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Monday 13 July 2009

Newcastle International Airport flies high with DataCore's SANmelody

Newcastle International Airport flies high using DataCore’s SANmelody™ to provide high availability and provision virtual storage to complete their virtualised infrastructure.

DataCore Software and partner Waterstons have installed SANmelody™ as the storage area network (SAN) virtual infrastructure within the Airport’s data centres.

We are now realising the significant benefits of our virtualisation solution including reduced maintenance costs, energy savings in line with our ‘green’ initiatives and improved Disaster Recovery processes. DataCore's software and Waterstons’ expertise has been invaluable in this project.” George Nesbitt, General Manager of Business Development and IT, Newcastle International.

Newcastle International evaluated several SAN technologies before deciding to choose DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualisation solution for this project. SANmelody offered an attractive mix of comprehensive feature set, strong track record and the capability to leverage relatively low cost storage hardware, comparing favourably to other SAN solutions. Two storage servers were deployed, one in each IT facility. Inbuilt synchronous replication across gigabit networks ensures that both storage servers are identical ‘block level’ copies of each other. In the event of a component failure affecting either storage server, the other server instantly takes over workload.

Newcastle International connected the two data centres over an IP based network. iSCSI technology was key for the airport as it would readily operate over the highly resilient Ethernet network which connected the two data centres together.

“We increasingly see iSCSI adoption as the protocol of choice over the more expensive Fibre Channel. This is largely owing to its good performance at a relatively inexpensive price.” commented Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, DataCore Software.

Friday 10 July 2009

DataCore Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) Software

Article: DataCore Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) SoftwareSome approaches to high availability and disaster recovery require that an organization maintain a separate datacenter, DataCore’s approach is to utilize excess capacity in current datacenters. This approach is likely to be appealing to small to medium sized organizations that don’t have the luxury of maintaining a separate datacenter for disaster recovery...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/virtualization/?p=1028

For more information on ASR, see:
http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_live.asp?date=05/11/2009

Tuesday 7 July 2009

2009 Storage Awards - DataCore's SANmelody wins Green Solution of the Year

The 2009 UK Storage Awards were held in June, with DataCore up for no less than 6 finalist category nominations. DataCore won the Green Storage Solution of the Year for dramatic carbon reductions in space, power, cooling and asset re-utilisation gained from the consolidation and virtualisation project conducted with NCE Group, at the Open University.

Monday 6 July 2009

FUJIFILM UK focuses on DataCore's SANmelody for Storage Virtualisation and Disaster Recovery

"Consolidation was becoming increasingly necessary to stem the pressure on the team having to backup, manage and ultimately move redundant servers." stated Manish Amriwala, Network and Desktop support team manager, FUJIFILM UK. "We needed a dedicated SAN and virtualised servers that would accommodate our growth and transition us from the restrictions of disk space provided by Direct Attached Storage."

After considering the results of a full cost of ownership report provided by DataCore partner Vcentral which predicted that FUJIFILM UK could have an effective, robust virtualised environment using only 2/3rd of the hardware whilst also providing a watertight Disaster Recovery solution, FUJIFILM UK adopted three DataCore SANmelody 2.0 Fibre Channel SANs running on HP ML370 G5 machines with 12 x 146Gb SAS disks on each machine. Two SANmelody servers act as identical mirrors in active mode; and one being located in a separate DR site 5 miles from the main datacentre connected using a 10Mb LAN Extension link. In this configuration, SANmelody robustly supports the four VMware servers and twelve virtual servers and applications running on the network and provides a full Disaster Recovery solution.

Rollout commenced since March 2008 and within 2 months all major applications were transferred onto the 12 virtual servers. The network carries 3,4 TB or 1.7TB mirrored of data with a further 50% expansion remaining available. Installation was a seamless and relatively painless process notes Manish, "Within just 2-3 hours we had an operational business continuity and disaster recovery solution up and running. Now maintenance and allocating storage is much easier - using SANmelody in a mirrored configuration, patches and new applications and servers can be easily uploaded; as one SANmelody box can be taken down without any interruption to business applications as the other SANmelody takes over"

Plus there have been notable financial benefits in terms of cost savings managing the new virtualised datacentre environment. The team have equated the reduction of costs for the entire virtualisation campaign to being that of around £50,000 - £80,00 per annum in terms of reduction of man days for management and maintenance.
http://www.it-analysis.com/news_release.php?rel=11956