Why be a Dummy, When You Can Be a Rock Star?

http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=3393

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like those “For Dummies” books. Maybe I am put off by the idea of being seen carrying a book around that casts aspersions on what my detractors might call my already questionable skills and knowledge. Or maybe it is because a number of titles I have perused over the past couple of years — thin tomes passed out at trade show booths — seem to be more like vendor brochures than sources of meaningful information about technology.

In any case, when DataCore Software approached me to write a “For Dummies” guide to storage virtualization, my initial inclination was to pass on the project. For one thing, I had seen at least two other “Storage Virtualization for Dummies” books in that series, which has become a cottage industry for its publisher, neither of which I had found particularly insightful or probative — unless you just wanted to learn about a particular vendor’s gear.

Then there was that negative title. ”…For Dummies.”

Heck, I might be a dummy. But I don’t want to go around advertising it.

Then, they came back to me with a new idea that changed my mind.

Instead of the familiar black-and-yellow “For Dummies” book, why not do things differently: write a “For Rock Stars” guide. Heck, everyone wants to be a rock star (or did once, before their teeth started falling out of their heads).

As we discussed the project, I grew more and more comfortable with it. I didn’t need to focus on the capabilities and limitations of any one vendor’s product in the guide. Nor did I have to explore the minutiae of differences between one product or another (especially not in a way that was calculated to stilt the discussion in favor of DataCore or any other vendor). DataCore was already quite secure about their technology and the overall superiority and value of their product.

The idea was to articulate the concepts and implementation alternatives available to any IT professional who wanted to get his or her head around the technology.

Moreover, the concept was settled upon to make the entire project a kind of mixed media adventure. I would help to develop the book as a series of white papers, each delivered in concert with a webcast in which I will do the “lead riff” followed by experts from DataCore.

That sounded cool, prompting me to hit PhotoShop hard to develop some seminal art. Here’s the cover:

          Intro slide for webcast series Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars

Get ready to rock and roll this Thursday, assuming I can still talk. I will post the invite details shortly.

I should add that this will not only cover the errata of storage virtualization technology, but also the business value case for those of you who have the practical challenge of cost-justifying all expenditures to the bean counters in the front office — (a category that includes most of us today!)

Fact is, I am having a lot of fun helping to develop this program and hope it will get a lot of interest and attendance.

Special thanks to DataCore Software for sponsoring this endeavor. They are all true rock stars in my book.


Invitation to Would-Be Rock Stars

http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=3397

Per my previous post, it is my pleasure to pass along this invitation to participate in Thursday’s introductory installment of the Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars Webinar Series.

Greetings.

You are receiving this because I consider you part of the DataCore Software ecosystem — meaning that I have communicated with you either regularly, routinely, or for a specific purpose in the past. I wanted to “waive a flag” on behalf of a NEW webcast series we are doing in the hopes that you will attend the first one – Part 1: Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency — this Thursday, May 26th. For those who have not already done so, please register at your earliest convenience.

The Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars Webcast Series

Starting this week, DataCore will offer one webcast a month, running from May through October. Different topics under the storage virtualization umbrella will be tackled each time.

Please join us on Thursday, May 26th at 11:30 AM EDT for the first webcast in this series — Part 1: Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency. The webcast will last between 30 and 40 minutes and then we will conduct a Q&A at the end (hence the one-hour “duration” on the registration form). IT industry analyst and data storage luminary Jon Toigo will serve as host and moderator for the entire “For Rock Stars” webcast series.

Also please consider forwarding (or posting on your web site/blog) this short text to encourage any others in your organization to attend –

The Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars Webcast Series: Part 1: Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency
Thursday, May 26, 2011. 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM EDT.

While I don’t know how luminescent I will be given the condition of my dentata, I will give my solo everything I’ve got and will be delighted to hear George Teixeira, President and CEO of DataCore, and Tim Warden, Director of Systems Engineers, contribute their “tasty riffs.” And of course, I will moderate what I hope will be an energetic panel discussion at the end of the presos.

Be there or be square. (Did I say that?)

Don’t Build Your Cloud with Iron!

I suppose almost everyone remembers cloud-watching as a child: lying on your back outdoors watching them morph from horse to dragon to spaceship to—well, you could find almost anything in those solid-seeming billows drifting overhead. And if someone had asked you then what clouds are made of, I can imagine any number of answers, and not one of them would have involved iron.

But that’s precisely what big-iron storage vendors like EMC, NetApp, and others would like you to think. The hoopla at EMC World last week in Las Vegas got me thinking about this, such as this quote from EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s keynote: “virtualization is the key to the cloud. This is the year when most, if not all, mission critical applications get virtualized and run on cloud topologies. This will be the year when all IT professionals will understand the opportunities [presented by the cloud].”

I couldn’t agree more with the first sentence: virtualization is the key to the cloud. And I hope this is the year when everyone understands cloud opportunities: especially the opportunity to get out from under the iron clouds that storage hardware vendors are pushing. (That image that makes me want to cover my head and run for cover!)

Virtualization software like VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V makes it easy to create virtual machines from a cloud of common CPU and memory resources without worrying about the iron behind the scenes. That’s a huge productivity boost for IT, so why not do the same with storage? Point-and-click creation of virtual disks—no matter whose storage hardware is behind them—would sure beat pushing heavy iron around.

Not surprisingly, private cloud providers like External IT, Host.net, and iomart hosting have been quick to recognize this opportunity. The single point of failure, hardware lock-in, and expense of big-iron storage solutions made it hard for them to provide the agile, cost-effective, highly-reliable infrastructure that their customers demand. So they’ve moved on to storage virtualization software that runs in the cloud like everything else and transforms all their storage assets into a single pool of storage that can very rapidly be “carved up” into virtual disks for customer applications or servers.

The benefits they talk about include:

• High availability with synchronous mirroring of all storage resources
• Disaster recovery with asynchronous replication
• Zero-downtime SAN hardware refreshes
• Improved storage performance from intelligent software cache
• No hardware lock-in and easy migration of older storage hardware to lower tiers

So forget the rivets and virtualize all the way down to keep your cloud soft and agile.


(Photograph taken by Karin Dalziel)

It Ain’t Easy Being ‘Green’ … Or Is It? Virtualization software makes an impact on waste.

Since Earth Day was proclaimed in 1970, protecting the environment has advanced from a grassroots effort to a global cause. We’ve all pitched in and taken steps to ensure the planet will be a healthy place to live for generations to come. From recycling to alternative sources of energy, the pursuit for a green future is on.

With the daily power consumption of a typical data center equivalent to the monthly power consumption of thousands of homes, it’s no surprise that a major focus of the green movement has turned to the data center. In fact, just this week The Green Grid Association announced new steps organizations can take to transform their data centers from an operational burden to a source of prosperity and sustainability.

But most of the hype around green data centers has focused on data center architecture, server consolidation, and new cooling strategies – and somehow ...

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Photos from DataCore at Microsoft TechEd 2011; Dancing DataCore GoBots ‘Hot’ item at the Show

Check out the photos and click on the video links to see the DataCore Dancing GoBots…
                                                    

Dancing GoBots:
Jousting GoBot
Hula GoBot
Flava Flav GoBot

Also, check out the latest releases from the show:
DataCore Showcases Use Cases and Next-Generation Storage Virtualization Software, SANsymphony-V at Microsoft TechEd

Microsoft Tech-Ed 2011: DataCore Software Adds Extra Data Protection, Flexibility and Speed to Windows Home Server with DriveHarmony

DataCore Showcases WW User Testimonials and New Software at Microsoft Tech-Ed

 http://www.it-director.com/technology/sys_mgmt/news_release.php?rel=24964&ref=fd_info

“Microsoft’s full range of virtualization solutions provide partners and customers with an effective way to save costs, increase availability, and improve agility within their business infrastructure,” said Mike Schutz, senior director of product management for the Server and Cloud division at Microsoft Corp. “By using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 and Microsoft System Center, customers can also take advantage of DataCore SANsymphony-V and explore ways to reducethe cost of storage while delivering improved performance and availability.”

Enterprise-class Solution Purpose-Built for Windows Server 2008 R2

Cloud services provider AcXess, for example, is using DataCore’s SANsymphony™ software to create a dynamic, resilient virtual storage infrastructure that cost-effectively supports the company’s Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtualization environment and its business model.

AcXess has built its business around flexible virtualisation technologies designed to meet the needs of key customers who rely on AcXess to provide reasonably priced services such as on-demand sales demos, proof-of-concept (POC) labs, and training sessions in virtualised environments to thousands of employees, partners, and customers. Using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and DataCore, AcXess has doubled the number of users year over year and has grown its business 300 percent, while saving $5 million in hardware costs.

A full case study is available on Microsoft’s website.

DataCore Showcases Use Cases And Next-Generation Storage Virtualization Software, SANsymphony-V At Microsoft TechEd

http://www.bsminfo.com/article.mvc/DataCore-Showcases-Use-Cases-And-Next-0001

DataCore Software is showcasing its SANsymphony™-V solution at this week’s Microsoft Tech•Ed North America 2011 conference. SANsymphony-V is DataCore’s next-generation storage virtualization software solution that enables IT organizations to eliminate storage-related barriers preventing them from realizing the financial and operational goals of their virtualization initiatives.

“By using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 and Microsoft System Center, customers can also take advantage of DataCore SANsymphony-V and explore ways to reduce the cost of storage while delivering improved performance and availability.”-Mike Schutz, senior director of product management for the Server and Cloud division at Microsoft Corp.

Tech•Ed 2011 takes place at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta from Monday, May 16 until Thursday, May 19, 2011. DataCore is a Silver Sponsor and is exhibiting in Booth 1629.

To read more about DataCore’s solutions and use cases in Microsoft environments, download the Taneja Group profile, “Building the Virtual Infrastructure with DataCore SANsymphony-V.”

DataCore™ SANsymphony-V enables data centers to use existing equipment and conventional storage devices to satisfy shared storage requirements introduced by highly dynamic, virtual IT environments. It provides a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 based set of advanced storage virtualization functions to provision, share, reconfigure, migrate, replicate, expand, and upgrade storage. This cost-effectively speeds up applications, delivers uninterrupted data access, and extends the useful life of storage devices, contrasting sharply with the expensive “rip and replace” approaches being proposed to support desktop and server virtualization projects.

“Microsoft’s full range of virtualization solutions provide partners and customers with an effective way to save costs, increase availability, and improve agility within their business infrastructure,” said Mike Schutz, senior director of product management for the Server and Cloud division at Microsoft Corp. “By using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 and Microsoft System Center, customers can also take advantage of DataCore SANsymphony-V and explore ways to reduce the cost of storage while delivering improved performance and availability.”

Enterprise-class Solution Purpose-Built for Windows Server 2008 R2
Two years in development, DataCore designed SANsymphony-V to meet the needs of midmarket end-users and solution-providers, especially those familiar with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 administration eager to adapt their IT operations to accommodate the many variables that server and desktop virtualization introduce. It is interoperable with Microsoft’s virtualization infrastructure, including Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1, System Center, and Failover Clustering.

While some vendors in the virtualization field recommend that customers lock themselves into specific storage hardware configurations and exotic purpose-built appliances, SANsymphony-V frees customers from hardware lock-in by decoupling the virtual infrastructure from the underlying disks. It also optimizes the I/O response obtained from standard storage devices that would have otherwise needed to be replaced. Then when customers need to expand capacity, they can simply choose the best deal at the time from a number of suppliers rather than be limited to one specific vendor’s hardware.

“Shared storage is often the ‘weak link’ in server and desktop virtualization initiatives; first as a performance bottleneck and then as a single point-of-failure. Many times, virtualization projects intended to reduce server or desktop costs hit the storage wall,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “We employ sophisticated software portable and scalable across Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 to overcome the storage-related roadblocks standing between IT organizations and their virtualization objectives.”

Real-world Successes Built on Virtualization Software
At Tech•Ed 2011, DataCore is also highlighting a number of customers that deploy Microsoft solutions in conjunction with a virtualized storage infrastructure powered by DataCore Software.

Cloud services provider AcXess, for example, is using DataCore’s SANsymphony™ software to create a dynamic, resilient virtual storage infrastructure that cost-effectively supports the company’s Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtualization environment and its business model.

AcXess has built its business around flexible virtualization technologies designed to meet the needs of key customers who rely on AcXess to provide reasonably priced services such as on-demand sales demos, proof-of-concept (POC) labs, and training sessions in virtualized environments to thousands of employees, partners, and customers. Using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and DataCore, AcXess has doubled the number of users year over year and has grown its business 300 percent, while saving $5 million in hardware costs. A full case study is available on Microsoft’s website.

More Information
Extensive reference material and supporting videos for SANsymphony-V may be found at on DataCore’s website: http://www.datacore.com/SANsymphony-V.

Additional resources, solution overviews, and product documents may be found on the DataCore website: http://www.datacore.com/Solutions/storage-virtualization-and-virtual-server-desktop/Microsoft/Resources.aspx and find out why the Taneja Group profile states, “For Hyper-V users that would like to build an enterprise-capable virtual infrastructure, DataCore SANsymphony-V is an ideal fit.”

Microsoft Tech-Ed 2011: DataCore Software Adds Extra Data Protection, Flexibility and Speed to Windows Home Server with DriveHarmony

http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2011/05/17/datacore-driveharmony-public-beta-announced/

Welcomes beta testers to trial DriveHarmony’s new pooling, mirroring and caching features that boost performance and sidestep hard disk drive limitations

DataCore Software today announced the Beta release of DriveHarmony™, a simple to use add-on software package for Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS). Users who are eager to protect, pool, accelerate, and easily expand storage capacity are welcome to request an early version of DriveHarmony for their personal beta testing by visiting DataCore’s booth (#1629) at this week’s Microsoft Tech•Ed 2011 or by sending a request to WHS@DataCore.com.

“With more and more content going digital, people increasingly want a simple way to access, store, and enjoy the wide range of photos, personal videos, music, and films they save at home”

Easily Pool and Expand Storage to Simplify File Sharing and Folder Management
Leveraging techniques learned from a decade of experience in large data centers across the globe, DataCore™ DriveHarmony maximizes the value home users get from their hard disk drives. The software integrates into the familiar WHS dashboard with a simple, easy-to-use control panel. From there, users can combine one or more physical disks of variable sizes and types into one “Virtual Big Disk” pool. When this virtual drive is created, it is automatically initialized, formatted, assigned a drive letter, and selectively mirrored for data protection. The virtual drive is then ready for use by any application running on the WHS 2011 operating system.

Growing with the Needs of Today’s Digital Lifestyle
As families and small businesses gather more digital assets, their disk space consumption naturally grows. DriveHarmony delivers the right combination of power, capacity, and ease-of-use for today’s home consumers. It allows them to expand appropriately by adding more drives to virtual disks without having to split up or re-organize their files. The rest is done behind the scenes without any need for intervention.

“With more and more content going digital, people increasingly want a simple way to access, store, and enjoy the wide range of photos, personal videos, music, and films they save at home,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development, DataCore Software. “Through the gathering of feedback during the beta process, we look forward to working closely with Microsoft and the Windows Home Server Community to bring to market a powerful solution to help home users easily protect, organize, and manage their growing disk requirements in a digital age.”

Availability
DriveHarmony is currently in Beta release and will be rolled out via select OEMs later this year. Visitors to DataCore’s booth (#1629) at Microsoft Tech•Ed 2011 can request an early version of DriveHarmony for their personal beta testing. Tech•Ed takes place at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta from Monday, May 16 until Thursday, May 19, 2011.

DataCore Attending Tech•Ed 2011

If you are in the Atlanta, GA area from May 16 through May 19, stop by Tech•Ed 2011 at the Georgia World Congress Center. Visit DataCore’s booth (#1629) where we’ll be “unlocking the mysteries” of storage virtualization and showcasing SANsymphony-V.

As part of a new initiative to extend our product line across the Microsoft Windows Server family, we will also be using Tech•Ed to highlight our newest software product, DriveHarmony, an easy to use add-on software application for Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS). Due for general release in June, DriveHarmony offer WHS users pooling, mirroring and caching features that boost performance and sidestep hard disk drive limitations, functionality long familiar to DataCore enterprise customers. All visitors to our booth will be encouraged to sign up for the beta version for personal testing. We hope to see you there!

Visit our website for more information:
http://www.datacore.com/teched2011

See related blog post:
http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2011/05/12/datacore-at-tech-ed/

Guess Who’s Back, Back Again? … External Storage Fights the Hard Fight

It’s official.  According to Gartner, external controller-based disk storage has recovered from the global recession, exceeding the record sales figure from 2008 with revenue in 2010 of more than $19.4 billion (US).  Analyst Roger Cox commented that “enterprises and service providers alike are investing more in external storage as they virtualize servers and build cloud-based services.”

Here’s my prediction: the storage required to support the Clouds will remain too expensive until Clouds move to a hardware independent software-based storage virtualization model.

As with virtual desktops, potential private cloud customers are experiencing “sticker shock” due to demanding storage requirements.  This has slowed commercial interest.  Clouds by definition are software constructs that provide services as needed when needed.  To do so, the combination of virtual servers, virtual storage and virtual networks working together as a combined virtualization layer is the obvious choice.

From our perspective, a cloud computing platform ...

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It’s Not Rocket Science: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

After the space shuttle Atlantis lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in June, an era of NASA’s manned space exploration will come to a close. Nearly 50 years to the day after President John F. Kennedy called for a brave new era of space exploration, and 30 years after the launch of Columbia, NASA is bringing its three-decade-long Space Shuttle Program to a close. This is at a time when 2011 marks such a significant, historic year for the U.S. space program.

After completing 135 missions, the space shuttle – the workhorse and pride of the American space program – has finally outlived its benefit. It was originally devised because, at the time, a reusable spacecraft seemed much more economical than its one-and-done predecessors. And for 30 years, the space shuttle fulfilled its mission objectives thanks in part to one critical component: its design.

That’s right; the space shuttle’s main design has been unchanged for 30 years. Certainly, upgrades have been made here and there, but to the casual observer, it appears very much the same vehicle as it did in 1981. The “software” has been updated, but the hardware remains much the same. We see instances of this still to this day, where the life of hardware can be extended with smarter software.

How fitting that we see one example in an area that was born from NASA and the space program – storage virtualization. When converting to a virtualized environment, many will tell you that you need to make a costly upgrade investment to the storage infrastructure, if you want to run the latest software. And of course you’ll need to have the latest hardware. This is just not true.

Smarter virtualization software has shown that it can take advantage of just about any storage hardware and you don’t need the most powerful, fastest, or biggest anymore. That’s because the software is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Just like with a car… if you want more oomph off the line, you don’t need a new engine, you just need to change the gear ratios and the shift points (the latter also being a software programming issue), in other words, use a smarter program to get much more from the same “old” engine. This is the same with storage virtualization projects.

Now don’t get me wrong, software cannot extend the life of hardware indefinitely. Eventually, your car engine will die, but hopefully after several hundred thousand miles. And the space shuttle will retire this year, only to be replaced by something newer.

Eventually, you may have to roll in some new devices, but smarter software can ensure that the investments you’ve already made won’t go obsolete anytime soon and can enjoy a long, healthy, and productive lifespan. Maybe people will be talking about your “old” disks, even 30 years from now.

Is This The Year When Desktop Virtualization “Gets Real”? VMware Thinks So.

I recently came across the following article in Barron’s and I think it merits discussion. Financial analyst Louis Miscioscia of Collins Stewart gives some insight into what’s cooking at VMware, and interestingly, the virtualization leader believes that this is the year when desktop virtualization projects will transform from proof of concepts to real deployments.

The main reason for this adoption? The cost of deploying a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) has dropped so significantly (about 70% cheaper) in just the past few years that it’s becoming a no-brainer from an investment perspective. The writer, Tiernan Ray, does point out that server virtualization deployments have far outpaced this uptick in VDI, so the bottom line is that there is a real uptick in the overall volume of virtualization projects going on right now. Maybe your own organization is dealing with this surge right now.

But as enterprises jump to on the ...

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DataCore Software Powers Scottsdale Community College Virtual Storage Infrastructure Designed for Virtual Desktops

Read the full Case study:
http://www.datacore.com/Libraries/Case_Study_PDFs/Scottsdale_Community_College.sflb.ashx

DataCore Software Powers Scottsdale Community College’s Virtualized IT Environment

Complements Citrix XenDesktop to provide an end-to-end virtualization solution and an enhanced virtual desktop experience for approximately 12,000 students and 1,000 employees

http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12712:datacore-powers-scottsdale-community-colleges-virtualized-it-environment&catid=231:storage-software&Itemid=2701181

http://www.istockanalyst.com/business/news/5108185/datacore-software-powers-scottsdale-community-college-s-virtualized-it-environment

Scottsdale Community College (SCC) has deployed DataCore’s SANsymphony™ storage virtualization software in conjunction with XenDesktop from Citrix in order to realize a fully virtualized IT environment. The responsiveness of virtualized environments – and in particular – the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), is closely tied to the availability and performance of the underlying storage systems.

DataCore SANsymphony and Citrix run with server hardware from HP and storage hardware from Xiotech. Collectively, they power the mySCC (my Scottsdale Community College) virtualized environment. With mySCC’s virtualization strategy, Scottsdale Community College has significantly reduced the total costs of its IT operations by $250,000, while increasing the number of services offered and dramatically improving access to them through a richer, more powerful desktop interface. The full case study is available on DataCore’s website: Virtual Storage Infrastructure Designed for Virtual Desktops.

“DataCore front-ends our Xiotech storage arrays and improves I/O performance”
“DataCore front-ends our Xiotech storage arrays and improves I/O performance,” said Dustin Fennell, vice president of IT and CIO, Scottsdale Community College. “And next year, if we get a better hardware option in terms of price-performance – we can hang that behind DataCore too. By embracing total virtualization of servers, desktops and storage, the college is now saving a quarter million dollars a year that would have been spent on hardware had we not deployed best-of-breed virtualization solutions from DataCore and Citrix.”

A Complete Virtual IT Environment Powered by DataCore and Citrix
DataCore’s SANsymphony software enables institutions of higher learning, such as SCC, to use their existing storage equipment and devices to achieve the robust and responsive shared storage infrastructure necessary to support highly dynamic virtual IT environments, including desktops. This contrasts sharply with the alternative “rip and replace” approach, which is often prohibitively expensive and results in a rigid infrastructure that cannot adapt to future storage needs.

DataCore software runs on HP DL 380 servers and these DataCore storage virtualization nodes connect to Xiotech Emprise 5000 hardware. The combination of Citrix’s unique provisioning technology and DataCore’s storage virtualization software dramatically reduces demands on storage and improves performance significantly – giving users maximum availability and performance from their virtual desktops.

Virtualization has turned technology operations at SCC from a cost center into a resource that actually funds innovation. SCC now offers technology innovation grants from the money it is saving in its technology operations budget.

The mySCC Virtual Environment: Today’s Online, Digitized University of the Future
mySCC is an end-to-end virtual IT environment whose virtual desktops enable access to over 230 applications across all of SCC’s faculty, staff and students. It serves the needs of approximately 12,000 students and 1,000 employees, including both full-time and part-time staffers, as well as adjunct and residential faculty. Through mySCC’s virtual desktop experience, users are presented with remote access to simple Windows applications like Microsoft Office – as well as more esoteric ones like AutoCAD. SCC sought to make its learning materials and resources completely accessible and affordable for any student – regardless of physical whereabouts, academic discipline and socioeconomic status.

IT administrators at SCC are now able to manage their older storage devices behind the same unified DataCore interface as the newer, higher-speed Xiotech arrays. SCC centrally controls DataCore’s comprehensive feature set across their entire infrastructure rather than being forced to deal with model-specific variations as is the case with device-by-device administration.

“The IT needs of our country’s colleges and universities are growing increasingly complex and expensive,” said George Teixiera, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “With tuition growing at alarming rates, colleges must drive operating costs down significantly to keep higher education affordable and accessible. By virtualizing their infrastructure, SCC has not only been able to extend their online resources to every student regardless of location and focus of study, they were able to generate incredible savings – funds that can be re-allocated to support critical assets and functions, such as the faculty and academic programs.”

DataCore offers 50% discounts to qualified educational institutions. To find out more, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/Solutions/Major-Verticals/storage-virtualization-software-for-education.aspx.

Full Scottsdale Community College Case Study: http://www.datacore.com/Libraries/Case_Study_PDFs/Scottsdale_Community_College.sflb.ashx

About Scottsdale Community College
Scottsdale Community College, a two-year college located in Scottsdale, Arizona, enrolls approximately 12,000 students and employs around 1,000 staff. The institution has recently expanded enrollment with non-traditional learners such as working adults and people who take courses online. Visit www.scottsdalecc.edu.

How To Sell Storage Virtualization To the CIO

http://community.crn.com/groups/how-do-i-info-for-starting-your-var-business/blog/2011/04/29/how-to-sell-storage-virtualization-to-the-cio#comments

By Dan Hascall, vice president of Americas channel and sales operations, DataCore Software

Your customers are becoming overrun with data—and those that must comply with Federal regulations are struggling to store crushing amounts of information for long periods of time. The solution is, quite obviously, to sell the those companies more storage. Here, Hascall, who has held senior level management positions at VMware, Alliance Systems, and Sun Microsystems, discusses how to get buy-in from the top for a virtualized solution.

Data that is housed in enterprise data centers is growing at an astounding 60 percent per year, according to analyst firm IDC. For CIOs, this is not good news. Furthermore, Sarbanes-Oxley compliant companies must store their data for at least seven years. The move to agile, virtual infrastructures has also exacerbated the cost and demands placed on shared storage systems. In this quandary of data storage issues, storage virtualization software has provided a much-needed grounding.

Virtual Resource Pools: Manage the growth and cost of storage as you do servers

Put simply, storage virtualization software makes it easy to pool and share storage resources just as server virtualization allows you to do the same for computing resources. It adds a new level of flexibility and responsiveness to meet user needs by ensuring that supply meets business demand. From a ‘lowering risk’ standpoint, storage virtualization software insulates users and applications from the inevitable upgrades, changes and disruptions that occur at the underlying hardware level. Storage virtualization software that works infrastructure-wide is the logical next step to complement and extend the business value of server and desktop virtualization. The combination acts as an enabler and an accelerator for businesses to fully benefit from virtualized environments, while at the same time giving users the freedom to choose the storage hardware technologies that best meet their needs and budgets.

How do you get CIOs to jump on the storage virtualization bandwagon if they’re not on it already? Learn five compelling points that make storage virtualization right for their organization. [Read the complete article]

DataCore Adds NAS Performance Acceleration and High-Availability File Sharing Support to SANsymphony-V Storage Virtualization Software

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/03/18/datacore-adds-nas-performance-acceleration-and-high-availability-file-sharing-support-to-sansymphony-v-storage-virtualization-software.aspx

DataCore Software is announcing that its SANsymphony™-V software addresses the three major roadblocks – cost, performance and business continuity – that have made it impractical for critical virtualization projects to utilize Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Why It Matters?

DataCore with SANsymphony-V software can now address customer NAS requirments in addition to meeting their SAN needs.

Enterprise NAS hardware (High Performance, Highly Available, Highly Scalable) systems such as NetApp filers and EMC Isilon have been successful in larger data centers but due to their very expensive price points are not able to meet the needs of small and mid-size businesses. DataCore has addressed this dilemma with its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software. The new development announced today employs standard Windows servers with off-the-shelf disks to achieve the required levels of uninterrupted shared file services at a reasonable price. Moreover, these systems now scale to performance levels once achieved only by “enterprise” NAS hardware.

Quotes --

Jeff Boles, senior analyst and director of validation services, Taneja Group:
“SANsymphony-V can be easily configured to significantly accelerate performance and add a new level of data protection to Microsoft’s Clustered File Shares. This resulting combination of SANsymphony-V and Microsoft is additive; it is simple to set up, requires no additional purchases and best of all it allows organizations to meet both their NAS and SAN requirements from one virtual infrastructure.”

John Bocskor, vice president of product management, DataCore Software:
“Unlike other attempts at converged SAN/NAS, the DataCore approach optimizes each layer for what it does best, yet both are managed from the familiar Windows Server administration console via a user-friendly interface with self-guided wizards.”

Key points --

• SANsymphony-V overcomes shared storage shortcomings and makes it feasible to employ the widely used NAS services already built into the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 platform in those environments.
• DataCore’s powerful feature set can be easily configured to enhance these Microsoft services. The integrated combination cost-effectively speeds up performance and adds a new level of fault tolerance to clustered network file system (NFS) and common Internet file system (CIFS) sharing.
• The new solution is particularly well-suited for IT organizations that prefer to store their VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenDesktop virtual machine images under NFS or CIFS. Many of them are eager to eliminate bottlenecks and disruptions in their underlying storage systems, but not willing to spend a lot of money doing it.

Existing DataCore SANsymphony-V customers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Hyper-V do not need to buy additional software to support the clustered NAS file sharing features. For those new to DataCore, SANsymphony-V software, including the NAS capabilities, can be professionally installed through DataCore-authorized solution providers across the globe.

3 Year Storage Implementations … Déjà vu all over again?

We’ve been talking a lot lately about “The Big Problem” facing virtualization projects, which is the need to virtualize the often-overlooked storage tier when desktops and servers are being virtualized. Many organizations have fallen into the trap of totally overhauling their existing hardware storage infrastructure in order to accommodate large-scale projects, at great expense both financially and in terms of IT efficiency.

One example that stuck out to me was in a recent article by CMIO Magazine in which a New York-based rehab hospital spent $450K and three years implementing a storage disk array to facilitate the use of electronic medical records (EMRs).

The CIO of the hospital was dealing with 500 users with more than 1,000 devices on its network across 15 buildings, spanning a 60-acre campus. One of main problems he was facing was that his 10-person IT staff had 30 projects going on simultaneously and the server-attached ...

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DataCore Unveils Features of Forthcoming Storage Pooling Add-in for Microsoft Home Server

The Home Server Show interviewed DataCore’s Carlos Carreras this week about their forthcoming storage pooling add-in for Windows Home Server 2011. As revealed back in February, DataCore the Enterprise storage virtualization specialist was approached by Microsoft late last year to look at ways of replicating some of the Drive Extender features that have been removed from Windows Home Server 2011.

The company subsequently announced support for Windows Home Server some weeks later but there has been little detail on which features from Datacore’s Enterprise software would be enabled for Windows Home Server users, and indeed, how the software’s storage pooling capabilities would work. In the course of this week’s interview, some of those questions were answered.

http://www.wegotserved.com/2011/04/22/datacore-unveils-features-forthcoming-storage-pooling-addin/

What is Tranquil PC Doing with Windows Home Server 2011

http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2011/04/21/more-information-on-what-are-tranquil-pc-doing-with-windows-home-server-2011/

...I already said a few weeks ago that DataCore’s add-in for Windows Home Server 2011 was the one I was most interested in testing and using, and now that Tranquil are going to be incorporating it as well can only be yet another tick in the box for DataCore.

DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V Wins 2011 Network Computing Award for "Data Center Product of the Year"

“With the launch of SANsymphony-V, DataCore has redesigned its software for virtual server and desktop environments. However, DataCore’s key benefits of extending the useful life of hardware, cutting hardware costs and removing vendor lock-in are still intact, and apply to both the physical and virtual world.” -Carla Arend , IDC

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/04/25/datacore-software-s-sansymphony-v-wins-2011-network-computing-award-for-data-center-product-of-the-year.aspx

http://www.it-director.com/channels/sys_integration/news_release.php?rel=24580

DataCore Software, the industry’s premier provider of storage virtualization software announced that it has won one of the UK’s top networking accolades by scooping the Data Center Product of the Year Award at the prestigious 2011 Network Computing Awards held at the Russell Hotel in London.

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, Northern Europe at DataCore Software, happily collected the award and commented, “This is the first award that SANsymphony-V has gained since its launch in January. Part of what enticed the Network Computing readers to vote for the new solution was the favorable independent review that appeared in the magazine recently. The review and this award endorses just how easy SANsymphony-V has made installation of virtualization across desktop and server environments for network administrators and managers.”

Indeed, Carla Arend, program manager, European infrastructure software research at IDC, underscores Joseph’s comments, “With the launch of SANsymphony-V, DataCore has redesigned its software for virtual server and desktop environments. However, DataCore’s key benefits of extending the useful life of hardware, cutting hardware costs and removing vendor lock-in are still intact, and apply to both the physical and virtual world.”

In brief the award recognizes that with SANsymphony-V network managers can achieve:

• Much lower risk to deploy virtualization projects since a complete storage and process overhaul is not required; changes can be implemented incrementally, tried or undone selectively.
• Cost-effective Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery to safeguard business.
• Infrastructure-wide administration and automation to increase staff productivity.
• Greater savings from consolidation, repurposing and better utilization of existing resources.
• Reduced complexity and greater control to manage growth and optimize budgets.
• Enduring value from a software solution that lives beyond devices that “come and go.”

The Network Computing Awards were established in 2005 to recognize best-of-breed, easy to use solutions that make the working lives of network administrators and managers easier and more effective. Voting takes place independently across a two month time frame, with just under 4,000 voters contributing.

“DataCore Tackles Storage Virtualization Barrier”
Access the Network Computing review on SANsymphony-V:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization/datacore-tackles-storage-virtualization-barrier.php?keyword=SANSymphony-V

Test-drive SANsymphony-V:
http://www.datacore.com/Software/Closer-Look/Demos.aspx

New Microsoft Case Study Details How DataCore Storage Virtualization Software and Hyper-V Combine to Enable Cloud Service Provider AcXess to Save Millions

SANsymphony and Hyper-V software support Microsoft’s global field and technical force sales teams who rely on AcXess V-Works™ Cloud to demonstrate and sell their solutions to customers worldwide.

At the recent Microsoft Management Summit 2011 in Las Vegas, DataCore Software announced that cloud services provider AcXess is using DataCore’s SANsymphony™ software to create a dynamic, resilient virtual storage infrastructure that cost-effectively supports the company’s Microsoft® Hyper-V™ server virtualization environment and its business model.

AcXess has built its business around flexible virtualization technologies designed to meet the needs of key customers such as Microsoft who rely on AcXess to provide reasonably priced services such as on-demand sales demos, proof-of-concept (POC) labs, and training sessions in virtualized environments to thousands of employees, partners, and customers. Leveraging the combination of Hyper-V and DataCore, AcXess has doubled the number of users year over year and has grown its business 300 percent, while saving $5 million in hardware costs. A full case study is available on Microsoft’s website.

“DataCore storage virtualization software has proven itself to be the ideal solution. We run a number of large systems for Microsoft in the cloud today and it was a very logical choice to choose DataCore to run the SAN component of the AcXess V-Works™ platform,” states Tom Elowson, president and cofounder of AcXess. “The reason that we chose DataCore was the flexibility and cost savings we gained from their storage virtualization solution and the way that it worked within our system to provide very powerful experiences to accelerate revenue for Microsoft sales people and other clients around the world.”

ESG Lab Reports: DataCore SANsymphony-V: Compelling Storage Virtualization Software

ESG Lab Validation Highlights: http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/04/datacore-sansymphony-v-compelling-storage-virtualization-software/

• DataCore SANsymphony-V R8 was very quick and easy to set up and manage. ESG Lab set up a two node, high-availability SANsymphony-V environment and was serving storage to virtual machines in minutes.
  
• With one click of a mouse, ESG Lab was able to serve a thin provisioned, performance tuned, fully protected, synchronously mirrored 1TB virtual disk to a Windows server in less than a minute.
  
• Migrating and importing disk drives from a working physical server into the virtual disk pool was a quick and easy process. The DataCore software provided a seamless transition from physical to virtual infrastructure while actually enhancing performance and availability.
  
• DataCore synchronous mirroring provided hosts with continuous access to virtual disks through a node outage with zero downtime and no interruptions to service.
  
• DataCore Continuous Data Protection (CDP) was easy to configure and use, enabling rollback to a specific point in time without having to create multiple snapshots.
  
• DataCore asynchronous remote replication was also easy to configure; compression and multi-streaming provided a 2x throughput enhancement over a simulated T1 link.
  
  

451 Group Impact Report: DataCore Renews Storage Virtualization, Plays Up Virtual Desktop Synergies

Analyst: John Abbott, Simon Robinson

DataCore Software recently introduced the first complete rewrite of its core storage virtualization technology since it was founded in 1998. The newly launched SANsymphony-V will eventually replace the original SANsymphony product line and also incorporate the previously separate entry-level SANmelody software, first introduced back in 2005. It's been designed to better support more recent trends in computing, such as cloud, virtual servers and virtual desktops, but it also helps simplify the core functionality with a better user interface, auto-tuned caches and built-in features such as workflow, continuous data protection and automated traffic-compressing replication.

Check out all the latest analyst reports on DataCore at: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/What-Others-are-Saying/Analyst-Reports.aspx

Tips to Overcome 3 Potential NAS Issues

http://www.bisdatacentres.co.uk/news/tips-to-overcome-3-potential-nas-issues/2022011

Network attached storage (NAS) is an attractive idea. It is relatively inexpensive and can deliver high performance; but unless managed carefully, with a product like Datacore’s virtualizing SANsymphony-V, it can create its own problems.

Virtualization TCO: Fact or Fiction?

“The nine-month ROI that vendors might advertise for their latest and greatest technologies can actually average three or four years, according to our clients that have crunched the numbers for their hosted desktop virtualization deployments,” Forrester wrote. “Why? Because the upfront infrastructure and licensing costs far outweigh the upfront benefits.”

This is especially true when you consider the high cost of the storage infrastructure needed to support virtual desktop deployments. In fact, Wikibon recently posted an intriguing video interview on how storage represents the biggest drag to virtual desktops. It points out that for every $1 spent on virtual desktop deployments, $3 to $10 is spent on storage.

To offset these numbers and make the cost of storage seem reasonable, vendors have spread the large cost over thousands of desktops. But as desktop Guru Brian Madden points out on his blog, we can clearly see the problem when...

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Server Virtualization Faces Real Problems

Storage costs and needed upgrades slowing adoption, surveyed IT managers say

https://www.information-management.com/news/server-virtualization-problems-10020082-1.html?zkPrintable=true

Valerie Valentine: Information Management Online

According to Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International, said the figures in the survey underscore anecdotal issues facing IT managers. “The fundamental issue confounding hypervisor-based virtualization is storage. Inflexible storage fabrics are becoming a source of application performance pain and represent a single point of failure in the high availability story touted by hypervisor vendors,” Toigo says. 

Toigo points out that virtualizing storage is less expensive than ripping out and replacing current storage infrastructure.

“Virtualized storage is also the key, going forward to successful desktop virtualization initiatives and to cloud service integrations. As more companies, compelled by reasons of cost or enhanced user mobility, begin to explore these technologies, hopefully the lessons learned around stalled server virtualization projects will not be forgotten.”

Unanticipated storage costs, availability concerns and performance bottlenecks are hindering server consolidation and desktop virtualization projects, according to storage vendor DataCore’s survey of more than 450 IT organizations across North America and Europe.

Of those that have deployed server virtualization, 66 percent cited a substantial increase in storage costs as the biggest problem they are facing. Nearly 40 percent say the storage infrastructure is either slowing application performance or limiting its availability, while more than 20 percent indicate that business continuity has become more difficult, according to the survey.

DataCore reports that despite hype surrounding cloud initiatives, a majority (73 percent) of organizations have yet to take advantage of cloud services for storage needs. However, 70 percent said access to more disk space would be the most important characteristic they would want from cloud-related storage.

Almost half (48 percent) of those surveyed are now using storage virtualization software with their server and desktop virtualization initiatives. Nearly three in four (74 percent) rely on it to improve disaster recovery and business continuity practices.

Storage: Virtualization’s wallflower?

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/IT-watch-blog/storage-virtualizations-wallflower/

DataCore Software, known for its storage virtualization software, has released a survey comprising over 450 IT organizations across North America and Europe, “The State of Virtualization.” The findings can be a little disturbing, especially to a company who creates a product that many medium and large enterprise IT orgs are leaving out of their virtualization plans: Storage. The study found that 43 percent had mistaken the impact storage would have on server and desktop virtualization or had shied away from a virtualization project because storage-related costs were too high.

Enterprise Strategy Group Hands-On Testing and Benchmarking Validates Key Value Propositions of DataCore Software’s Storage Virtualization Platform

DataCore Software has announced the results of comprehensive hands-on testing and performance benchmarking conducted on its SANsymphony™-V R8 product by the Lab team at leading industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

“DataCore’s impact on performance was dramatic, in every metric we measured,” said Tony Palmer, senior engineer and analyst with ESG Lab. “Even more impressive is how SANsymphony-V simplifies management and how easily it can make data center storage more resilient. With a single mouse click disk capacity is served and all the normal error-prone steps to configure, tune, and set best paths for high-availability get done auto-magically.”

ESG Lab summarized its test conclusions as follows: “ESG Lab firmly believes that it would benefit any organization considering or implementing an IT virtualization project to take a long look at DataCore SANsymphony-V R8 storage virtualization software. It is robust, flexible, and responsive and delivers major value in terms of utilization, economics, improved response times, high-availability, and easy administration.”

To download the full ESG Lab Validation Report, please visit: DataCore Software – FEATURED ANALYST REPORTS.

Powerful, Intuitive, and Automated

ESG Lab found that the software was “very quick and easy to set up and manage” and “virtualizing storage was intuitive and straightforward.” In fact, ESG analysts configured a high-availability SANsymphony-V environment and were serving storage to virtual machines in minutes. “The volume was thin provisioned, mirrored for high-availability, and preferred and alternate paths to storage resources were set without administrator intervention. ESG Lab was impressed with the speed, simplicity, and completeness of the configuration.”

SANsymphony-V software enables data centers to use existing equipment and conventional storage devices to achieve the robust and responsive shared storage environment necessary to support highly dynamic virtual IT environments. This contrasts sharply with the expensive “rip and replace” approaches being proposed to support desktop and server virtualization projects. In its findings, ESG Lab verified that DataCore SANsymphony-V software can be deployed to cost-effectively provide easy-to-configure, performance enhanced, storage virtualization, offering affordable scalability, and performance acceleration for virtualized servers and applications.

“Enterprises have long been concerned about underutilization of servers in their data centers,” continued Palmer. “Virtualization helps them consolidate data by reducing the number of servers used and leaving those that remain as a pool of resources to be drawn on as needed. Now, enterprises are turning their attention to storage, and DataCore is tapping into that demand.”

SANsymphony-V Delivering Compelling Value, Innovation and Faster Performance

The ESG Lab Validation Report on DataCore SANsymphony-V also specifically highlights the following:

• Performance improved significantly for every workload with the File Server workload posting the most significant improvement, more than 6x and the Exchange 2007 workload showing a 5x improvement.
  
• With one click of a mouse, ESG Lab was able to serve a thin provisioned, performance tuned, fully protected, synchronously mirrored 1TB virtual disk to a Windows server in less than a minute.
• Migrating and importing disk drives from a working physical server into the virtual disk pool was a fast and effortless process. DataCore storage virtualization software provided a seamless transition from physical to virtual infrastructure while actually enhancing performance and availability.
• DataCore synchronous mirroring provided hosts with continuous access to virtual disks through a node outage with zero downtime and no interruptions to service.
• DataCore Continuous Data Protection (CDP) was simple to configure and use, enabling rollback to a specific point in time without having to create multiple snapshots.
• DataCore asynchronous remote replication was also easy to configure; compression and multi-streaming provided a 2x throughput enhancement over a simulated T1 link.

“The results of the ESG Lab test strongly validate the core value proposition we hoped to achieve with SANsymphony-V, which is to cost-effectively shape the shared storage infrastructure required by virtual IT environments,” said Alex Earhard, product manager of DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V. “By providing high-availability storage virtualization that multiplies the performance of what’s already in place, we are solving the big problem that is bringing many of today’s server and desktop virtualization projects to a standstill.”

For more information and to view the full report, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/What-Others-are-Saying/Analyst-Reports.aspx.

Virtualization Strategies Must Include Storage

http://www.rackspace.co.uk/rackspace-home/media-centre/news/article/article/virtualisation-strategies-must-include-storage/?tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=3931&cHash=e259f64b5ce67c57888b3b44c418bd74

Virtualization of desktops and servers has so far saved some businesses a bundle on their IT costs, but when overhauling a data center or integrating virtualization to existing networks, businesses need to consider storage needs as well.

According to George Teixeira, president and chief executive of DataCore Software Corp, the cost appeal of virtualization can often distract from other priorities in the company.

"You get excited about saving all this money with consolidating many servers to a few and completely forget that part of that has to be used to offset getting additional capabilities on the storage side," he told IT World Canada.

Teixeira's company conducted a survey of medium to large scale businesses throughout North America and Europe, with one third of respondents indicating they mis-estimated budgets for storage when deploying virtualization solutions.

DataCore Adds NAS Performance Acceleration, File Sharing Support to SANsymphony-V Storage Platform

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Storage/DataCore-Adds-NAS-Performance-Acceleration-File-Sharing-Support-to-SANsymphonyV-Storage-Platform-694/

Storage virtualization software specialist DataCore Software announced it has integrated Network Attached Storage (NAS) performance acceleration and high-availability file sharing support for its SANsymphony-V platform, makes it possible to employ the NAS services built into the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 platform in those environments. The integrated combination is designed to speed up performance and add a level of fault tolerance to clustered network file system (NFS) and common Internet file system (CIFS) sharing.

DataCore’s design employs mirrored copies of the SANsymphony-V software layered beneath clustered file shares (NAS) integral to Windows Servers 2008 Enterprise. Any standard storage device can be used for disk space, ranging from the basic internal hard drives packaged by the server manufacturers, to bigger external disk arrays offered by the popular storage systems vendors.

“SANsymphony-V can be easily configured to significantly accelerate performance and add a new level of data protection to Microsoft’s Clustered File Shares,” said Jeff Boles, senior analyst and director of validation services, Taneja Group. “This resulting combination of SANsymphony-V and Microsoft is additive; it is simple to set up, requires no additional purchases and best of all it allows organizations to meet both their NAS and SAN requirements from one virtual infrastructure.”

In the smallest configuration, the software co-resides with the clustered file share functions on each of two redundant Windows Enterprise servers. SANsymphony-V performs adaptive I/O caching directly on top of Hyper-V to speed up block disk access while mirroring updates to the other server’s virtual disk copy: All disk space is thin provisioned. Snapshots and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) can be turned on for added protection helping customers recover from events like ‘virus attacks’ and inadvertent deletions.

For larger environments, the file share cluster remains split across two machines, while the DataCore software runs on two separate servers dedicated to block storage virtualization. The cluster then accesses the DataCore virtual storage pool over an iSCSI or Fibre Channel SAN. Customers who start small and later outgrow the two servers can reassign their software licenses to the two additional servers. Incremental capacity licenses may also be added at any time to cover expansion.

Existing SANsymphony-V customers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Hyper-V do not need to buy additional software to support the clustered NAS file sharing features. For companies new to DataCore, SANsymphony-V software, including the NAS capabilities, can be professionally installed through the company’s authorized solution providers and resellers.

DataCore Channel Penetration Re-Inforced with New Positions & 5 Star Channel Program Designation

http://www.snseurope.com/news_full.php?id=17926
http://www.channelemea.com/spip.php?article4049

DataCore Channel Penetration re-inforced with New EMEA Director Positions, New Local Northern European Additions and top US Channel Award.

DataCore Software extends local, European and international Channel commitment:

DataCore Software has re-inforced its worldwide channel commitment by announcing the appointment of two new director positions for the EMEA; three new local channel positions in Northern Europe and the gaining of a significant US CRN channel award.

For EMEA, Iris Hatzenbichler-Durchschlag will lead and manage all marketing activities in the region. In addition, Joerg Schweinsberg will direct all distribution activities across Europe. With these promotions, DataCore Software has aligned its organisation for a steady growth in Europe, where the company expects a continued yearly growth of 30 to 40 percent...

Locally in Northern Europe the channel account management team continues to expand. March saw two new starters, Steve Wilson, Account Manager, South of England and Garry Carpenter, Technical Account Manager. Steve joins DataCore from Ericom Software UK where he held the position of Strategic Account Manager for Four years. Garry joins from Cristie Data Solutions. In addition, this week Rupert Collier, Account Manager, North of England, joins us from COMPUTERLINKS where he held the position of Product Manager for over 5 years.

On the worldwide stage, with its commitment for being 100% channel focussed, DataCore has notched further progress. It has been awarded a 5-Star Partner rating for the second straight year. CRN’s Partner Programs Guide and 5-Star Partner ratings serve as the definitive authority on vendors who have robust partner programs or products that service IT Channel solution providers. The annual 5-Star rating produced by Everything Channel recognizes the DataCore Partner Program as offering a program that provides the best possible partnering elements for channel success.

Storage by the Barrel

Every time you drive past a gas station, it’s painfully clear that the oil and gas industry is experiencing extraordinary supply and demand issues … which translates to escalating prices. According to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook report, by 2030 global energy demand is expected to increase by 50%, and oil- and gas-based energy will account for approximately 60% of this increase.

That’s why there may be no other industry today that demands a more diverse set of technological capabilities than oil and gas exploration and production. Mark P. Mills said it best in his recent Forbes.com column, “Whither oil prices? 150 in sight. So follow Bill Gates in to digital barrels”:

Sit in an oil conference today and you hear about digital technology and software, cloud computing, remote servers, bandwidth constraints, high-speed wireless, terabytes of storage, GPS, laser mapping, virtualization, virtual-reality caves, satellite imaging, hyperspectral cubes, reverse-time software, and virtualization.

Did you catch that: terabytes of storage? Let me put it into perspective. One terabyte can hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica and 10 terabytes can hold the printed collection of the Library of Congress. That’s a lot of data.

There’s little doubt that data and storage are literally the “beating heart” of today’s oil and gas organizations. But really, oil and gas is just a “poster child” for what’s happening across enterprises of all types and sizes. As enterprises become increasingly data-driven, they consume and create ever-more data from an increasingly diverse universe of sources. And while storage prices continue to decline, they are not keeping pace with the rate of data consumption, which is causing new problems in manageability, usability and data center resources. This all adds up to systemic storage problems.

With the emergence of the virtualized IT infrastructure, as well as the explosive data growth we’ve experienced over the past 10-plus years, storage management is now in the spotlight as storage volume has become the biggest cost driver for IT. And it’s become evident that a new approach is needed.

In this quandary of data storage issues, we believe virtualization-driven storage consolidation has provided a much-needed grounding. Storage virtualization is a practical and effective way to manage the increasing complexity of data and growing demands for high-availability. It also allows organizations to meet this challenge in a manner that reduces operational costs, improves efficiency, provides an expanded choice of hardware alternatives, and extends the life of existing storage assets.

And it puts real money back into the IT budget. Don’t you have some encyclopedias to buy or something?

Solving the Data Center’s Next Big Problem

By George Teixeira, CEO & President, DataCore Software

The transition to a virtualized infrastructure environment has moved to the forefront of many IT discussions. Organizations of all sizes are continuing to pursue the benefits that virtualization can offer, from increased efficiencies to maximization of resources to lower costs. But virtualization is not just about servers or desktops.

Virtualization is about creating agile, cost-effective and enduring IT infrastructures that can evolve to support the enterprise over time. To date, virtualization has largely failed to live up to this promise. Many server and desktop virtualization projects have stalled or failed because of cost overruns or unanticipated infrastructure issues. But why is this happening?

What is being missed is that server and desktop virtualization are about more than merely virtualizing servers and desktops. They are both about virtual IT infrastructure—and if organizations do not virtualize the entire infrastructure, they will not achieve the anticipated return on investment (ROI) and business benefits they are seeking. What they often overlook is the part of the infrastructure upon which both virtual servers and desktops depend: storage.

Today, the “Big Problem” in virtualization projects is storage, and enterprises have learned some hard lessons. They are being sold forklift upgrades of their storage infrastructure and vendor-specific virtualization strategies to support virtualized server and desktop infrastructures. This has moved the storage issue—its high cost, inadequate performance, inflexibility and vendor lock-in—to the front burner in virtualization discussions. That’s why this has become IT’s next “Big Problem.”

Why Virtualize?
Why not? It is universally agreed that server virtualization is a huge leap forward...

Read the full article at:
http://www.datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4499:solving-the-data-centers-next-big-problem&catid=28&Itemid=100123

B.Y.O.S. (Bring Your Own Storage); Thoughts on Wine and Virtualization

On a recent trip, I sat with a group of partners talking about wine and virtualization (a natural pairing, if I do say so myself). I love a restaurant where I can bring my own wine if I choose, but this isn’t the norm in most restaurants and certainly wasn’t the case on that particular night. Instead, I was locked in to their wine list and could only order what they offered, at a steep markup.

So, what does that have to do with virtualization? Everything, when it comes to virtualizing the storage tier.

Everyone wants flexibility and choice without being locked-in to specific hardware requirements. This choice largely exists today in the server and desktop tiers, thanks to the widespread adoption of virtualization software. But when it comes to the storage tier, hardware vendors act like restaurants – they want to lock you into their proprietary product ...

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HA! (We’re not laughing at you, Dilbert.)

Ever since hard disks were deemed critical to data processing, storage suppliers have devoted much effort to circumvent hardware failures. It started with basic disk mirroring and then evolved into the various RAID protection levels in attempts to reduce the cost of redundancy. As external disk subsystems became popular, vendors added redundancy to other components whose failure was considerably more catastrophic; fans, power supplies and disk controllers come to mind.

It’s now commonplace to regard storage products as offering “high-availability” (HA) simply because they have internally redundant hardware. This interpretation creates the expectation that you can always get to data on disks. But this is far from reality.

In effect, better storage products have shifted the risk from hardware failures to data outages. Protecting against these outages is particularly important in environments where numerous workloads depend on centralized storage devices. Take, for example, server and desktop virtualization. ...

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How Old Man Kryder Gets Back his Giddyup

As the hypervisor wars continue to rage, much attention is being paid to the high end of the market. There is a reason for this – Microsoft is flexing its marketing muscles promoting successes in large, mission-critical deployments. The most recent example of this was a deal it announced with Target, in which Target is migrating numerous mission-critical applications to its Hyper-V environment.

While the large-enterprise sector currently receives the lion’s share of the glitz, we all know that 95% of the economy is the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector. And, we also know that the SME sector is where the first shots of the hypervisor wars were fired, with Microsoft’s launch of Windows Server 2008.

What we have seen since then is a classic case study in why competition is a good thing for customers. VMware responded to Hyper-V with new SME-friendly products, and since then both companies have been “sweetening the deal” with even more attractive bundling and pricing of products and features. Thus, it’s no surprise that as we sit here in 2011, virtualization adoption in the SME market is skyrocketing.



But there is a rub – because while desktop and server virtualization technology costs have never been more appealing, ancillary costs have never been more daunting – particularly storage costs. Kryder’s Law, which states that storage density doubles every 13 months, was remarkably accurate until 2005. Since then, however, capacity gains have slowed and today one can expect no more than 30 or 40 percent annual gains in capacity at any given price-point.

What this means is that traditional storage economics are not keeping pace with growing storage demands. And with virtualization projects causing huge increases in storage consumption, the age-old approach of “throwing hardware at the problem” is fatally flawed.

Kryder’s Law is no longer a valid solution to keeping storage costs in check – particularly when one considers the exotic and expensive hardware that is often required to achieve sufficient performance and availability in a virtualized environment. A far more practical solution lies in getting more out of existing and lower-cost off-the-shelf hardware through the use of device-independent storage virtualization software.

The time has never been better for SMEs to move forward into the brave new world of virtualization. But they need to understand that Old Man Kryder needs some help these days because he just doesn’t move as fast as he used to. He needs a healthy dose of storage virtualization software to get back his giddyup.

What They Won’t Tell You About Virtualization … We Will.

Well done! You’ve consolidated 40 applications from 25 servers down to just four servers. Sure, you’ll realize hardware cost savings over time, but surprisingly, these partial steps can also increase the complexity and thus the cost of managing your IT environment. And in too many cases, early successes have given way to unmet expectations.

Why is this happening? You have to remember that virtualization isn’t just about servers or desktops. Virtualization is about creating agile, cost-effective, and enduring IT infrastructures that can evolve to support the enterprise over time. But there is a looming problem that is often overlooked, and one which can bring a virtualization deployment to a standstill – the storage problem.

You mean you didn’t know that server/desktop virtualization actually increases the complexities of storage management? And at the same time, you didn’t know it can actually stress the overhaul needed for high availability, and disaster recovery? ...

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DataCore Software Receives Second Consecutive 5-Star Rating in CRN’s 2011 Partner Programs Guide

http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/What-Others-are-Saying/Awards.aspx

Annual guide and 5-Star designation identifies DataCore as having an exceptional vendor partner program 

DataCore Software has been named to CRN’s 2011 Partner Programs Guide and has also been awarded a 5-Star Partner rating for the second straight year. CRN’s Partner Programs Guide and 5-Star Partner ratings serve as the definitive authority on vendors who have robust partner programs or products that service IT Channel solution providers. The annual 5-Star rating produced by Everything Channel recognizes the DataCore Partner Program as offering a program that provides the best possible partnering elements for channel success.

With its SANsymphony™-V next-generation storage virtualization software solution, DataCore makes it easy to address the essential storage dimension to virtualization, enabling solution providers to accelerate sales cycles, increase margins and address the lucrative and growing storage market. DataCore provides a compelling software advantage delivering hardware independence and cost saving benefits to storage in much the same way as VMware, Microsoft and Citrix software do to servers and desktops. Virtualization solution providers can easily leverage their virtual server and virtual desktop practices with a software solution that makes it practical to address the demanding storage needs – cost, performance and availability – of their virtualization projects.

DataCore also has strong partnerships with the software industry’s leading developers of virtualization technologies. These partnerships offer customers full featured, best-of-breed virtualized IT solutions across the entire data center. To read what resellers have to say about the value of selling SANsymphony-V, please see: Resellers Herald DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V Solution for Making Storage Virtualization Practical for All. To view SANsymphony-V reseller video testimonials, please visit: “What Virtualization Resellers Are Saying About SANsymphony-V.”

“The companies listed on the 2011 Partner Programs Guide represent the best channel programs in the market today. Of those, only a few get our 5-Star award, based on their commitment to the channel, breadth of program offerings and services offered to their partners,” said Kelley Damore, VP and Editorial Director, for Everything Channel’s CRN. “Each of these organizations understands that technology alone does not make for a successful channel program. By focusing on delivering a comprehensive partner program, vendors and solution providers can work together to drive business opportunities and revenue.”

DataCore has undertaken a major effort to streamline its Partner Program over the last two years to make it easier for partners to reap the rewards and benefits of featuring DataCore’s storage virtualization solutions among their product offerings. The 5-Star recognition from Everything Channel validates this partner-centric approach. DataCore’s Solution Advisor Resource Center includes a wealth of sales training and positioning tools and materials to help resellers and solution advisors grow their virtualization business with DataCore's storage virtualization solutions. To learn more, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/partner/resources/.