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Friday 28 February 2014

The Register Interviews DataCore CEO who waxes lyrically on software-defined storage and future storage technologies

El Reg: DataCore had a terrific year in 2013, breaking the 10,000 customer site number. It's a solidly successful supplier with a technology architecture that's enabled it and its customers to take advantage of industry standard server advances and storage architecture changes gracefully. 2014 should be no different with DataCore being stronger still by the end of it.”

Article: Future storage tech should KILL all-in-one solutions

El Reg had a conversation with DataCore president, CEO and co-founder George Teixeira about what’s likely to happen in 2014 with DataCore. Software-defined storage represents a trend that his company is well-positioned to take advantage of and he reckons DataCore could soar this year.

El Reg: How would you describe 2013 for DataCore?

George Teixeira: 2013 was the ‘tip of the iceberg’, in terms of the increasing complexity and the forces in play disrupting the old storage model, which has opened the market up. As a result, DataCore is positioned to have a breakout year in 2014 … Our momentum surged forward as we surpassed 25,000 license deployments at more than 10,000 customer sites [last year].

What’s more, the EMC ViPR announcement showcased the degree of industry disruption. It conceded that commoditisation and the movement to software-defined storage are inevitable. It was the exclamation point that the traditional storage model is broken.

El Reg: What are the major trends affecting DataCore and its customers in 2014?

George Teixeira: Storage got complicated as flash technologies emerged for performance, while SANs continued to optimise utilisation and management - two completely contradictory trends. Add cloud storage to the mix and all together, it has forced a redefinition of the scope and flexibility required by storage architectures. Moreover, the complexity and need to reconcile these contradictions put automation and management at the forefront, thus software.

A new refresh cycle is underway … the virtualisation revolution has made software the essential ingredient to raise productivity, increase utilisation, and extend the life of … current [IT] investments.

Last year set the tone. Sales were up in flash, commodity storage, and virtualization software. In contrast, look what happened to the expensive, higher margin system sales last year – they were down industry-wide. Businesses realized they no longer can afford inflexible and tactical hardware-defined models. Instead, they are increasingly applying their budget dollars to intelligent software that leverages existing investments and lower cost hardware – and less of it!

Server-side and flash technology for better application performance has taken off. The concept is simple. Keep the disks close to the applications, on the same server and add flash for even greater performance. Don’t go out over the wire to access storage for fear that network latency will slow down I/O response. Meanwhile, the storage networking and SAN supporters contend that server-side storage wastes resources and that flash is only needed for five percent of the real-world workloads, so there is no need to pay such premium prices. They argue it is better to centralize all your assets to get full utilization, consolidate expensive common services like back-ups and increase business productivity by making it easier to manage and readily shareable.

The major rub is obvious. It appears when local disk and flash storage resources, which improve performance, defeat the management and productivity gains from those same resources by unhooking them from being part of the centralised storage infrastructure. Software that can span these worlds appears to be the only way to reconcile the growing contradiction and close the gap. Hence the need for an all-inclusive software-defined storage architecture.

A software-defined storage architecture must manage, optimise and span all storage, whether located server-side or over storage networks. Both approaches make sense and need to be part of a modern software-defined architecture.

Why force users to choose? Our latest SANsymphony-V release allows both worlds to live in harmony since it can run on the server-side, on the SAN or both. Automation in software and auto-tiering across both worlds is just the beginning. Future architectures must take read and write paths, locality, cache and path optimizations and a hundred other factors into account and generally undermine the possibility of all-in-one solutions. A true ‘enterprise-wide’ software-defined storage architecture must work across multiple vendor offerings and across the varied mix and levels of RAM devices, flash technologies, spinning disks and even cloud storage.

El Reg: How will this drive DataCore's product (and service?) roadmap this year?

George TeixeiraThe future is an increasingly complex, but hidden environment, which will not allow nor require much if any human intervention. This evolution is natural. Think about what one expects from today’s popular virtualization offerings and major applications, but exactly this type of sophistication and transparency. Why should storage be any different?
Unlike others who are talking roadmaps and promises, DataCore is already out front and has set the standard for software-defined storage as our software is in production at thousands of real world customer sites today. DataCore offers the most comprehensive and universal set of features and these features work across all the popular storage vendor brands, models of storage arrays and flash devices. Automating and optimizing the use of these devices no matter where they reside within servers or in storage networks.

DataCore will continue to focus on evolving its server-side capabilities, enhance the performance and productive use of in-memory technologies like DRAM, flash and new wave caching technologies across storage environments. [We'll take] automation to the next level.

DataCore already scales out to support up 16 node grid architectures and we expect to quadruple that number this year.

[We] will continue to abstract complexity away from the users and reduce mundane tasks through automation and self-adaptive technologies to increase productivity. ... For larger scale environments and private cloud deployments, there will be a number of enhancements in the areas of reporting, monitoring and storage domain capabilities to simplify management and optimise ‘enterprise-wide’ resource utilisation.

VSAN "opens the door without walking through it."
El Reg: How does DataCore view VMware's VSAN? Is this a storage resource it can use?

George Teixeira: Simply put, it opens the door without walking through it. It introduces virtual pooling capabilities for server-side storage that meets lower-end requirements while delivering promises of things to come for VMware-only environments. It sets the stage for DataCore to fullfil customers’ need to seamlessly build out a production class, enterprise-wide software-defined storage architecture.

It opens up many opportunities for DataCore for users who want to upscale. VSAN builds on DataCore concepts but is limited and just coming out of beta, whereas DataCore has a 9th generation platform in the marketplace.

Beyond VSAN, DataCore spans a composite world of storage running locally in servers, in storage networks, or in the cloud. Moreover, DataCore supports both physical and virtual storage for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, Oracle, Linux, Apple, Netware, Unix and other diverse environments found in the real world.

Will you be cheeky enough to take a bite at EMC?
El Reg: How would you compare and contrast DataCore's technology with EMC's ScaleIO?
George Teixeira: We see ourselves as a much more comprehensive solution. We are a complete storage architecture. I think the better question is how will EMC differentiate its ScaleIO offerings from VMware VSAN solutions?
George Teixeira: Both are trying to address the server-side storage issues using flash technology, but again why have different software and separate islands or silos of management, one for the VMware world, one for the Microsoft Hyper-V world, one for the physical storage world, one for the SAN?
This looks like a divide and complicate approach when consolidation, automation and common management across all these worlds are the real answers for productivity. That is the DataCore approach. Instead, this silo approach of many offerings appears to be driven by the commercial requirements of EMC versus the real needs of the marketplace.
El Reg: Does DataCore envisage using an appliance model to deliver its software?
George Teixeira: Do we envisage an appliance delivery model? Yes, in fact, it already exists. We work with Fujitsu, Dell and a number of system builders to package integrated software/hardware bundles. We are rolling out the new Fujitsu DataCore SVA storage virtualization appliance platform within Europe this quarter.
We also have the DataCore appliance builder program in place targeting the system builder community and have a number of partners including Synnex Hyve Solutions which provides virtual storage appliances using Dell, HP or Supermicro Appliances Powered by DataCore and Fusion-io.
El Reg: How will DataCore take advantage of flash in servers used as storage memory? I'm thinking of the SanDisk/SMART ULLtraDIMM used in IBM's X6 server and Micron's coming NVDIMM technology.
George Teixeira: We are already positioned to do so. New hybrid NVDIMM type technology is appealing. It sits closer to the CPU and promises flash speeds without some of the negatives. But it is just one of the many innovations yet to come.
Technology will continue to blur the line between memory and disk technologies going forward, especially in the race for faster application response times by getting closer to the CPU and central RAM.
Unlike others who will have to do a lot of hard coding, and suffer the delays and reversals of naivety trying to keep up with new innovations, DataCore learned from experience and designed early on software to rapidly absorb new technology and make it work. Bring on these types of innovations; we are ready to make the most of them.
El Reg: Does DataCore believe object storage technology could be a worthwhile addition to its feature set?
George Teixeira: Is object storage worthwhile? Yes, we are investing R&D and building out our OpenStack capabilities as part of our object storage strategy; other interfaces and standards are also underway. It is part of our software-defined storage platform, but it makes no sense to bet simply on the talk in the marketplace and on these emerging strategies exclusively.
The vast bulk of the marketplace is file and block storage capabilities and that is where we are primarily focused this year. Storage technology advances and evolves, but not necessarily in the way we direct it to, therefore object storage is one of the possibilities for the future along with much more relevant, near term advances that customers can benefit from today.
El Reg: DataCore had a terrific year in 2013, breaking the 10,000 customer site number. It's a solidly successful supplier with a technology architecture that's enabled it and its customers to take advantage of industry standard server advances and storage architecture changes gracefully. 2014 should be no different with DataCore being stronger still by the end of it. ®

Thursday 27 February 2014

Legacy Pharmaceuticals entrusts DataCore's SANsymphony-V Storage Virtualisation to Scale out their Virtual Infrastructure

DataCore SANsymphony at Legacy Pharmaceuticals 

Rather than NetApp, EMC and HP

Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer, Legacy Pharmaceuticals Switzerland GmbH have entrusted DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V to implement and scale out their virtual infrastructure to support the introduction of their critical ERP system based on IFS and Oracle databases.
Legacy Pharmaceuticals

Read full article at:
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/customer-wins/datacore-sansymphony-at-legacy-pharmaceuticals-switzerland/ 

The software-defined virtual infrastructure is based on DataCore for storage virtualisation and VMware, Inc. for server virtualisation. Overall, the solution provided higher performance and higher availability compared to other evaluated alternatives and the total cost, including what was required for a redundant SAN hardware and software design, was around 60% lower than the price of alternative non-redundant single SAN systems.

"DataCore SANsymphony-V gave us more flexibility and scalability than a hardware SAN and it was able to meet our HA and performance requirements perfectly. Not only did we gain a redundant SAN architecture, but we achieved a 40% savings in the initial investment in comparison to conventional hardware SAN solutions and now we can adjust our storage infrastructure to meet our requirements without having any storage vendor lock-in", said Sascha Fritz, IT expert, Legacy Pharmaceuticals.

As a company in the Swiss pharmaceutical industry, Legacy Pharma is committed to quality and safety standards. These are mandated by the Swiss regulatory and supervisory authority and have specific compliance requirements and remedies which are regularly audited.
The compliance guidelines, required by the state as well as those established based on voluntary standards must also fit within the practical bounds of economic feasibility in regards to the IT that is implemented. The need for compliance and cost-effectiveness IT productivity are key competitive advantages to maintain leadership in the industry.
For these reasons, Legacy Pharma decided to implement a new IT infrastructure and ERP validated system according to the latest GAMP 5 guidelines.

Good Automated Manufacturing Practice (GAMP) is a standard framework for the validation of computerised systems within the pharmaceutical industry. However, for the ERP system with IFS, theolder AS400 environment with NetApp storage but critically without full redundancy, were no longer suitable.
"Therefore our IT environment had to be upgraded. In cooperation with IT service provider Steffen Informatik AG, we decided to go with a virtual infrastructure and put our ERP system on VMs running on VMware," says Sascha Fritz.

At the same time, a new storage solution with appropriate availability and performance needed to be found. The SAN solutions offered by NetApp, EMC and HP that were evaluated did not allow a redundant environment within budget. Finally, the project virtualisation experts at Steffen Informatik AGpresented SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation software that provided sophisticated enterprise storage features and using standard industry storage components.

SANsymphony-V virtualises storage resources regardless of manufacturer or model and provisions virtual disks to physical and virtual servers, and mirrors them synchronously to achieve HA between any two DataCore powered x86 based servers. The storage management for all resources in the infrastructure can be centralised, made flexible and automated. Furthermore, DataCore integrates into the VMware server management systems.

The flexibility of DataCore allowed for the existing NetApp systems to be integrated, but instead they were replaced due to their high continuing maintenance costs.

The new DataCore and VMware based software-defined virtual infrastructure was preconfigured by Steffen Informatik and installed in parallel to the old solution. Then the subsequent migration of physical servers to VMs took place gradually. The new IFS ERP system with all the components for production, development and test systems, including the underlying Oracle databases and MS Exchange, MS SQL, domain server and print services were transferred to the virtual environment. In addition, the Citrix XenApp environment used for virtualisation of applications on thin clients was set up to run on the HA DataCore storage.

"The project was managed by our staff and by Steffen Informatik who were very competent and efficient. Importantly they were able to implement the GAMP 5-validation successfully. Compared to the previous solution, we now have a virtual infrastructure that combines VMware and DataCore as a highly flexible and thus more economical platform to meet our needs. DataCore SANsymphony-V enabled greater performance and higher availability at a cost point that other solutions could not equal or provide. We are very satisfied," says Sascha Fritz.

Opinion and Insights: Revenues Trump Innovation at Large Tech Companies

Let’s face it. Large B2B tech companies don’t come up with groundbreaking innovations. They are too big and are too busy with action items, corporate politics and intense pressure from the street to develop new innovations and bring those ideas to market in a reasonable timeframe. They also have a big reason not to monkey with the status quo, billions of reasons actually. Faster, cheaper, better typically means less revenue.
Turns out Wall Street isn’t a big fan of cool innovations that decrease revenue, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perched high on the list of career limiting moves in Silicon Valley is driving a plan to develop innovative products and services that will decrease revenue.
The truth is, most great ideas from the major hardware and software vendors leave with their creators, stop on Sand Hill road for funding and end up in a little office in the Valley. Big ideas can mean big money. Visionary engineers aren’t turning their moment of genius over to a big political machine to get kicked around meeting rooms for three years only to resurface neutered and too late to matter anyway.
Big tech companies, especially hardware vendors, will continue to fight to the death to keep their antiquated products moving off the shelves. Sluggish economics made 2013 a great year to buy dated technology; 70, 80, even 90 percent discounts on six-figure hardware deals. What’s happening here? While these products are selling for next to nothing, vendors are now charging 20 percent of the list price for support and updates.
This is a plan that certainly works for Wall Street and it is hard for customers to resist. What would you do if you bought a new car two years ago for $50,000 and your dealer called you at the end of the year saying they’d give you a new care for $5,000? Anyone would take that deal!
VMware had this same problem getting their groundbreaking technology off the ground. Customers could install their technology and use 90 percent less server hardware. While this was great for the customers, HP, Dell and IBM certainly weren’t happy with VMware. The same thing could be said for resellers, as they certainly weren’t interested in selling 90 percent less hardware.
The resellers are just as weary about messing with their nest egg. However large or small, the few VARs that actually survive their first two years in business did so for a reason — they realized that running a tech resale business is about making money. The rash of leads, rebates and SPIFs coming from their big vendors are too lucrative for the resellers with influence to take a chance on anything new.
The hardest part of getting new innovations to market is cutting through the big tech companies marketing machines and their incredibly talented (and well paid) sales people to get prospective customers to consider new technologies. There really isn’t a villain to blame, but there is a hero.
Ultimately, the buyers of technology are the heroes of our industry. They are our saving grace. Despite pressure from their upper management, the people in the trenches that do this because they love it are the ones that keep us moving in the right direction.
To those visionary technologists, don’t believe all the marketing hype from big tech. Keep innovating. By doing so, you will help shape the future of the industry.
Paul Murphy is VP of Worldwide Marketing at DataCore.

Wednesday 19 February 2014

Legacy Pharmaceuticals Trusts DataCore to Scale Out Its Virtual Infrastructure and Support its Critical ERP, Oracle and VMware Systems


“DataCore SANsymphony-V gave us more flexiblity and scalablity than a hardware SAN and it was able to meet our high availability and performance requirements perfectly. Not only did we gain a redundant SAN architecture, but we achieved a 40 percent savings in the initial investment in comparison to conventional hardware SAN solutions and now we can adjust our storage infrastructure to meet our requirements without having any storage vendor lock-in", Sascha Fritz, IT Expert at Legacy Pharmaceuticals Switzerland.

Legacy Pharmaceuticals have entrusted DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V to implement and scale out their virtual infrastructure to support the introduction of their critical ERP system based on IFS and Oracle databases. The software-defined virtual infrastructure is based on DataCore for storage virtualisation and VMware for server virtualisation. 

Overall, the DataCore solution provided higher performance and higher availability compared to all other evaluated alternatives and the total cost, including what was required for a redundant SAN hardware and software design, was around 60 per cent lower than the price of alternative non-redundant single SAN systems.

As a leading company in the Swiss pharmaceutical industry, Legacy Pharma is committed to the highest quality and safety standards. These are mandated by the Swiss regulatory and supervisory authority and have specific compliance requirements and remedies which are regularly audited.

The compliance guidelines, required by the state as well as those established based on voluntary standards, must also fit within the practical bounds of economic feasibility in regards to the information technology that is implemented. The need for compliance, cost-effectiveness and innovative IT productivity are key competitive advantages to maintain leadership in the industry. For these reasons, Legacy Pharma decided to implement a new IT infrastructure and ERP validated system according to the latest GAMP 5 guidelines. "Good Automated Manufacturing Practice" (short: GAMP) is a standard framework for the validation of computerised systems within the pharmaceutical industry. However, for the ERP system with IFS, the older AS400 environment with NetApp storage but critically without full redundancy, were no longer suitable.

"Therefore our IT environment had to be upgraded. In cooperation with IT service provider Steffen Informatik, we decided to go with a virtual infrastructure and put our ERP system on virtual machines running on VMware," says Sascha Fritz.

At the same time, a new storage solution with appropriate availability and performance needed to be found. The SAN solutions offered by NetApp, EMC and HP that were evaluated did not allow a fully redundant environment within budget. Finally, the project virtualisation experts at Steffen Informatik presented DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation software that provided sophisticated enterprise storage features and using standard industry storage components.

SANsymphony-V virtualises storage resources regardless of manufacturer or model and provisions virtual disks to physical and virtual servers, and mirrors them synchronously to achieve high-availably between any two DataCore powered x86 based servers. The storage management for all resources in the infrastructure can be centralised, made flexible and automated. Furthermore, DataCore integrates seamlessly into the VMware server management systems.

The flexibility of DataCore allowed for the existing NetApp systems to be easily integrated, but instead they were replaced due to their high continuing maintenance costs.

The new DataCore and VMware based software-defined virtual infrastructure was preconfigured by Steffen Informatik and installed in parallel to the old solution. Then the subsequent migration of physical servers to virtual machines took place gradually. The new IFS ERP system with all the components for production, development and test systems, including the underlying Oracle databases and MS Exchange, MS SQL, domain server and print services were transferred to the virtual environment. In addition, the Citrix XenApp environment used for virtualisation of applications on thin clients was set up to run on the high-availability DataCore storage.


"The project was managed by our staff and by Steffen Informatik who were very competent and efficient. Importantly they were able to implement the GAMP 5-validation successfully. Compared to the previous solution, we now have a virtual infrastructure that combines VMware and DataCore as a highly flexible and thus more economical platform to meet our needs. DataCore SANsymphony-V enabled greater performance and higher availability at a cost point that other solutions could not equal or provide. We are very satisfied," says Sascha Fritz.

Friday 14 February 2014

ComputerWorld.UK: Chatham House overcomes outages with DataCore storage virtualisation


See full article at: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/infrastructure/3502081/chatham-house-overcomes-outages-with-datacore-storage-virtualisation/ 

Systems can be restored in two hours

Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs global think tank, has solved its data network problems with a virtualisation system from DataCore.
DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation software is being used to solve outage and application access problems at Chatham House in central London.
Paul Curtin, finance and operations director at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said: "Outages were becoming more frequent and a distinct problem. Sporadic performance was also an issue, with unreliable access and poor response times being delivered to staff from critical applications such as Exchange email or database mining."
He said: "Whilst we had benefitted from the success of a consolidated virtualisation deployment some years previously, it was recognised that we were being dramatically hindered by the existing underlying storage supporting the virtual servers.”
...Two HP ProLiant DL385 standard servers running two licences of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software in a mirrored synchronous format were deployed, to form a centrally managed virtual storage pool from which the Institute’s 24 VMware virtual machines (VMs) could "draw disk".
This immediately alleviated the previous I/O bottlenecks, as the multiple VMs running on the same physical servers could now access a readily available shared pool of storage.
Curtin said: "Previously, so unstable was the storage array, that we couldn’t even guarantee 24x7 access. The installation of DataCore’s SANsyphony-V software layer immediately enhanced the service, so the days of 48-hour downtime whilst we re-indexed Exchange email and addressed database corruption have been totally eradicated.”
In addition, a disaster recovery system was also delivered by a third asynchronous SANsymphony-node, housed outside of central london in a secure data centre hosted facility acting as a contingency site.
...Through disaster recovery simulation tests, SDT says it can have all assets, applications and data back up and running within a two-hour window.

DataCore SANsymphony-V R9.0.3 Storage Virtualization Software picks up Storage Magazine Software-defined Storage Award

Please note: Storage Magazine reviewed submissions from earlier in the year and selected DataCore SANsymphony-V R9.0.3 for review and the award, since then, DataCore has had a major update R9.0.4 which has greatly enhanced the functionality, please see: DataCore Software’s Newest SANsymphony-V R.9.0.4 Update Release Sets the Standard for Software-Defined Storage Platforms
See today's announcement: Storage Magazine Storage Product of the Year 2013 Awards http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/feature/DataCore-SANsymphony-V-R903 
The DataCore SANsymphony-V update scored highest in functionality among the finalists in the category. New features included wizards to provision multiple virtual disks from templates, group commands to manage storage for multiple application hosts, storage profiles for improved control of resources, auto-tiering and replication, heat maps to optimize performance, and a database repository option for recording and analyzing performance history.
One judge called DataCore SANsymphony-V R9.0.3 a "nice upgrade to scale-out SAN storage as a virtual appliance" from "one of the original storage virtualization vendors."
DataCore Software SANsymphony-V R9.0.3
"Their GUI has made administration easier," said one long-time user. "Performance Counter Recording is helpful when troubleshooting issues and is easy to use, and Performance Counter keeps tabs on everything to see quickly if there are any issues."
SANsymphony's ninth release also boosted scalability to eight nodes per centralized group, improved response time through I/O tuning and DRAM cache optimizations, and added support for persistent Tier-0 flash memory storage, 16 Gbps Fibre Channel ports and Windows Server 2012. The product scope expanded from external SANs to server-side virtual SANs with internal and direct-attached storage.

Thursday 13 February 2014

Why All the Buzz Around Software Defined Storage?

Check out this video presentation and Q&A session on Software-defined Storage.

Paul Murphy, VP of WW Marketing at DataCore Software explains why the idea of software-defined storage has picked up momentum in the storage industry and covers the key features and benefits of a software-defined storage solution. View: Why All the Buzz Around Software Defined Storage?


View: Why All the Buzz Around Software Defined Storage?

Wednesday 12 February 2014

Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, decides on DataCore’s Storage Virtualisation Software to attain a faster, agile and resilient IT environment

Leading Global Think Tank achieves High Availability with a dramatic increase of I/O throughput and Watertight Disaster Recovery - through the deployment of a software defined storage layer.

Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs global Think Tank, has standardised on DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation software. Famous worldwide for the Chatham House Rule facilitating free speech and confidentiality at meetings, the Institute promotes thought-provoking insight into international affairs through open debates, extensive research and analysis on the world’s leading topics.  As such, Institute staff and Associate Fellows undertake global research and analysis and require constant access to the extensive range of research databases and infrastructure applications. 

Paul Curtin, Finance and Operations Director at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, details the issues. “18 months ago, outages were becoming more frequent and a distinct problem. Sporadic performance was also an issue – with unreliable access and poor response times being delivered to staff from critical applications such as Exchange email or database mining. Whilst we had benefitted from the success of a consolidated virtualisation some years previously, it was recognised that we were being dramatically hindered by the existing underlying storage supporting the virtual servers.”

Enter DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software proposed by DataCore Gold accredited partner of choice to the Institute, SDT, to effectively identify and combat a number of frequent and untraceable disruptions that were happening on the previously running SAN solution.  SDT recognised that the data degradation and unreliability issues could be quickly stemmed through deployment of a software defined storage layer, whilst also providing a watertight Disaster Recovery solution. 

Andrew Wayman, SDT Project Manager on the installation comments: “Firstly we addressed the ailing performance issues by installing two HP ProLiant DL385 standard servers running two licences of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V in a mirrored synchronous format to form a centrally managed virtual storage pool from which the Institute’s 24 VMware’s Virtual Machines (VMs) could  draw disk.”  This immediately alleviated the previous I/O bottlenecks, as the multiple VMs running on the same physical servers could now access a readily available shared pool of storage. Indeed, as SANsymphony-V uses CPUs and memory as high speed cache - automatically optimising read and write traffic - I/O throughput is dramatically increased, hence alleviating the Institute’s unpredictable response times from frequent performance spikes. Interestingly, in this not-for-profit organisation where financial resources remain a key consideration, SDT were able to repurpose its investments using two HP ProLiant DataCore servers from the previous environment, along with the three existing physical servers.

Paul comments: - “Previously so unstable was the storage array, that we couldn’t even guarantee 24x7 access. The installation of DataCore’s SANsyphony-V software layer immediately enhanced the service so thankfully, the days of 48 hour downtime whilst we re-indexed Exchange email and addressed database corruption, have been totally eradicated.”

Watertight Disaster Recovery was the next milestone in deployment required due to the high profile nature and influence of the Institute on the world’s stage, together with its Central London location. To address the threat SDT recommended deployment of a third asynchronous SANsymphony-node, housed outside of Central London in a secure data centre hosted facility acting as contingency site. Within this managed facility, SDT utilises SANsymphony-V’s low-impact and space efficient snapshot technology to replicate data and applications. Andrew details: “Watertight Disaster Recovery is what every high profile organisation strives for. With an asynchronous deployment of SANsymphony-V replication services outside of the Central London risk area, into a secure, managed location, we have achieved this and continue to test its effectiveness regularly. We know from our full DR simulated tests, that we can have all assets, applications and data, back and running within a two hour window. “

In the back office, management under one single SANsymphony-V management console is also significantly easier for the Institute, with a central operational view of distributed resources on the SAN. With DataCore’s integrated set of advanced provisioning, data protection, and replication functions, legacy models and differing brands of storage devices are managed centrally as a unified group. Provisioning new VMs therefore becomes clicks away and non-disruptive; as is maintenance, which can now be planned, co-ordinated and performed by switching between nodes, meaning that no system downtime is required.

Paul concludes. “Together with SDT and deploying DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation software, a monumental shift in the efficiency of the organisation has been achieved, without the necessity of an entire rip-out and replacement. Not only has critical performance and considerable availability gains been achieved, but IT management is better controlled and facilitated. It’s one Chatham House rule that we are happy to shout about.”

About Chatham House
Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is a world-leading source of independent analysis, informed debate and influential ideas on how to build a prosperous and secure world for all. The institute engages governments, the private sector, civil society and its members in open debates and confidential discussions about significant developments in international affairs; produces independent and rigorous analysis of critical global, regional and country-specific challenges and opportunities and offers new ideas to decision-makers and -shapers on how these could best be tackled from the near- to the long-term.


Monday 10 February 2014

DataCore ‘storms’ into 2014 and expands investments in Europe and sets up Engineering team in London

DataCore ‘storms’ into 2014 

DataCore is further expanding its investment and staff in Europe to take DataCore’s Software Defined Storage solution, SANsymphony-V, into the next generation and beyond. The Engineering Team has expanded from their current facilities in Florida and Bulgaria, to additionally recruit the wealth of talented developers in the UK in the London area. Meanwhile, in EMEA DataCore HQ in Munich, two key marketing hires have been onboarded and are already actively contributing to increasing brand awareness and quality Sales and Marketing programmes across the region.
“Undoubtedly, 2014 will be the year of software defined data centres and software defined storage – and whilst many vendors jumped on the bandwagon hastily repurposing and rebranding their existing platforms, we continued to increase investment and build upon development of our industry-leading 9th generation software defined platform, SANsymphony-V, further investing in the expansion of our Engineering and Marketing Teams, to ensure that our customers continue to reap the benefits of hardware independence, high availability and performance improvements through a software layer that optimises customer’s new and installed storage investments.” reflected George Teixeira, CEO, DataCore.

Nick Connolly, Sr. Director and Chief Architect at DataCore, is heading the growth of the London Engineering facility and comments further: “Based in Greater London, DataCore’s initial UK Engineering office will accommodate 6 engineers, with the potential to grow further in the longer term. We have already filled three of these positions with top-class engineers and continue with recruitment plans for the remaining posts.”

The growth in the EMEA Marketing efforts is fuelled by the hiring of Michel Portelli as EMEA Sales & Marketing Programs Manager (formerly of Hewlett Packard EMEA) and Robert Thurnhofer Marketing Manager Central Europe (formerly of storage software giant, Computer Associates) to drive European marketing programmes and initiatives that directly contribute to increased sales across the region. Michel comments: “No-one argues that DataCore has an outstanding software solution with SANsymphony-V. Critics and competitors alike begrudgingly agree that it stands in a class of its own. Now the terminology behind Software Defined Data Centres is more widely adopted and understood, the market opportunity is expanding; so we stand strategically positioned to expand our pull marketing programmes to capitalise on what we have had in place for over a decade with 10,000 customers achieving significant storage efficiencies and cost savings without replacing their existing storage infrastructure.”

Thursday 6 February 2014

AVIA Service Stations Rely on DataCore Storage Virtualization for Business Continuity and Critical Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP System Operations

AVIA Osterwalder Zurich AG, the leading operator and supplier of AVIA gas stations in Switzerland, has deployed DataCore storage virtualization software to improve its storage performance, simplify management and provide high-speed mirrored protection for its mission-critical applications. These applications include the company’s core ERP application Microsoft Dynamics NAV plus its Microsoft SQL Database and Microsoft Exchange mail systems. With DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization in place the company has added a new level of business continuity and high-availability at its main IT site and has put in place the infrastructure to support disaster recovery through additional replication capabilities to an outsourced data center. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V has proven itself to be cost-effective and reliable.
"Our IT operations and critical business applications are exposed to constant change and growth demands, with the DataCore solution in place we not only have met our acute needs, but we have made a long-term investment that we believe is a strategic advantage,” said Christian Arragain, head of the computer science department at AVIA Osterwalder Zurich AG. “Without hesitation, we can say that everything promised with SANsymphony-V has been delivered."
AVIA operates more than 3,000 AVIA petrol stations in 14 European countries. Osterwalder Zurich AG operates over 120 petrol stations in Switzerland and needs to ensure the supply and flow of fuels be completed while maintaining the highest level of safety. Besides petroleum products for service stations Osterwalder Zurich AG supplies wholesale and retail customers with diesel fuel, lubricants, fuel oils and pellets.
ERP system is the core application to run the business
At Osterwalder Zurich AG, all IT Services provided are centrally located. The heart of the IT operations is the ERP system, which manages orders, processing and delivery to gas stations and business clients. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is the basis of the ERP system implemented. While no downtime is tolerable, a failure in the winter months for business is almost unthinkable.
The company needed to increase its reliability and provide better protection for its central storage systems and the best way to do so was to establish a second data center remote from the site in Niederhasli (about twenty kilometers away from the main site). With two data centers, the company would have access to more capacity, higher performance and increased availability with a solution that could provide fast synchronous mirroring and a cost-effective solution for disaster recovery.
SANsymphony-V better protects AVIA’s business and investments
In the central data center, SANsymphony-V runs on two standard IBM servers, in effect, transforming them into intelligent storage servers. These DataCore servers provision and supply both the internal and external storage capacity from arrays to application servers. DataCore caching optimizes all workloads across all their storage to greatly improve performance and application response times. Between the two redundant DataCore systems the data is synchronously mirrored at high-speeds. Continuous availability of operations is ensured through the auto failover and auto failback features of SANsymphony-V. In effect, the systems stay up and if one side fails it provides an automatic restart making the process non-disruptive to the critical business applications.
For their disaster recovery site AVIA Osterwalder Zurich AG has implemented automatic, asynchronous site replication using DataCore’s integrated Advanced Site Recovery feature over a WAN link. This link connects to an emergency data center for disaster recovery purposes. At this remote location, a VMware server and a DataCore storage server with internal storage capacity is operating on IBM hardware. The systems use asynchronous mirroring to replicate vital information between the sites. In case of a major emergency or site disaster, the data center, which is equipped with emergency generators, can be begin operating in a very short time.
"The concept and our evaluation process with existing references convinced us that DataCore was the right solution. In addition to the high availability and disaster recovery requirements, DataCore’s storage virtualization software provided a new level of flexibility and ease of management. Even more, the evaluation we conducted showed clearly that DataCore offered the best value for money, so we decided in favor of SANsymphony-V,” continued Arragain.