems, and a build-it-yourself pairing of the Promise vTrak E610f hardware and DataCore's SANmelody 3.0 storage software...

The prices (as tested) of these systems range widely, from less than $10,000 for the Promise Technologies and DataCore combination to $130,000 for the Pillar Data system. All the manufacturers have models ranging from inexpensive starters to very high-performance datacenter-ready systems. As you can tell from the range in price, the models I tested don't necessarily compete with each other.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138935/Test_Center_SANs_tuned_for_virtualization_pack_nice_surprises?taxonomyId=0&pageNumber=6

...Promise vTrak E610f and DataCore SANMelody 3.0 The build-it-yourself Promise and DataCore system represents how far you can go on a tight budget if you're willing to roll up your sleeves. The Promise vTrak E610f is a 16-drive enclosure that includes two 4Gbps Fibre Channel controllers that offer RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1 (or 10), 5, 6 (double parity drive), 50 (two mirrored RAID 5 volumes), or 60. You can add up to three additional enclosures via Serial Attached SCSI, all using the same dual controllers or as many Fibre Channel dual-controller systems as your switch will support. The Promise system doesn't include drives -- you add your own SAS or SATA drives. Installing drives is straightforward and shouldn't bother anyone with hardware experience; there's even a full paper manual that fully documents the process.

Once the drives are installed, connecting to the system and initializing the RAID set or sets is straightforward. I installed eight Western Digital Raid Edition 500GB SATA drives and eight Seagate Savvio 15,000-rpm 73GB SAS drives, creating a 280GB RAID10 volume with the Savvio drives and a 3.5TB RAID5 volume with the Western Digital drives.The next step was installing the DataCore SANmelody software on an HP ProLiant ML370 G5 server. I didn't count the server in the cost of the system for two reasons. First, the server is still available for other uses, and second, a really expensive high-powered server is not required; SANmelody can even run on a VM. The server I used had a two-port QLogic 2Gbps HBA connecting it to the Promise array, but SANmelody will work with any storage the server can see -- whether direct-attached SCSI, internal storage, or external -- and can then make that storage available to other systems via Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or even Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)...

Back to School - Storage Virtualization Customers around the World and DataCore

2009-10-01T09:42:00.000-04:00

DataCore Software announced new SAN software packages and promotions for academic institutes that deliver price savings of up to 50% and highlighted a host of educational institutions around the world that have already deployed storage virtualisation using its SANmelody and SANsymphony solutions.
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/business/datacore-ww-customers-in-education
“Most educational enterprises want enterprise-class storage networking functionality but have to settle for a lot less, since they do not have the budgets to implement these solutions due to the high costs and complexity that is involved – especially for fault-tolerant, auto recovery storage systems needed to protect and support virtual server environments,” stated George Teixeira, president and CEO, DataCore Software.

VMware vSphere "HCL" listings for DataCore SANmelody / SANsymphony

2009-09-21T08:13:00.001-04:00

Both SANmelody and SANsymphony have been "VMware ready Certified" for some time now with detailed support information available. Now, both SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 are listed on the VMware "HCL" for both iSCSI and Fibre Channel on VMware ESX 4.0. Simply search the HCL for "DataCore" under the SAN/Storage section to view results. http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php .

Is that a DataCore T-shirt that Brian Madden is wearing? DataCore Offers StorageLink Adapter for XenServer and Hyper-V

2009-09-14T09:14:00.007-04:00

DataCore Offers StorageLink Adapter for XenServer and Hyper-V
www.brianmadden.com/blogs/the_official_citrix_blog/archive/2009/08/03/datacore-offers-storagelink-adapter-for-xenserver-and-hyper-v.aspx

DataCore Software Announces Support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

2009-09-02T09:38:00.000-04:00

DataCore Software Announces Support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced support for native Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity for its SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ storage virtualization solutions. The company has added the Emulex and Brocade FCoE converged network adapters (CNAs) and Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches to its FCoE-qualified support list. Additional FCoE CNAs will be announced over the next year. FCoE software drivers are currently available for Microsoft® Windows® and VMware® ESX / vSphere®.

"With the addition of FCoE to our SAN connectivity options, DataCore continues to demonstrate the ease with which our storage virtualization software adapts to new technology and extends the life of existing investments,” stated Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing, DataCore Software. “Our customers can immediately take advantage of FCoE in their highly scalable, non-stop storage pools without having to replace or modify their existing back-end storage, which may well include DAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces.

DataCore at VMworld 2009 (part II)

2009-09-01T23:49:00.003-04:00

DataCore Software Leverages ROBOs to Cut Business Continuity Costs for VMware vSphere Customers

2009-09-01T15:05:00.001-04:00

http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/08/31/datacore-software-leverages-robos-to-cut-business-continuity-costs-for-vmware-vsphere-customers.aspx
DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, used VMworld 2009 to introduce VMware customers to its new Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) solution. The company has developed a distributed and cost-effective way to have IT assets at remote office and branch offices (ROBOs) take over for the main datacenter when the central machines are unable to meet processing obligations. Whether that is during planned facility outage or an unexpected disaster makes no difference.

“We recognize that economic pressures preclude all but the most affluent organizations from dedicating another site to back up their main data center. So we've chosen to tap the horsepower available at the ROBOs during emergencies,” explains Augie Gonzalez, product marketing director at DataCore. “Given a choice, customers will opt to run their business on systems in a remote office or branch office machine versus not doing business at all.”

For VMware vSphere™ customers, remote servers whose primary duty is branch office computing, are given a second “dormant” personality to be awakened as needed. When the main site can’t get the job done, each branch office takes on a piece of the back-up role in line with their processing capacity.

DataCore Advanced Site Recovery Solutions at VMworld 2009

2009-09-01T14:41:00.002-04:00

DataCore at Vmworld 2009, for additional information, please visit:http://www.datacore.com/vmworld2009/

Virtual Storage Infrastructure – Can Software Take Center Stage?

2009-08-27T07:48:00.001-04:00

Virtual Storage Infrastructure – Can Software Take Center Stage?
We’ve been conditioned to think of infrastructure as hardware. Is it time to rethink?...

Serious About High Availability?Solutions like DataCore enable non-stop data access using commodity-priced storage devices from vendors of your choosing. Each side of the mirror can use different types of storage; they need not be from the same supplier. In fact, some of the solutions can reconfigure the equipment that you already have to eliminate storage downtime…

Create a SAN with storage virtualization software: IDC

2009-08-26T08:31:00.000-04:00

Create a SAN with storage virtualization software: IDC
http://www.ciol.com/Technology/Networking/News-Reports/Create-SAN-with-storage-virtualisation-s/w-IDC/21809123918/0/

Virtualize storage through SANs, says IDC
Analyst recommends firms create SANs with storage virtualization software rather than shelling out for new equipment
http://www.techcentral.ie/article.aspx?id=13895

The best way to virtualize your storage is through a storage area network (SAN), according to IDC. In a new report entitled "Removing storage-related barriers to server and desktop virtualization," the analyst firm claimed there is no need for high-end expensive systems to reap the benefits of virtualization - just create a SAN with storage virtualization software.

StorageSwitzerland: Virtual Storage Infrastructure - Can Software Take Center Stage?

2009-08-25T08:37:00.001-04:00

http://www.datacore.com/downloads/SoftwareCentricStorageInfrastructure-Handout.pdf
...Comprehensive storage virtualization software offerings like those from DataCore Software, a pioneer in the storage virtualization space, offer a superset of the advanced feature/functionality found on high-end storage systems, yet can be utilized across disparate disk resources and centrally managed. The same rich set of functions cover direct-attached and SAN-connected storage arrays, regardless of model or manufacturer. This software typically runs on standard x86/x64 servers and is fully portable between hardware generations so that customers are not faced with the usual obsolescence of proprietary storage appliances.

This capability provides data center managers with a number of distinct advantages.

Firstly, whenever a storage asset needs to be retired or upgraded, the migration process is non-disruptive and greatly simplified. The new array is presented to the storage virtualization engine and the data that was contained on the old array is transparently moved to the new array. No scheduled downtime is necessary.

Secondly, since command and control of the storage environment is in the hands of the overarching storage virtualization software, the backend storage can be purchased “bare bones”, without all the costly embedded firmware licenses. This has the effect of commoditizing storage and empowering the IT buyer to negotiate very aggressive discounts from multiple storage vendors.

Another interesting advantage of software-based storage virtualization kicks in when the software leverages “Moore’s Law” through the use of increasingly faster CPUs to speed up I/O processing. In effect, the storage virtualization server puts its internal processors and memory to use as high-speed caches for accelerating disk I/Os from anywhere in the virtual storage pool. Furthermore, this extra processing capacity helps offload advanced functions from the application hosts and the disk subsystems to ensure better quality of service across the board. This insulates the business from needing to incur costly proprietary disk controller storage upgrades and helps greatly extend the usable life of all storage assets on the data center floor.

What’s more, certain storage virtualization software can run as a virtual machine (VM) instance, alongside application VMs helping customers to further improve server resource utilization and truly maximize efficiencies throughout the data center...

Citrix Web site adds DataCore Links for DataCore Virtual SAN Appliance and StorageLink adapter for Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V

2009-08-18T10:42:00.001-04:00

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=1855667

Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, Express EditionSeamless storage integration for Hyper-V:

+ Download the free Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V Express Edition
+ Download the Virtual SAN Appliance for Citrix Essentials from DataCore™

Advanced StorageLink technology
How advanced StorageLink for technology works
http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=1687089