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Thursday 31 July 2014

DataCore Expands and Amplifies Its Software-Defined Storage Market Impact with New Office and Team in Silicon Valley

Strengthens Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area Presence With Experienced Leadership Team Focused on Building Strategic Partnerships and Market Awareness
DataCore, a leader in software-defined storage, today announced the opening of a new Silicon Valley area office located in San Francisco and an expanded team to build upon the company’s growing presence and momentum. A diverse and experienced team of storage and virtualization industry executives has been assembled together to help propel DataCore’s marketing and strategic alliance initiatives. The team includes, Sushant Rao, Haluk Ulubay and Devi Madhavan, who will lead company-wide product marketing, demand generation and field readiness initiatives. Phil Williams, who will target and develop OEM partnerships and strategic alliances; Peter Thompson, who will oversee the growing DataCore Asia-Pacific (APAC) Sales Operations; and DataCore’s west coast regional sales team, will also utilize the new facility.
“DataCore started the software-defined revolution in storage, has thousands of customers worldwide, and now is well positioned with a presence and a high-caliber team in Silicon Valley to amplify our industry impact.”
“The storage industry is undergoing major disruption and the time is right for DataCore to breakthrough and seize the larger market opportunity,” said Steve Houck, COO of DataCore. “DataCore started the software-defined revolution in storage, has thousands of customers worldwide, and now is well positioned with a presence and a high-caliber team in Silicon Valley to amplify our industry impact.”
The expanded DataCore team in the Bay Area will advance the company’s visibility in the industry and further the software-defined storage leader’s ability to increase strategic alliances and develop local customer and partner relationships. Recent examples include companies announcing new DataCore Ready partnerships with DataCore such as SANdisk, PureStorage, Fusion-io, Commvault, Microsoft, VMware and Dell. Another example is the latest announcement of Nexus as a DataCore Premier Partner, a Dimension Data company well recognized as a leading IT solution provider and award winning Cisco Partner of the year. DataCore’s presence in the Silicon Valley region will help bolster these types of partnerships and provide the proximity needed to strengthen and increase DataCore’s growing ecosystem of strategic alliances.
The DataCore team in Silicon Valley
The San Francisco office boasts multiple talented new additions to the leadership team, including Sushant Rao who joins DataCore as the senior director of product and solutions marketing. He previously worked as director of product and solution marketing at PernixData, and before that at Virsto and VMware. Haluk Ulubay, also joins as the senior director of marketing, responsible for leading a team of integrated marketing campaigns, with a sharp focus on lead generation and conversions. Previously, Ulubay has held marketing roles at Cisco and most recently served as director of enterprise networking at Juniper Networks, where he led the global campaigns team that builds, implements and executes global demand generations campaigns on cloud, data center, security and network infrastructure. Additionally, Devi Madhavan will serve as vice president of global field readiness. She previously worked at Red Couch Interactive, Cisco and Brocade. Devi joined DataCore in May of this year, with a focus on defining, building and scaling the Field Readiness and Sales Training functions for the company globally.
Phil Williams, a high-tech executive with over 25 years of experience in the storage and software industries across both VC-backed startups and large multi-national companies, also joins DataCore as senior director worldwide OEM and strategic alliances. He previously worked at Kaminario, Dell and NetApp. Peter Thompson, the vice president of DataCore’s Asia/Pacific Operations, has been with the company since 2000, where he started operations in Japan and now directs and oversees DataCore’s entire APAC operations from San Francisco and in country offices within Japan, China and Australia.
Meet the DataCore team
The DataCore team will be attending and sponsoring VMWorld 2014, taking place on August 24-28 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. Multiple DataCore members will be there to meet with attendees, customers and partners to showcase the company’s latest advancements in software-defined storage.
ABOUT DATACORE
DataCore is a leader in software-defined storage. The company’s storage virtualization software and virtual SAN solutions empower organizations to seamlessly manage and scale their data storage architectures, delivering massive performance gains at a fraction of the cost of solutions offered by legacy storage hardware vendors. Backed by 10,000 customer sites around the world, DataCore’s adaptive and self-learning and healing technology takes the pain out of manual processes and helps deliver on the promise of the new software defined data center through its hardware agnostic architecture.

Tuesday 29 July 2014

Mole Valley District Council achieves total resilience for applications through DataCore’s software defined storage

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software platform provides the robust infrastructure that spans a 5 year virtualised journey, bringing enduring cost savings, performance boosts and resilience to District Council’s 50 essential applications

DataCore announced that Mole Valley District Council (MVDC) have been reliably using their DataCore SANsymphony-V solution for the past five years, ensuring throughout that MVDC’s 300 internal council customers retain full access to an optimal infrastructure, applications and IT services, in order to fulfil their busy roles from within the Dorking based IT Department. 

MVDC’s IT Service Design Manager, Saeed Foroughi, comments reflectively on the benefits of achieving such an enduring foundation: “We support over 50 essential applications across the various parts of the Council, most of which are deemed critical to successful civic operations. With such a number of departmental applications, performance and resiliency cannot be compromised. Failover, when it has occurred, remains seamless and automatic, with the other side of the mirror resuming the primary load and no disruption to services.” The process is so seamless that frequently Mole Valley only notice that it has happened when a visual inspection highlights that the transition has occurred. That’s software defined working at its best. 

MVDC today operates in a virtualised server and storage environment, having gone through the consolidation journey from physical to virtual five years ago, with the assistance and advice of trusted DataCore certified partner, Adapto. Back then, the landscape looked somewhat different, with over 90 physical servers running alongside HP direct attached storage with frequent hardware refreshes required. Today, the consolidated server rooms hold just 30 physical servers alongside 100 VMs running VMware ESX server virtualisation platform with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software defined storage platform robustly supporting the virtual landscape, in a synchronously mirrored configuration across 2 nodes providing non-disruptive and automated failover and failback operations in a high availability configuration, with a third asynchronous offsite replication location for Disaster Recovery. 

“We have enjoyed a longstanding relationship with DataCore that spans across many years, way before Software Defined Storage became a mainstream term; after we realised that the clever part of storage emanates almost entirely from the software layer. The primary reasons that we selected SANsymphony-V haven’t really changed from what we experience today – to ultimately decrease cost and increase scalability and reliability. Adoption of DataCore’s SDS platform has certainly kept us away from costly hardware refreshes and endless cycles of appliance purchasing and today we have complete freedom of choice as to which disks and storage we provision, so we select storage that is entirely suited to task and not to incumbent brand.”

Running on a pair of rack mounted HP ProLiant DL 380 servers with Windows Server 2008 R2, Mole Valley’s core 25TB of data remains fully protected, assured, and highly performant. For speed of processing of applications and data reporting, SANsymphony-V continues to enhance the internal user experience by using RAM-based caching to overcome I/O bottlenecks to help applications to run faster. 

When Mole Valley requires additional performance, the organisation can either add more RAM to the storage virtualisation servers, add additional servers, or gain performance through the integration of flash storage to the storage pool by adding cost-effective SSD cards. With DataCore’s auto-tiering technology, a real-time intelligent mechanism that continuously positions data on the appropriate class of storage based on how frequently the data is accessed, the most intensive applications are processed by the fastest available storage, further improving response times and optimising the efficient usage of available storage resources. The result is superior application performance and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) across the entire storage architecture. 

Other resource gains have been made using the power of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V to help the ICT Department make savvy procurement decisions on forward disk purchases through the creation of storage pools that maximise disk usage. All disk are allocated as virtual disks, but when there are demand spikes, spare disk is reassigned from the pool, so over provisioning has become an issue of the past. The inbuilt monitoring of the platform identifies storage usage and allows mapping to document the most appropriate levels of storage to be apportioned.

With Mole Valley’s gruelling Box Hill featuring heavily in the recent London Olympics, a watertight Disaster Recovery plan needed to be fully operational with the TV cameras of the world upon the area. To achieve this after successful storage virtualisation adoption, Mole Valley adopted a collaborative Disaster Recovery plan with a neighbouring council to allow a third DataCore node to be housed over 15 miles away in a neighbouring town, asynchronously replicating data across the existing UNICORN network that links all Local Authorities across Surrey. Bob Thomas, Head of ICT, Mole Valley District Council explains. “It made sense and brings total peace of mind to work with reciprocal agreements with neighbouring authorities. It alleviates the need to procure commercial space outside of the Mole Valley vicinity successfully replicating data asynchronously through a third DataCore node for DR purposes.” 

The closing words go to Saeed. “Given we have been running DataCore’s software defined storage platform now for five years under Adapto’s advice, we are well placed to comment with authority that DataCore fulfils our needs. It represents much more than high availability; SDS is now the foundation for the supply and optimisation of all our critical applications.”

Monday 28 July 2014

Download Free Virtual SAN Software and experience the power of DataCore Software Defined Storage

Experience the power of the new Virtual SAN capabilities and further educate yourself on the benefits of software-defined storage. DataCore is providing free access to a non-production use Virtual SAN software license. The free SANsymphony-V10 Virtual SAN software is now available for download at: www.datacore.com/Free-Virtual-SAN.



Also, check out the new Virtual SAN design and deployment guide

The new Virtual SAN software is ideal for personal self-education and training, home labs and for evaluation purposes. It is intended primarily for technical specialists, virtualization consultants, certified storage experts, instructors and architects evaluating technologies to manage and optimize existing and new storage infrastructures.
DataCore’s new Virtual SAN is a software-only solution that automates and simplifies storage management and provisioning while delivering enterprise-class functionality, automated recovery and significantly faster performance. It is easy to set up and runs on new or existing x86 servers where it creates a shared storage pool out of the internal Flash and disk storage resources available to that server. This means the DataCore™ Virtual SAN can be cost-effectively deployed as an overlay, without the need to make major investments in new hardware or complex SAN gear.
DataCore virtual SANs are a cost-effective solution for clustered servers, VDI desktop deployments, remote disaster recovery and multi-site virtual server projects, as well as demanding database and business application workloads running on server platforms.

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Friday 25 July 2014

3 urgent data challenges for Healthcare; driving the need for Software-defined Storage

Healthcare IT faces many challenges regarding data storage, retrieval and availability due to the critical nature of the industry.  Here are some of the most pressing:

Around the clock access
nursesFirst and foremost, is the need to make sure data is always available. Healthcare facilities and emergency rooms are always in use so there are rarely any good time windows for system maintenance or upgrades. If there is an outage, then IT has to quickly bring the data back online.  And, they can never lose data.  If data is lost or unrecoverable due to an outage, the facility has to manually re-enter the data or repeat the diagnostic procedure, which is expensive and time consuming, not to mention the negative impact on patient care.  IT is under pressure to ensure that their systems can survive an outage, whether it is due to a device or site failure.  So, a fundamental question for healthcare IT is how do they ensure their data is always available and/or recoverable in the event of a site (or device) outage?

Explosive Data Growth
datacenterIT in healthcare firms are under stress to handle the incredible growth in data.  Enhancements in color, resolution, and 3D have led to immense growth in images produced from PACS (picture archiving and communications system) to the point where each scan can consume gigabytes of data.  Medical records are being digitized and EHRs (Electronic Health Records) continue to grow.  In addition, regulations have contributed to the increase in data, with VNAs (Vendor Neutral Archives) required to store patient data for years, if not decades.  Some estimate that data at healthcare firms will grow 75% per year.  IT has the challenge of being able to keep up with this demand by freeing up more capacity from existing storage systems, adding capacity quickly and migrating data as needed between storage systems without impacting data availability.  The question for healthcare IT is how do they scale capacity quickly and seamlessly, without affecting availability?

Immediate Response Time
performanceFast data retrieval is also extremely important.  Lots of applications in a healthcare organization utilize a storage system to store data. As IT tries to scale applications due to increased demand, they find the performance of applications often fall below users’ expectations, leading to complaints.  After root cause analysis, IT typically finds that the storage system is causing  bottleneck.  Server and networks have grown dramatically in performance, but storage systems haven’t kept up.  Getting more performance from storage then becomes yet another challenge for IT departments in healthcare firms.  IT has to answer the question of how do they accelerate their applications by improving the speed of storage?

Overlaying all of these challenges is the fact that healthcare is a cost-constrained industry.  IT departments in healthcare firms do not have all the funding needed to meet these challenges.

But, unlike other industries, healthcare has greater expectations and lower tolerance for errors.  This is true for the providers of care as well as the IT department.  So, IT in a healthcare firm must explore innovative solutions that address these data challenges within the budget they do have.

This is where DataCore comes in.  Check out our Healthcare Solutions to learn how healthcare firms have addressed their data challenges with cost-effective solutions from  DataCore.

Saturday 19 July 2014

Leading Medical Center and Teaching Hospital Sets the Standard for Storage Virtualisation and IT Best Practices in Healthcare


Maimonides Medical Center, a Brooklyn NY-based and leading independent teaching hospital, has leveraged storage virtualisation to help drive staff productivity, cost savings and better operational performance. The flexibility of DataCore’s software architecture has enabled Maimonides to meet the dynamic range of performance, availability and capacity growth demands needed to stay ahead of compliance regulations and their ever-changing applications and system requirements.

“As a result of DataCore’s software-defined storage platform, we have seen significant savings in hardware and personnel costs, while increasing the performance of applications,” said Gabriel Sandu, CTO at Maimonides Medical Center. “DataCore’s SANsymphony-V allows us to manage all these discrete systems from different vendors seamlessly and without compatibility issues, which gives us tremendous negotiating power to drive down costs.”


The hospital has been able to meet change head-on and has improved productivity, achieved better cost containment and consolidated online storage resources that span multiple remote locations all under the management of DataCore’s storage virtualization platform. A multitude of primary business-critical applications are under the central control of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V – including:

  • GE’s imaging system (PACS)
  • Numerous Oracle databases for human resources
  • Microsoft SQL servers for clinical programs
  • Primary databases for neonatal, geriatric, pediatric and research
  • Microsoft Exchange and IBM DB2 databases that support medical records
Cost Containment and Full Asset Utilization – Courtesy of Software-defined Storage
More than 800 physicians rely on Maimonides information systems to care for patients. Before working with DataCore, the organization had a number of disparate systems not working in conjunction with each other. This ad-hoc approach decreased efficiencies and intelligence around what departments were in need of storage resources.
With all storage now managed through DataCore software, the medical center can fully leverage existing storage assets, reduce costs, and track storage consumption, as well as more efficiently budget for the future by easily identifying usage patterns. Maimonides also now utilizes previously unused storage throughout the hospital because resources are pooled and easily optimized.

Productivity Improvement: Super-charged Performance & Capacity On-demand
The intelligence and automation that DataCore’s SANsymphony-V provides reduces the work needed to manage the hospital’s petabyte of data. Maimonides now has a pool of storage that can be “served up” to each department rather than purchasing resources separately.
“DataCore’s self-tuning caching capabilities also allow Maimonides to super-charge application performance,” said Rogee Fe de Leon, head of the storage group at Maimonides Medical Center.

Risk Reduction and Metro-wide Data Protection for Continuous Availability
The hospital uses DataCore to split storage between two data centers using stretched metro-clusters and DataCore’s built-in metro-wide mirroring, enabling them to provide responsive applications and uninterrupted patient care during routine maintenance, equipment failures and facility upheaval. For example, when the hospital experienced a major power outage in one data center, the doctors, staff and patients had continuous access to their vital data from the virtualized storage pool at the redundant site. Once power was restored, the systems returned automatically to normal operations.

Business Continuity and Non-Stop Operations
“High availability for our operations was the first and foremost reason for going with DataCore,” adds Rogee Fe de Leon. “Now, everything that is mission-critical to running the hospital is supported by DataCore. Users not only receive faster access to data, but they benefit from simpler provisioning and more server capacity as well.”
Having rock-solid business continuity remains the overriding benefit Maimonides derives from DataCore’s solution. Maimonides can now cluster applications between sites through on-demand, available storage serving remote locations. If outages occur, IT systems don’t go down with the affected site and continue providing non-stop business operations.
“Maimonides is leading by example, demonstrating how software-defined storage architectures can meet the management challenges of the modern-day data center on shrinking budgets,” said Melody Brown, vice president sales for the Americas, DataCore Software. “We congratulate Maimonides for being our first recipient of the DataCore Healthcare Innovator Award. Like Maimonides, SANsymphony-V sets the standard for flexible and trusted data storage management for the software-defined data center.”



Monday 7 July 2014

New Climate Change Agreements (CCAs) forces UK data centres back to the consumption drawing board:

Where do you start? Cutting the mass overhead of needless spinning disk in your data centre for a start.

Last week the Government announced that UK based data centres can now enter into Climate Change Agreements (CCAs) which, when met, entitles them to significant tax breaks, bringing the UK in line with most advanced EU countries. Most commentators view the move as long overdue - but begrudgingly admit it secures UKs place at the table when it comes to data centre expansion and growth.

Now the heat is on to meet the CCAs with reductions of up to 30% being expected in IT and non-IT carbon infrastructure savings. Everything is up for consideration. One area where immediate productivity gains can be experienced with relatively low overhead is reducing the amount of physical storage within the data centre.  For many years, at DataCore, we have been discussing how storage systems spin disks 100% of the time, even if they are accessed only 15% of the time. Today, the era of software defined storage is upon us, with the software defined layer provided by SANsymphony-V seamlessly allocating data away from energy intensive spinning disks and onto a virtual storage layer that is allocated as a tiered shared resource. To minimize consumption, the software thinly provisions capacity from the virtual storage pool to hosts, only as needed, so previously pre-allocated disk space is freed up and disks no long whizz round needlessly. And there's management tools included that prove the transition and help qualify for the CCA.


Analyse your potential savings and return on investment using the Storage Virtualization ROI Benefits Calculator

Thursday 3 July 2014

Download the Free Virtual SAN Software and experience the power of DataCore Software Defined Storage

Experience the power of the new Virtual SAN capabilities and further educate yourself on the benefits of software-defined storage. DataCore is providing free access to a non-production use Virtual SAN software license. The free SANsymphony-V10 Virtual SAN software is now available for download at: www.datacore.com/Free-Virtual-SAN.



Also, check out the new Virtual SAN design and deployment guide

The new Virtual SAN software is ideal for personal self-education and training, home labs and for evaluation purposes. It is intended primarily for technical specialists, virtualization consultants, certified storage experts, instructors and architects evaluating technologies to manage and optimize existing and new storage infrastructures.
DataCore’s new Virtual SAN is a software-only solution that automates and simplifies storage management and provisioning while delivering enterprise-class functionality, automated recovery and significantly faster performance. It is easy to set up and runs on new or existing x86 servers where it creates a shared storage pool out of the internal Flash and disk storage resources available to that server. This means the DataCore™ Virtual SAN can be cost-effectively deployed as an overlay, without the need to make major investments in new hardware or complex SAN gear.
DataCore virtual SANs are a cost-effective solution for clustered servers, VDI desktop deployments, remote disaster recovery and multi-site virtual server projects, as well as demanding database and business application workloads running on server platforms.