Washington Archives Management Deploys DataCore for a High-Availability Storage Virtualization Solution to Safeguard Citrix XenServer and Maximize Business Uptime

"The bigger picture here is that technology like this has previously been prohibitively expensive for a small to mid-size business customer. Sure, large companies have been deploying virtual servers and virtual SANs, but they have had to pay a huge price for doing so. DataCore's SANmelody enables the small business to get this kind of virtualization environment built and to do so without paying for Fibre Channel or paying over $100,000 for the SAN alone, which is what has made having a SAN unattainable for a large number of customers - before DataCore paved the way." - Summarizes Radford, System Administrator, Washington Archives Management,

A Shared Storage Approach from DataCore Combined with Citrix XenServer Delivers High Availability - Thereby, Eliminating Costly, Storage Related Downtime

DataCore Software today announced that its SANmelody software has been selected and deployed at Washington Archives Management (WAM) to serve as a high-availability, virtualized, storage area network (SAN) that works in conjunction with virtual servers from Citrix to deliver the redundancy this customer was desperately seeking. Now WAM has a fault-tolerant storage virtualization infrastructure that provides automated failover and failback recovery in the event of a network or hardware calamity in order to maximize business uptime. WAM is a 50-person archiving service that stores, archives and manages paper records.

"A forward-thinking approach combined with technological advances in virtualization has meant that our firm could avoid past failures," says Tom Radford, System Administrator, Washington Archives Management. "And by deploying redundancy in our network - as well as leveraging advances like automated failover and multi-pathing, XenMotion and - above all - a software-based SAN that delivers on the promise of virtualization, WAM has made it possible to eliminate costly, storage related downtime."

A hardware failure leads to a fresh start on the storage front

Moving the virtualized guests to the other server (in case of a hardware failure) was difficult because there was no shared storage - no SAN was in place, which is necessary to "motion" the virtual guests. As fate would have it, the firm did experience one ESX server failure and therefore was forced to run on only one ESX server. Without redundancy in the network, if any other component had failed, Washington Archives Management would have been "out of business" until it was fixed.

Read more... Washington Archives Managment and DataCore + Citrix