ANZ Customer Newsletter

Q2 2008      Issue 2

Q2, 08 ANZ SANvantage Newsletter

Welcome to this issue of DataCore News, bought to you from DataCore Software, encompassing the latest news and events, customer wins and useful download materials.

By now most of you know that virtualization is the hottest thing going in IT, but did you realize that if you are only using server virtualization you are only getting ½ the benefits of going virtual?

Virtual Servers and Virtual Storage make sense!

Customers and partners worldwide are arriving at this realization and it has made for an exciting Q1 for DataCore. Not only did we celebrate our 10 year anniversary in February, we announced SANharmony, the next generation virtualisation platform to offer integrated advanced storage services (initially offering management of both NAS and SAN storage), which will be on general availability in this quarter. And we unveiled Virtual Infrastructure Foundation PLUS (VIF+) package, which has been well received by the channel.

Nearly 5000 Customers Worldwide, and Growing at Over 100 New Customers Per Month!

Growth continues at a phenomenal rate, and one of our main focuses in the short term will be to continue building our customer base. Don’t miss the opportunity to become one of them! Please Check out our latest Disaster Recovery and Virtual Storage Solutions.

I trust that you find the content useful. As always, your feedback is welcome.

Kind regards,

Peter Thompson
VP, Asia
DataCore Software

Announcements

Meet the DataCore ANZ Management Team!

David Childs joins David Bull and Peter Thompson in the management and development of the business in ANZ. Peter joined DataCore over 8 years ago as the first APAC employee, and has been responsible for building the business in the region. David has been with DataCore for nearly 4 years and spearheaded the current channel and focus on Total Enterprise Virtualization. Together, the three of them and our network of authorized and trained value-added partners are your resource for helping to answer your questions and are in place to provide you with the right storage and disaster recovery solutions that fit your needs and budget.

DataCore ANZ Welcomes David Childs to the Team!

We’d like to take a moment to welcome our newest DataCore ANZ member to the team. David Childs brings over 20 years experience in solution consulting and business building to the table, and has also been one of DataCore’s top selling partner consultants! He liked the technology so much that he decided that he wanted to be part of the team, and we saw the tremendous value he brings in being able to address DataCore customer needs.

“It is exciting to be part of a team that is revolutionizing the way we think and work with storage. DataCore is cost effective software that makes storage better. It complements existing storage solutions and is a tremendous value for end users, solving key storage issues such as performance acceleration, fail-safe data protection, disaster recovery, and flexibility. Best of all, DataCore is growing rapidly and is solidly committed to supporting and building its partner and customer base in Australia.”

Initially working with accounting systems for the SME market, then for thirteen years running a successful Melbourne based consultancy, David has firsthand knowledge of the challenges and opportunities faced by many IT shops.

The team can be reached at ANZinfo@DataCore.com

          

         David Bull                David Childs

The DataCore Team in Action at the Citrix Application Delivery Conference in Sydney and Melbourne.

David Bull, David Childs & George Teixeira (CEO DataCore) work the event.

DataCore Engineering Product Update

This is an exciting year for DataCore, new features and products releases, new SANsymphony and SANmelody updates, and new versions of our products that will support 64 bit and W2K8 operating systems are under way. Expect SANsymphony and SANmelody updates or PSP's in the next few months that will include some enhancements of the user interface. A Traveller update is also planned that will improve volume restoration performance. W2K8 and X64 support comes in the latter half of the year. A new product capability, SANharmony (available in Q2) will more closely integrate DataCore's SANsymphony and SANmelody features with Microsoft's NAS features. This will take the form of a new optional MMC console interface that will be used as the launch mechanism to easily deliver SANsymphony or SANmelody cached and thin provisioned virtual volumes to be used for NAS file shares. SANharmony can be added to existing up to date SANmelody or SANsymphony installations.

For more information: SANharmony – New Virtualisation 2.0 Platform That Integrates SAN and NAS

DataCore Software Announces Affordable Line of Feature-Packed SAN Virtualisation Solutions for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery 

Solutions Come "Ready to Run" on VM's, Blades or Servers; Feature-Packed iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN Solutions Offer Fail-Safe Data Protection, DR Replication, Upgradeability and "Value Carry-Forward" Protection.

Feature-Packed Virtual Storage Solutions – Explained

DataCore Announces Portable, Feature-Packed VM Starter SAN

Runs on: VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, SUN, and Citrix XenServer Virtualisation Platforms, Hardware Servers and Blades

Vizioncore and DataCore Form Virtualisation Technology Alliance; Companies Showcase a Joint Disaster Recovery and Offsite Backup Solution

Partnership Means Increased Efficiency and Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery Capability for SMBs and Server Virtualisation Deployments

“Over the course of the last few years, implementing a disaster recovery project has become a priority for most businesses, regardless of their size,” said Chris Akerberg, vice president of global sales & marketing, Vizioncore. “It is now commonly accepted that although the SMB may not have the same IT budget as large enterprises, they typically have the same imperatives in terms of data protection and availability. Bringing Vizioncore's and DataCore's respective products together in an integrated DR/backup and offsite backup solution provides an elegant, reliable and cost effective means for businesses to protect their data and keep their applications available.” Vizioncore products, which include vRanger Pro, vConverter™, vCharter™ and vReplica to r™ enhance Virtualisation technology by enabling customers to replicate, P2V migrate, back-up, monitor and improve the performance of virtual machines within their overall IT infrastructure.

DataCore Adds the Citrix Global Alliance Technology Partners to its prestigious list of Industry Affiliations

The Citrix Global Alliance Technology Partners are industry leaders who extend the Citrix Access Platform through integration and support of one or more Citrix products to support customer choice in access solutions.
See DataCore Industry Affiliations.

DataCore Software wins Network Computing’s Virtualisation Product of the Year 2008

DataCore’s SANmelody solution has been awarded the Virtualisation Solution of the Year beating stiff category competition from VMware, Citrix, Vizioncore and NetApp.

The Awards, voted by more than 4000 of Network Computing Magazine’s readership, signifies readers’ appreciation of SANmelody and how it easily and cost effectively it converts PC servers into cost-effective expansion disk servers.

DataCore Software announced as finalist in Four Categories of the UK Storage Awards

DataCore Software has been announced as finalists in no less than four categories for the UK Storage Awards to be announced in London on 5 June. The categories are,  Storage Replication Product of the Year, Storage Product of the Year, Storage Virtualisation Product of the Year and Storage Manufacturer of the Year.

Vote now http://www.storage-awards.co.uk/

Top

Customer Spotlight

DDI Health

“DataCore has removed a great deal of the complexity and management burden from our IT systems staff by automating tedious tasks that were error prone, disruptive and time consuming. Our overall productivity and the high levels of system uptime being achieved are greatly improved since we deployed SANmelody,” said Paul Graham, head of software development, DDI Health.

DDI Health of Perth, Australia, produces a range of solutions across the diagnostic health services sector. The company was grappling with wasted disk space, ‘out of disk space' warnings that force systems and applications to be shut down to add more disks and constant disk provisioning issues. Whereas one set of servers would be full, another set would have disk space to spare, thereby making the provisioning of disk space between systems an on-going and fairly labor-intensive undertaking. With SANmelody in place to automatically allocate disk space to physical and virtual servers as well as workstations, the administration team's disk management headache has disappeared.

Press release link: http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_live.asp?date=04/14/2008
Case study link: http://www.datacore.com/downloads/CaseStudies_ddiHealth.pdf

The Glenvill Group

"Since we were building a new IT center from the ground up, we really didn't want to worry about storage details or failures. Our focus was on making sure we could manage growth, respond rapidly to new requirements and keep our business critical applications and services up and running," stated Michael Dickson, General Manager, Glenvill Group. "DataCore has done the job for us. The SANmelody solution has been running for almost a year now with 100% uptime, allowing us to concentrate on managing and growing our business, not worrying about our IT storage needs.

"Press release: http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_071018.asp

Chandler Macleod

"When we first heard about the solution, we were understandably skeptical - it just sounded too good to be true," said John Walker, IT Programme Manager, Chandler Macleod. "But we did the due diligence and even spoke to some other customers using it, and everything came back positive. The installation went smoothly and we spent a weekend trying to break it, but it stood up to the hype. Our existing SAN had a limitation of 32 LUNs. By introducing SANmelody into our storage infrastructure, we are now able to separate physical storage LUNs and logical LUNs and break that barrier."

"We now have a storage solution that is as robust and flexible as the servers - including the virtual ones - that it serves." said Walker. "We did not have to invest heavily in storage hardware for future growth since we can add what we need, when we need it - despite which vendor we purchase it from. And when it does come time to refresh hardware, our storage practice will remain intact."

Press release link: http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_071129.asp

Kingston City Council

"A core strategy for our IT services was to implement a robust and secure storage environment in our production data centre that we could extend to our DR site for replication. DataCore's SANmelody(TM) provided our business with the technology to build an active cluster in production ensuring we have maximum uptime, almost identical to what we have achieved by implementing VMware ESX for our server infrastructure," stated Kevin Chan, IT infrastructure manager, Kingston City Council. "DR was simplified by using Asynchronous Mirroring and the ability to utilise any underlying storage arrays give us flexibility to utilise lower cost storage to build the DR Storage solution. We worked with our partner Lincom Solutions to design, proof of concept and deployed the solution, which was done seamlessly with minimal downtime to our operation."

Press release link: http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_070919.asp  
Case study link: http://www.datacore.com/downloads/CaseStudies_Kingston_Print.pdf
CIO article link: http://www.cio.com.au/index.php/id;316257298

Sherron Associates

“SANmelody made it easy to set up a high-availability SAN to support our move from an aging server farm to new XenServer-based systems. Moreover, we were able to re-purpose existing hardware to run the SAN simply by purchasing some additional hard drives. The DataCore SAN just works and provides peace of mind that my system is secure. It does absolutely everything that it should and makes things far more simple and flexible. I love that I don't have to think about it.”

At the start of 2008, Sherron Associates was at a point where all of its equipment (with the exception of two servers) was well over five years old and was becoming increasingly problematic. According to Gayle Spencer, network administrator, Sherron Associates, “going virtual” with Citrix XenServer and DataCore SANmelody was the most practical thing for the firm to do because it could cost-effectively virtualize and consolidate their storage resources and its entire server farm, consisting of seven servers, onto just two servers – using XenServer and SANmelody – as opposed to purchasing five or six brand new hardware platforms.

Press release: http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_live.asp?date=03/18/2008
Case study link: http://www.datacore.com/downloads/CaseStudies_SherronAssociates.pdf

Woodgrain Millwork, Inc.

“We ended up purchasing an EMC array for performance mostly,” said Olsen. “To virtualize the storage, further enhance performance across both arrays and for data replication, we use DataCore SANsymphony. Very importantly, DataCore allowed us to use dissimilar storage arrays and protect our existing investment;  it let us do the replication between our old EVA 5000 and new EMC array.” Woodgrain has 14 terabytes (TBs) of data in their EVA array and it was essential for them to be able to use that array and not throw it away. “SANsymphony allows us to use our existing equipment,” said Rem Fox, CIO, Woodgrain Millwork, Inc. “That was one of our key requirements as we embarked on this. We wanted to leverage our investment in the array we had, but still wanted to be able to move forward with the data replication design that we had in mind.”

According to the IT team at Woodgrain, there are not a lot of solutions on the market that would allow them to deliver the required data replication and still keep their existing array. “SANsymphony was one of the only solutions we found that would allow us to meet our needs,” said Olsen. “Plus, it accelerates performance of the underlying storage arrays and has a lot of other features even over and above what we were looking for.” Woodgrain moved SANsymphony into a live production environment at the end of February 2008. The IT team has now moved a number of key systems to run off of the new SAN, including its VM environment and all of their SQL servers. “Overall we have seen some pretty good performance benefits,” commented Olsen. “The SQL servers running through SANsymphony are running very well and are giving us good performance numbers – a lot better than what we were seeing before.”

Press release: http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_live.asp?date=04/30/2008

Top

Reseller Spotlight

Blue Connections Website

Blue Connections has put together a great solution combining VMware and DataCore, running on IBM hardware to provide TRUE Total Enterprise Virtualization. Their success is partially attributed to a strong web presence detailing the product in a prevalent manner, and one of their top engineers (and of course a DataCore Certified Installation Engineer or DCIE), Bernard Tyers, has even started a blog detailing real world use of SANmelody!

Storage Virtualisation Blog

Top

Resources

Solutions Reference Cards – VMware

DataCore has just released a Reference Integration card with VMware that outlines value propositions, user needs, frequently asked questions and common scenarios.

Download: http://www.datacore.com/downloads/VMware_DataCore_Solutions_Reference_Card_UK.pdf

Solutions Reference Cards – Citrix

DataCore has just released a Reference Integration card with Citrix that outlines value propositions, user needs, frequently asked questions and common scenarios.

Download: http://www.datacore.com/downloads/Citrix_DataCore_Solutions_Reference_Card_UK.pdf

Webinars

DataCore offers regularly scheduled ANZ webinars that are held fortnightly on Thursday mornings at 9:30 AM (GMT+10) The Webinar duration is 30 minutes and includes a Datacore Introductory overview for ANZ, general product overview and Demo. Register today

DataCore Carry Forward Value Protection Programme

The DataCore Carry Forward Value Protection Programme is a unique value-add offering customers to begin where they need and upgrade accordingly by paying the difference in price between their original purchase and the new upgrade purchase.  Simply stated, the price paid for DataCore software is applied towards future purchases giving customers the utmost flexibility and leveraging their investment in DataCore solutions.  This programme is a key competitive differentiator and represents the fundamental value of a strategy that is based on intelligent portable software.  DataCore is the only storage Virtualisation vendor that can scale from low-cost entry level solutions for SMB customers to high performance, highly available Enterprise class offerings.  For more details and to discuss how a phased approach to winning a customer can yield higher profits, increased trust, and greater loyalty at an account contact your DataCore representative today!

Bandwidth Calculator

Ever need to calculate what it will take to meet a customer's RPO/RTO (Recovery Point Objective/Recovery Time Objective) requirements?  Begin by considering how long it will take to replicate volumes from one site to another and how big of a pipe your customer will require to handle their Disaster Recovery needs.   Here is a publicly available bandwidth calculator which will make this task easier http://www.bandwidth.com/content?page=calculator.  Contact your DataCore trained Technical Consultant for details on how our Synchronous Mirroring and Async IP Mirroring options can help you meet RPO/RTO needs.

New DataCore White Papers

DataCore has just initiated a new awareness campaign. Currently, we have 10 white papers posted. Please download the papers as they are interesting and informative resources.   DataCore downloads

Top

Support

DataCore Training is available in Australia

All DataCore partners have the opportunity to participate within DataCore’s SANcollege online training programme. Visit http://www.datacore.com/training/training_home.asp or check out the course calendar on: http://www.datacore.com/index_frame.asp?frame_subnav_content=3.

Limited places are still available for SANmelody Training - book up online to reserve your place.

New Tech Bulletins

Several Technical Bulletins (TBs) have been updated / released.  These Tech Bulletins are updated whenever a 3rd party vendor or DataCore makes changes that impact recommended configuration practices.  DataCore attempts to remain up to date with these TBs.  Those that have changed recently are:

TB #	Date Update Posting	Topic Summary
2	January 30, 2008	LINUX MPIO
5	March 3, 2008	VMware
8	February 6, 2008	NMVs
10	January 4, 2008	Solaris iSCSI
13	February 6, 2008	MS Clusters
15	April 14, 2008	XenSource

Top

Latest News

The Citrix Application Development Conferences (Sydney and Melbourne): DataCore Showcases Citrix Ready SAN Storage Virtualization Appliance on XenServer

DataCore president and CEO George Teixeira and the DataCore ANZ team showcased these new capabilities at the DataCore booth at both Citrix events. “DataCore's virtual SAN appliance and cost-effective disaster recovery solutions provide a new level of flexibility for the base of Citrix users in Australia,” said Teixeira. He added, “Australia is a growth market for DataCore. Recent customers deploying DataCore in combination with virtual servers include Telstra Super, Newmont Mining, Hertz Australia, Daimler Chrysler, DDI Health, Chandler Macleod, Glenvill Group, and Kingston City Council, among others.”

Link to Press Release

DataCore Virtual SAN Appliance & Storage Virtualisation Software Are Citrix Ready™ for XenServer 4.1

DataCore Software today announced that its two industry leading storage virtualization solutions, SANsymphony and SANmelody, have been verified as Citrix Ready™ for XenServer 4.1 as virtual SAN appliances running on XenServer virtual machines as well as in a standard physical storage server configuration. Rigorous testing verified that both implementations will support XenServer 4.1 virtual machines with virtual storage and advanced storage services critical to demanding virtual server environments, such as fail-safe data protection, high availability mirroring, disaster recovery replication, SANmotion data migration, thin provisioning storage pools and high speed caching for performance acceleration.

Link to Press Release

Insight Venture Partners and Updata Partners Invest $30 Million in Storage Virtualization Leader DataCore Software

“Insight Venture Partners has built its reputation on finding and investing in companies poised for tremendous success in the industries in which we specialize,” said Jeff Horing, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners. “DataCore is perfectly positioned as the virtual storage foundation for all server and desktop virtualization platforms, regardless of vendor. We believe that storage virtualization will eventually be as big as server virtualization and that DataCore will be the big beneficiary of this trend.”

“DataCore has gained global customer traction with superior storage virtualization and storage management solutions,” said Barry Goldsmith, General Partner, Updata Partners. “We are pleased to invest in a company that has already had significant impact in its market and is well-positioned for high growth.”

Link to Press Release

DataCore Announces Affordable, Feature-Packed SAN Virtualisation Solutions for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Solutions Come "Ready to Run" on VM's, Blades or Servers

DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage Virtualisation SAN software, announced that it has developed a series of Feature-Packaged Virtual Storage Solutions that run on VMware, Microsoft VS, Oracle VM, SUN VM, Virtual Iron and Citrix XenServer Virtualisation platforms, or Intel/AMD based hardware servers and blades. DataCore's Feature-Packed Virtual Storage Solutions support capacities ranging from 2TB to 32TB and start from $4,500. All the Feature-Packed solutions include auto-allocating thin provisioning storage support, SANmotion data migration technology, storage performance acceleration caching software, snapshots for fast disk backups, auto failover and auto recovery data protection via synchronous network mirroring as well as remote site IP mirror replication for disaster recovery. These solutions provide the simplest and most affordable way on the market to get started fully realizing the cost savings and productivity benefits of a full-featured, virtual SAN that can scale and survive hardware obsolescence.

DataCore Launches New Starter SAN Package

DataCore new SAN software aimed at SMBs that require the features & functionality of the higher-end enterprise SANs - but at an affordable price point.

“The VM Starter SAN includes the features included in last year's Starter SAN, as well as failover and failback automatically for data protection, the ability to do disaster recovery, and have the system take storage snapshots for quick disk-to-disk backup. The software can be deployed on a server, blade server or VM, and then SMBs will have everything a large storage array can do at a fraction of the cost,” Teixeira said.

DataCore Has Reason to Celebrate

“We've built a terrific company that is delivering great value to our customers, our shareholders and the industry, without losing its character as a fun and creative place to work,” said George Teixeira, founder, president and CEO, DataCore Software. “Our employees, partners, customers and friends make it all possible, and we are very grateful to have their support.”

Founded on February 4, 1998, DataCore Software has thousands of customers worldwide using its storage virtualization, SAN management and disaster recovery solutions. DataCore regularly raises the bar, redefining storage virtualization in evermore practical, user-friendly and economical terms. DataCore pioneered many of the advanced storage technologies in the industry including Thin Provisioning, Storage Domains, Continuous Data Protection, portability across Virtual Machine platforms and its groundbreaking Virtualization II advances.

Said Teixeira, “Just wait ‘til you see what comes next.”

Top