City of Inverness Selects DataCore Software for Storage Virtualization, Business Continuity and to Better Leverage VMware
Functionality
and price point win out over hardware-centric SAN solutions; Inverness
will reap the rewards from high-availability as well as asynchronous
mirroring for disaster recovery - all for less than half the cost of a
hardware-centric SAN
FORT LAUDERDALE - June 6, 2007
- DataCore Software today announced that the City of Inverness in
Citrus County, Florida, has selected DataCore's SANmelody storage
virtualization solution to manage and protect their data center. With
SANmelody, not only was the City of Inverness able to use existing
hardware, it was able to get twice as much use out of its existing
storage space as well as adding a new level of business continuity
protection and scalability for the future, which the city did not
previously have.
When Joey Johnston, IT director, City of Inverness, came
on board he inherited approximately thirteen server systems. He knew
enough about VMware to know that he could greatly improve productivity
and cost savings. Therefore, he decided to consolidate these servers.
In order to take full advantage of the functionality of VMware across
systems, he also knew he needed to deploy a SAN. Johnston did his
research and a key priority at the outset was finding a SAN that would
work with VMware and provide a level of automated failover protection.
Johnston soon found DataCore in his research and identified the
company's SANmelody as a potential solution that supported and was
fully compatible with VMware. He also spoke with EqualLogic and
LeftHand Networks as well as some other, major SAN solution providers.
What Johnston soon realized was that other SAN solutions were not very
scalable in comparison with DataCore's SANmelody.
Taking EqualLogic, for example, if he would have
purchased a 3TB solution and then needed to add another terabyte or two
in the future, he would have then needed to buy another storage
hardware module as an upgrade. This could cost $25,000 just to
accommodate the additional storage capacity. Also, while fiber channel
(FC) was not an immediate requirement, the fact that SANmelody
supported all of its services over FC or iSCSI protocols on Ethernet
connections left the option open for the future.
"With DataCore, you can simply add an additional license
to manage three more terabytes of storage - or sixty terabytes, or an
unlimited option," said Johnston. "The high-availability option was
also a very big deal as was being able to re-provision servers. We
could take a server that might not be up to the task of managing a
geographical information system (GIS) or a mail host and re-provision
it as a SAN server solution running SANmelody. It is very easy to just
add more disks to a SANmelody server, since it is a standard server
just like the ones running other applications. You simply populate the
SANmelody server with more disks to get to six terabytes in capacity -
in our case all for under $5,000. On another vendor's solution, you
will easily spend three or four times the amount just to get the same
capacity."
Johnston took about eight weeks in total to make this
decision - from his initial introduction to DataCore to signing off on
purchasing SANmelody. That time was primarily taken doing some of the
underlying work to get his environment ready for the new SAN, such as
making sure the switch fabric was up to the task. "I talked and met
with each vendor, I attended the webinars they offered and considered
the options," continued Johnston. "Budget-wise and performance-wise,
SANmelody won out. The performance numbers on SANmelody are right there
with any of the top vendors and we are able to use servers that would
either be doing nothing or would be offered up for auction. The main
business drivers for going with SANmelody were the price point, the
scalability, as well as the breadth of storage services that can be
taken advantage of with the product."
SANmelody now runs on Dell PowerEdge 2500 servers -
servers that would have been decommissioned. SANmelody supports the
city's GIS system, which is used to map properties, chart water lines,
track tree management initiatives as well as monitor and manage roads
and streets for maintenance and usability purposes. SANmelody will go a
long way in terms of ease-of-management as the City of Inverness
outgrows its direct, attached storage. Of huge benefit to Johnston, who
is the only IT person working on behalf of the City of Inverness, is
the ability to scale his thirteen servers into one virtual machine.
Likewise, consolidated storage and the ability to automate the
provisioning of storage to servers without human intervention was a
major plus. Furthermore, Johnston is now able to do fast disk-to-disk
back-ups and replication and he is able to test these services. Before,
he neither had the time nor the funds to buy a server to test back-ups.
"SANmelody is all about ease of use and scalability and allows you to
have enterprise-level functionality at an SMB price," added Johnston.
The AIM technology DataCore offers for asynchronous IP
mirroring enables Johnston to replicate critical data over the
Internet. Next year, Johnston plans on fully implementing a remote
server at a replication site. With a location smack in the hurricane
zone of Florida, the ability to protect data outside of Florida with
another local government agency in another state will mean Johnston can
achieve a higher level of disaster recovery as well as have
high-availability. He plans to connect to that remote site via a
thin-client and do asynchronous data mirroring transfers at night. The
replicated environment will encompass both payroll information as well
as email on the servers. The financial package, which currently runs on
Solaris, is also migrating to Windows and will live on the VMware
platform too, all running in conjunction with SANmelody.
"The City of Inverness bought DataCore and VMware in
tandem," said George Teixeira, president and CEO, DataCore Software.
"They knew they needed to go with a SAN in order to fully leverage the
functionality inherent to VMware. Whereas a SAN originally looked
cost-prohibitive to the City of Inverness, when Joey found our
SANmelody solution he was able to get full functionality without
sacrificing his requirements. He was also able to repurpose some of his
old servers that he had slated to be retired. Not only has DataCore
delivered an affordable SAN, but now he has at his disposal a fully
automated high availability SAN that can grow with his needs."
The mail server is in the process of going live this
month along with the financial servers and the GIS systems. The
deployment at the City of Inverness will first manage six terabytes on
a DataCore powered SAN supporting auto failover and recovery across
dual SANmelody servers - each supporting three terabytes. When Johnston
fields calls now from the other SAN providers who are keen to know why
he went with DataCore, he has the answers for them. "DataCore offers up
functionality and the most competitive price point," he said.
"Moreover, in terms of functionality, I mention high-availability and
auto failover data protection as well as AIM - asynchronous mirroring
for remote site disaster recovery. And the price point was just over
$15,000 for all that functionality and two licenses. This is less than
half of what I was quoted for one box from a traditional SAN hardware
solution."
Johnston concluded, "We bought a scalable storage infrastructure and not a box that we would soon find ourselves outgrowing."
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization
software, fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage with
innovative software that combines advanced functions and services with
the agility and savings of hardware independence. DataCore's disk
server software easily adds capacity expansion and centralized storage
management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, VMware, MacOS, and NetWare
systems. DataCore is privately held and its corporate headquarters are
in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. For more information, call (877) 780-5111
or visit
www.datacore.com.
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