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Monday 28 June 2010

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


DataCore's SANmelody™ endorsed as the critical dimension for three-dimensional virtualisation. http://www.it-director.com/enterprise/technology/news_release.php?rel=18517
DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualisation software, has once again scooped one of the UK's top storage awards by winning the Virtualisation 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 virtualisation. 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 virtualisation."

Virtualisation 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 virtualisation 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 Virtualisation Product of the Year Award signifies the readers' appreciation of how it easily and cost-effectively converts physical Intel/AMD servers or virtual machines (VMs) into fully-capable, virtualisation 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 virtualisation managers easier and more effective.

Monday 21 June 2010

DataCore Storage Virtualisation and Citrix Xen

For more details: DataCore Storage Virtualisation and Citrix Xen

'The virtual infrastructure that encompasses both server and storage virtualisation 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 virtualised environment, spanning Citrix Xen and SANmelody that makes this possible.'

"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.'"
Full story: http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=14965

Wednesday 9 June 2010

Photos and Customers at Microsoft Tech-Ed 2010: DataCore Virtualization Software, Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft Cluster Servers



Customers showcased using both DataCore and Microsoft in virtualization infrastructures includes health network Continuum Health Partners (www.datacore.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.

Monday 7 June 2010

At Tech-Ed 2010 – Metro Clustering Using Microsoft and DataCore

At Tech-Ed 2010 – Metro Clustering Using Microsoft and DataCore
Onsite today in New Orleans 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 .

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 .

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Serious about High-availability? Eliminate Storage-related Downtime, Not Just Hardware Device Failures

Storage Switzerland White Paper: http://www.datacore.com/downloads/SeriousHA.pdf

The economic downturn is no time to compromise on data availability, especially when storage virtualization software has made it possible to eliminate costly, storage-related downtime without paying a premium.

If you are serious about high availability, look for storage virtualization software that provides the ability to stretch the two mirrored locations, potentially several kilometers apart yet still present mirrored virtual disks to applications as if they were single, high-performance drives.