DataCore Announces Updated Partner Program at Microsoft Management Summit 2009: Targets Virtualization and Microsoft Hyper-V Partners

DataCore Encourages Resellers to “Knock Down Storage-related Barriers to Virtualization” with New Partner Benefits
http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=10690

DataCore Software is using the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2009 to announce updates to its SANvantage™ Partner Program. The updated Partner Program includes new lead registration incentives, as well as a new “open-door” model that helps encourage more resellers to sell DataCore solutions. DataCore is also using the occasion to demonstrate how new, ground-breaking features in the newest releases of SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ benefit Microsoft users and therefore greatly increase opportunities for Microsoft resellers. The bottom-line: new partner incentives as well as new enhancements to DataCore’s industry-leading storage virtualization technology solutions will enable virtualization and storage partners to fast-track sales of DataCore’s business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) software solutions.

Why Solution Providers and Resellers Should Partner with DataCore

DataCore is committed to the reseller community and working with solution providers to stimulate, accelerate and grow their virtualization business. DataCore’s updated Partner Program and incentives serve as a stimulus program for partners – enabling them to accelerate their virtualization business.

First, with its “open door” model, DataCore has made it far simpler for first-time solution providers to become a DataCore reseller.
Second, as part of its updated Partner Program, DataCore has increased and simplified lead registration incentives. The lead registration incentives now apply to all software product sales – new customers, upgrades and follow-on sales.
Third, DataCore has established “SAN starter” promotions for its industry-leading BC and DR packages that are designed for resellers to kick-start business and grow with DataCore’s ”value protection, upgrade path” model.

To learn more about the DataCore SANvantage Partner Program and find out how you can ‘Knock Down Storage-Related Sales Barriers to Virtualization’ please visit: www.datacore.com/stepuptodatacore.

Accelerate Your Sales and Empower Users to “Do More and Save More”

DataCore yields the highest availability, fastest performance and fullest utilization from your storage assets, making it an essential element of Microsoft Hyper-V configurations. DataCore’s storage virtualization software solutions provide unmatched return on investment and help clients “Do More and Save More.” Learn more at: www.datacore.com/costsavings.

DataCore’s new solutions provide unmatched performance; particularly for those solution providers supplying Microsoft Hyper-V, Exchange and SQL based solutions. The newest, x64 versions of DataCore’s flagship SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ storage virtualization solutions include advances in performance, migration, thin provisioning, and high-availability that improve storage. Among the new features in SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 that will certainly serve to benefit the demanding needs of Microsoft users are large ‘mega cache’ support to accelerate SAN performance, non-stop high-availability, universal storage controllers that are Windows Server 2008-based, a simple and fast ‘Transporter’ option, and ‘waste-free reclamation’ of storage space.

For more details on these newest versions of DataCore’s high-performance storage solutions, please visit: www.datacore.com/software2009.

Get on Board with a DataCore Distributor – Today!

VARs and system integrators that want to learn more about the new benefits of DataCore’s Partner Program should contact any of DataCore’s UK distributors:
Bell Micro www.bellmicro.eu , DNS Arrow www.dnsarrow.co.uk , or Magirus www.magirus.com

See DataCore at Microsoft Management Summit 2009

MMS 2009 is the premier event of the year for IT Professionals seeking deep technical information and training on the latest IT Management solutions from Microsoft, Partners and Industry Experts. Microsoft Management Summit 2009 runs April 27 - May 1, 2009 at the Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada. DataCore Software is an Exhibiting Sponsor and may be found at Booth 617. For more, visit http://mms-2009.com.

Thin provisioning and Reclamation

From Informationweek's Storage Blog
What keeps many organizations from seeing significant improvement generally centers on two areas that have plagued some thin provisioning implementations; conversion to thin and reclamation....

The second issue that has plagued thin provisioning is that during use, deleted items do not properly get reclaimed. This is because most file systems do not really delete data when you give the delete command, they just set the data as eligible to over write. If you go through a big house cleaning operation on a volume, that freed up space is not reallocated to the global storage pool that thin provisioning storage systems count on. It stays with the volume.

The result of these two factors is that thin provisioned systems put on a little weight both initially and over time. While some thin provisioning is better than no thin provisioning these challenges lead to the poor results on the survey. Companies like 3PAR, HDS and DataCore have all announced technologies that can address both the conversion to thin issues as well as the ongoing space reclamation issues.

With these technologies companies can intelligently convert to thin to see immediate storage savings and can keep their volumes thin over time. Thin provisioning is more than a check mark feature, it is a serious technology that when all the challenges are properly addressed can save significant storage costs in the enterprise.

See also: Full Use with Space Reclamation for Thinly Provisioned Storage

DataCore Software Empowers Partners to knock down storage-related barriers to virtualisation

Resellers Register to Learn How to Remove the Storage-Related Sales Barriers to Virtualisation and Empower Customers to "Do More and Save More"

DataCore offers new partner benefits and encourages solution providers to visit www.datacore.com/stepuptodatacore and attend a webinar so that they can learn how to "knock down storage-related barriers to virtualisation"

At the VMware Partner Exchange 2009 last week, DataCore put a spotlight on its worldwide distribution partners and to highlight its enhanced partner programme, new lead registration incentives, as well as a new "open-door" model that helps encourage more resellers to sell DataCore solutions. The new initiatives include reseller-focused, "SAN starter" promotions to accelerate DataCore™ business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) solution sales.

Accelerate Your Sales; Get on Board with a DataCore Distributor:

DataCore is committed to the "Power of Partnering" and working with solution providers to stimulate, accelerate and grow their virtualisation business.

VARs and system integrators that would like to partner with DataCore should contact any of DataCore's UK distributors: Bell Micro www.bellmicro.eu , DNS Arrow www.dnsarrow.co.uk , Magirus www.magirus.com,

How to Capitalise on the Current Economical Climate: Why Partner with DataCore?

• First, with its "open door" model, DataCore has made it far simpler to become a DataCore reseller.
  
• Second, as part of its enhanced Partner Programme, DataCore has increased and simplified lead registration incentives. The lead registration incentives now apply to all software product sales - new customers, upgrades and follow-on sales.
  
• Third, DataCore has established "SAN starter" promotions for its industry-leading BC and DR packages that are designed for resellers to kick-start business and grow with DataCore's "value protection, upgrade path" model.

In addition, DataCore's storage virtualisation software solutions provide unmatched return on investment and help clients "Do More and Save More." Learn more at: www.datacore.com/costsavings

VARs and system integrators should contact a DataCore distributor to learn more about these new benefits of the DataCore Partner Programme.

Partner Spotlight: A Radically Simple, High Availability Storage Virtualisation Solution Designed for VMware-Virtualised IT Environments:

"DataCore has helped us to get our foot in the door with a lot of SMB customers," said Lak Gill of Interware Systems, a VMware and DataCore Gold partner in Canada. "With a DataCore foundation, we can easily upgrade these customers later on - enabling their infrastructures to grow as their companies grow." The flexibility to grow with DataCore was a key consideration in the decision of Toronto-based The State Group to select a combined DataCore and VMware solution implemented by Interware Systems.

SANs are essential for virtual server environments. However, the high costs of most SANs put them beyond the reach of most customers. In particular, true-high availability between physically separate locations, even when located in the same building, can be prohibitively expensive. "DataCore allows us to put together solutions for our clients that do the job right within their budgets," explained Tim Rettig, President, LAN Solutions, a DataCore reseller partner. "What is more, we feel strongly that our clients are getting robust, enterprise-level SANs at SMB prices."

Continued Rettig, "With DataCore, the client can pick among hardware offerings from their favourite hardware vendors, and even mix and match them," Rettig said. "When their requirements approach their systems' limitations, we can non-disruptively upgrade them to faster, newer technology, possibly from a different supplier who then offers a better price/performance alternative. Because it offers an adaptable enterprise solution to our clients - in terms of capabilities, performance and reliability, all for a reasonable price, we feel that DataCore helps our firm to build lasting relationships with our clients."

Call to Action: Prospective Partners Should Attend A "How To" Webinar Titled "Knock Down Storage-Related Sales Barriers to Virtualisation"

DataCore has made it easy to learn about the benefits of its partner program, please visit: www.datacore.com/stepuptodatacore . The brief introduction and new monthly webinars are available exclusively for solution providers and IT consultants advising clients on server and desktop virtualization.

Click here to register: www.datacore.com/partner or email: info@datacore.com

A Blueprint for affordable and accelerated Disaster Recovery

BY ANDREW KERSHAW, WATERSTONS’ TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, A DATACORE SILVER LEVEL PARTNER:

Before now, full offsite replication of an entire IT infrastructure was an expensive business, affordable to only the wealthiest of organisations.

However, this view now needs to be radically adjusted as new and innovative ways of reducing the cost of achieving this goal are developed.

A key enabling technology has been server virtualisation, adoption of which is often justified on its own merits. However, when used to address remote disaster recovery (DR), virtual technology comes into its own, offering a range of affordable solutions for off-site replication. The quality, frequency and lag of the DR replica is determined by the quality and speed of the Wide Area Network (WAN) between the sites, with operating costs of suitable high performance links very high. Often a significant upgrade would be required to provide capacity for replication, and costs are prohibitive. The answer to this problem is to architect a replication solution which gets the best out of the now well proven WAN acceleration technology.

One such architecture – which Waterstons are able to recommend - involves combining DataCore SANmelody™ storage virtualisation with Riverbed Steelhead™ WAN acceleration. The remote replication capability of DataCore SANmelody™ is used to replicate an entire server infrastructure to a remote location. The inter-site transmission is compressed, cached and optimized by inserting Riverbed Steelhead network appliances on either side of the link. This solution meets disaster recovery objectives and proves much more cost-effective both to set up and to operate than an upgrade to higher bandwidth service. The net effect is a full disaster recovery capability with often very little (or even zero) lag, behind the live site even over surprisingly poor quality and low speed WAN links. Waterstons have successfully deployed this solution for several clients, and as a result, avoided unnecessary additional wide area line rental and secured more robust and more scalable DR, backup and restore systems. For more information on using virtualisation and WAN acceleration technologies, please read the Disaster Recovery white paper: http://www.datacore.com/downloads/DataCore_Riverbed_DR_22Sep08.pdf

Virtualisation Bucks the Recession Trend

Virtualisation bucks the recession trend:

As the recession bites, for the first time IDC has predicted a slowdown in storage spending. However latest reports show that the virtualisation and storage virtualisation markets continue to grow:

http://www.techworld.com/virtualisation/news/index.cfm?newsid=114241&email

We see this trend echoed at DataCore with data still exponentially growing as a by-product of any operating business, but with IT managers becoming more disconcerting with signing off what where considered previously as organic IT spends. Largely this used to simply involve throwing more external disk to combat data growth on the network. Virtualisation and hence consolidation has changed all that with IT managers able to meet the business data growth needs by reutilising external storage solutions already in their network. We are now seeing that the market is beginning to understand that they can meet their demands within their new budgets by layering cost effective high performance storage software on commodity servers. This is now becoming more common to implement it with existing storage to extend its life by supplementing additional power and flexibility, but also we are seeing customers choosing lower cost storage that when combined with storage software provides the required capacity and performance.

DataCore European Storage Virtualisation Partner and Customer Conference 2009: Virtualisation conference for channel and business

www.it-director.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=10708
DataCore Software is gathering partners, integrators and resellers at the DataCore European Storage Virtualisation Partner Conference (May 12/13) followed by a customer conference (May 14/15, The Golden Tulip, LTU-Arena Duesseldorf). Conference attendees benefit from first hand information on the virtualisation market, sales, and key technology developments. As well as key DataCore spokespeople, attendees have access to virtualisation experts from ADN, Azlan, DNA, Magirus and Citrix.

"In the present ecnomic downturn, storage virtualisation is like a vitamin syringe because it offers cost savings for businesses and growth potential for the channel. At the same time desktop, server and storage virtualisation technologies are becoming increasingly aggregated", explains Iris Hatzenbichler, marketing & operations manager EMEA in DataCore. "Within this climate we are holding our fourth partner and end user conference discussing both technical and sales opportunities but also unravelling some of the pitfalls that can surround virtualisation. We are pleased that we have already received lots of registrations and international interest."
The virtualisation experts from Florida expect numerous visitors from across Europe and as such, will offer senior international representation from various company divisions and countries. At the top of the technical delegation, stands DataCore's CTO and co-founder, Ziya Aral, who also brings product developers from Asia and the USA across to the Rhine Conference. Additionally sales and marketing representatives from France, Great Britain and Germany will be on hand throughout.

Recently introduced SANsymphony 7.0 and SANmelody 3.0 will be one of the key focusses. In presentations, workshops and best practice sessions, DataCore will inform and discuss in detail the new 64-bit versions as well as unravelling the "Transporter" Software, that enables an uninterrupted migration between physical and virtual platforms. Additionally, distribution partners ADN, Azlan, DNS and Magirus introduce concepts and offerings during the two-day conference. The programme is completed with an outlook on DataCore's roadmap by DataCore mastermind Ziya Aral.

Conference costs including overnight stay, conference pass, all meals and evening programme is 280 Euro.
12. - 13. May 2009: DataCore European Storage Virtualisation Partner Conference
14. - 15. May 2009: DataCore European Storage Virtualisation Customer Conference

The Golden Tulip, LTU-Arena Düsseldorf,
Registrations to Iris.Hatzenbichler@datacore.com

CRN UK Report Quotes Nick Broadbent of DataCore Software UK

"This used to simply involve throwing in more external disk to combat data growth on the network. Virtualisation and hence consolidation has transformed all that with IT managers able to meet the business data growth needs by re-utilising external storage solutions already in their network," said Nick Broadbent.

http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/news/2239784/recession-finally-hits-storage-4564528

According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, global storage software revenues in Q4, 2008 increased 3.6 per cent to $3.03bn (£2.16bn) over the same quarter a year ago. However, most vendors showed signs of slowed growth.

...Nick Broadbent, UK managing director of DataCore Software, agreed that managers are more reluctant to sign off what were previously considered organic IT spends.

"This used to simply involve throwing in more external disk to combat data growth on the network," said Broadbent.

"Virtualisation and hence consolidation has transformed all that with IT managers able to meet the business data growth needs by re-utilising external storage solutions already in their network."

DataCentre Times - DataCore demonstrates new SAN solutions

See: DataCore demonstrates new SAN solutions

Managing the large number of storage devices in the datacentre is a complex problem. Not everything uses the Storage Area Network (SAN) or Networked Attached Storage (NAS). A lot of data and machines still ship with Direct Attached Storage (DAS). The challenge is how to bring all of these into a single environment for the most efficient and secure usage.

This is where software vendor DataCore has found a niche and over the last two weeks, firstly at VMworld in Cannes and then at CeBIT in Hannover, they have been showing the latest features in their SANsymphony, SANmelody and Traveller CDP solutions...

With virtualisation high on everyone's agenda, DataCore is allowing the support of 64-bit mega caches, allowing up to 1TB of data to be held in cache. This means that several virtual machines can be held in cache drastically improving response times for users. "To ensure resiliency", Alexander Best says, "the cache is mirrored over multiple nodes. We have also extended the write cache from 2MB to 32MB per LUN and improved our global read-ahead cache schema."...
DataCore is also targeting the delay in migrating virtual machines between physical machines and hypervisors with its Transporter software. Transporter can also be used as part of a backup solution moving snapshots to backup devices.


Tony Lock, Programme Director, Freeform Dynamics states:

...the most interesting announcement concerns DataCore's "Transporter" which supplies Hypervisor Migration capabilities and better Integration to VMware Virtual Center.
" These functions could prove to be very useful as organisations begin to look at using multiple hypervisors in their environments and try to manage them as a pool rather than as a number of isolated islands of virtualisation. However DataCore needs to be very active to educate interested parties in how such functionality, and indeed the capabilities of its entire portfolio, can be exploited."

Are you serious about high availability?

Check out the new white paper by noted storage expert George Crump of Storage Switzerland: Are you serious about high availability?

How can we entertain such mirrored HA configurations when budgets are tight?
A possible solution is found in storage virtualization. DataCore Software, as an example, offers a straightforward and affordable software solution for organizations of all sizes. It runs on standard x86 servers, or on a virtual machine in an existing server virtualized by one of the popular hypervisor products from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Parallels and Virtual Iron.Solutions like these 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.

What are the performance implications when mirrors are stretched?
DataCore as an example employs advanced caching techniques that enable data to be written simultaneously to a perfectly mirrored pair at higher speeds than you would experience with the standalone array. When one side of the pair has to be taken down or suffers an unexpected outage, all the storage I/O is sustained from the second mirror without manual intervention. Nothing needs to be scripted or reconfigured. Read more...

DataCore Scoops 'Software Product the Year' Award for 2009

All eyes turned towards London last week at the prestigious Network Computing Awards for 2009 were unveiled where DataCore’s SANmelody was rewarded with the "Software Product of the Year" beating off stiff category competition from finalists EMC, CA, Attempo, amongst others.

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, Northern Europe, DataCore Software, commented, "It's great to receive this award as it demonstrates that network managers are moving away from the traditional hardware based solutions that disk manufacturers advocate in favour of a software storage solution that operates on anything and reutilises the storage and disk already in the network to provide greater utilisation, manageability, productivity, uptime and performance."

The Awards, voted on by thousands of Network Computing Magazine's readership, signifies the readers' appreciation of SANmelody and how it easily and cost effectively converts physical Intel/AMD servers or virtual machines (VMs) into fully capable virtual storage servers that are able to optimize, protect and manage storage over existing networks to fulfill the needs of application servers.

Other features that enticed winners' votes include SANmelody's thin provisioning for disk space capacity automation, point-in-time snapshots for fast disk based backups, and powerful data protection services that provide auto failover across redundant disk servers and long-distance asynchronous replication for disaster recovery over IP WANs.

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.