DataCore Software, provider of storage virtualization software, announced the availability of SANsymphony-V. SANsymphony-V is a next-generation storage virtualization software solution designed to enable IT organizations to eliminate storage-related barriers preventing them from realizing the financial and operational goals of their virtualization initiatives.

“Unanticipated storage hardware investments and inefficient storage use are often the most critical factors that bring server consolidation and desktop virtualization projects to a screeching halt,” describes Richard Villars, vice president of storage and IT executive strategies at IDC. “Storage virtualization software solutions, like DataCore’s SANsymphony-V, allow IT teams to maximize the use of existing storage assets while also dramatically reducing administrative burdens. They frequently play the key role in ensuring the success of organizations’ server and desktop virtualization efforts.”

SANsymphony-V software enables datacenters 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.

The new software helps to avoid the performance problems caused by I/O bottlenecks and lost business suffered from downtime that make customers hesitant to virtualize crucial business applications, such as mail and databases systems.

SANsymphony-V uses adaptive caching and performance boosting techniques perfected over the past 10 years to absorb wildly variable workloads, while simultaneously removing storage as a single point of failure and disruption. SANsymphony-V offers a flexible, open software platform from which to provision, share, reconfigure, migrate, replicate, expand, and upgrade storage without slowdowns or downtime.

DataCore uses software to reshape server and disk resources already in use to meet the largely unpredictable and unforeseen workloads that virtual machines and virtual desktops throw at newly consolidated data centers–delivering compelling operational and economic value, says a spokesperson.

DataCore designed SANsymphony-V to meet the needs of midmarket end-users and solution-providers, especially those familiar with Windows Server administration eager to adapt their IT operations to accommodate the many variables that server and desktop virtualization introduce.

SANsymphony-V further accelerates the transition between physical and virtual machines by putting to full use the disk drives and data mounted on the original systems. The advanced features, all device-independent, include disk pooling, high-speed caching, synchronous mirroring, asynchronous remote replication, non-disruptive disk migrations, and low-impact online snapshots. SANsymphony-V also includes a number of advances to better safeguard workloads and avoid disruptions, including integrated continuous data protection (CDP), multi-site recovery, and high-speed and traffic compressing replication.

SANsymphony-V software can be purchased through DataCore-authorized solution providers across the globe. With the new release comes a simple licensing and pricing structure based on instances of the software (generally, two copies for high-availability) and managed disk capacity.
Five different models and price points are available to meet needs from large to small.

Source:http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/News/2011/DataCore-Announces-New-Generation-of-Storage-Vir.aspx

DataCore Software, a leading provider of software-based virtualization solutions empowering storage, today announced that the company has continued to attract top talent from VMware and Citrix in key executive positions to fuel growth and to take the company to the forefront of the virtualization market space. DataCore has hired Dan Hascall as the new Vice President of Americas Sales, promoted Martin Clancy to the position of Chief Financial Officer, and appointed Johan Vanhaeren as the new regional director covering the Benelux countries.

“With over 6,000 customers worldwide and nearly 20,000 licenses shipped, we are tapping the wave of virtualization that has spread from servers and desktops to storage,” comments George Teixeira, president and CEO, DataCore Software. “Storage virtualization software, like its server and desktop virtualization cousins, is all about software that lives beyond the life of storage devices that come and go over time, making users’ storage investments better and more economical. Adding these industry veterans to our management team comes as we prepare an even more aggressive push to the reseller community and to virtualization users. We are hiring experienced virtualization industry leaders to fuel our growth as storage virtualization takes center stage and becomes more and more mainstream – both in the enterprise and in the Cloud.”

Widely recognized as the software leader in storage virtualization, DataCore has continued its double digit growth despite recessionary times. DataCore’s software solutions enable data centers and IT departments to better manage, consolidate and maximize storage capacity as well as to leverage existing hardware in order to protect and serve storage assets to VMware, Microsoft and Citrix virtual servers and desktops.

DataCore Doubles North America Sales Team; Hires Dan Hascall, New Vice President of Sales for the Americas

Building for growth in North America, in 2010 DataCore has doubled its North America sales team and hired Dan Hascall, formerly of VMware, to lead it as the new Vice President of Americas Sales. Hascall came to VMware in 2006 and helped develop VMware’s channel model and was responsible for the company’s Western Channel region. “DataCore is well-positioned for major success in both the network and Cloud computing models,” states Hascall. “And my question to users is simply ‘Why haven’t you virtualized your storage?’ Virtualization applies equally well to servers, desktops and storage. With DataCore, the move to storage virtualization is painless and partners can offer real value and strategic business agility to their customers. DataCore storage virtualization is the critical foundation that makes it easy for customers to move along the virtualization journey.”

Finance & Operations Expertise with a Channel Mindset: DataCore Promotes Martin Clancy to Chief Financial Officer

Martin Clancy has been promoted to Chief Financial Officer at DataCore Software. Clancy came to DataCore from Citrix Systems, a marquee virtualization vendor with a blue-chip reseller community and an extraordinarily channel-oriented mindset. In his twelve years with Citrix, Clancy served in a variety of financial and operations roles, the last one being Senior Director, Finance & Product Operations for the Desktop Division.

“DataCore is seeing a lot of growth and the numbers are compelling,” notes Clancy. “The appetite for virtualization technologies stems from the fact that these technologies give organizations that use them freedom. But from the perspective of CFO, I look at the tangible business benefits that virtualization brings, and they are incredibly persuasive on the storage-side. Virtualizing storage resources means that institutions are not locked in to a particular storage vendor and therefore gain greater purchasing power; they can avoid downtime, planned or unplanned; improve the performance of storage devices; mix current storage devices with newly purchased equipment; and, most importantly, stay within a budget.”

Worldwide Momentum in the Channel: DataCore Hires New Director of the Benelux Region

DataCore has also appointed Johan Vanhaeren, based in Belgium, as director for the Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) region. Vanhaeren was the former country manager for Citrix in the Benelux region. “Just like its storage virtualization and desktop virtualization counterparts, DataCore storage virtualization software is changing the way resellers, solution providers and virtualization administrators manage and deploy virtualization projects and Clouds,” said Vanhaeren. “And this adoption is worldwide in its scope. The virtualization phenomenon knows no boundaries.”

Adds Teixeira, “More companies and institutions of all sizes are experiencing first-hand the power that comes from embracing DataCore’s software-based approach to storage virtualization, which includes achieving the highest degree of availability, flexibility and openness for their storage. We will continue to build our leadership team and company to help bring the benefits of DataCore storage virtualization to customers worldwide, helping them to evolve their current storage environments to attain the added benefits of virtualization.”

Source:http://www.kansascity.com/2010/10/11/2298136/datacore-software-fuels-growth.html

DataCore Software recently reported that its storage virtualization software has enabled the NIEDAX GROUP to combine traditional storage arrays, already installed, with new high-speed Solid State Disks (SSDs) to create a Storage Area Network (SAN) to meet their growing data center needs. DataCore virtualization software, combined with FusionIO NAND flash memory SSD technology, has achieved a new level of performance, high availability and energy efficiency – running in production at 100,000 IOPS and 600 MBs per second of throughput, while only consuming 15 Watts of energy versus 4000 Watts with hard disks alone.

The NIEDAX GROUP, one of the largest electrical installation manufacturers worldwide, needed to upgrade its systems to meet the growing demands of its ERP system which is based on Microsoft Dynamics. In addition they wanted to migrate their base of over 40 VMware VMs onto a more reliable SAN infrastructure. The major requirement, however, driven by the ERP requirements was for a new SAN storage solution that could deliver higher performance, capacity and availability than the existing hardware SAN. NIEDAX utilized a consultancy firm to calculate and access its data requirements and found out that if it continued to use a traditional hardware SAN it would need to add and invest in at least another two storage systems, each with a minimum of 40 Fibre Channel disk drives, to achieve the required performance and high availability. This would be a significant investment and greatly add to the ongoing space and energy costs – so alternatives were sought.

The Challenge: Having already seen the value of using VMware for servers, NIEDAX wanted to know if there was virtualization solution that could do the same for their SAN storage. Additionally, it also had to meet the ERP performance requirements that were critical.

The company understood the value of virtualization – having evaluated the use of VMware ESX to virtualize a number of machines and realizing the benefits of going green by reducing power consumption and heating costs with servers. So, NIEDAX asked what they could do similarly for their storage. DataCore partner S&L Netzwerktechnik GmbH evaluated the requirements and then suggested and developed an alternative plan that could build on the company’s existing investment and reduce their ongoing costs. The solution consisted of:

DataCore SANmelody 3.0 software providing virtualization, performance- accelerating caching software and high-availability mirroring across the pool of storage arrays and SSDs;
Integration of the existing HP EVA Storage Array;
Integration and additional disks to the HP MSA Storage Arrays;
The addition of high-speed FusionIO SSDs with NAND flash memory to boost performance and lower overall energy requirements.
The Solution: DataCore SANmelody 3.0 virtualization software runs on standard servers and enables cost-effective high availability via synchronous mirroring to occur between the heterogeneous mix of SAN hardware. The DataCore solution facilitated NIEDAX GROUP using its existing hardware in combination with the required expansion and new SSDs in order to obtain higher performance and to grow capacity. In a similar manner to what VMware had done for their servers, DataCore virtualized and made their storage hardware more efficient and cost-effective.

“We are happy with our DataCore investment and we are benefiting from the many functional and financial benefits of putting it in use,” stated Oliver Bauer, Team Leader Administration / IT at NIEDAX GROUP. “The SAN now enables flexibility in administration, ease of expansion and the ability to dynamically allocate storage where and when we need it. DataCore caching accelerates overall performance and delivers a much higher data throughput. The software approach ensures the ease of transfer and the ability to use SAN-wide features on different hardware arrays and devices. Thus it is a very cost-effective way to mirror data. For our demanding ERP application, the fact that we could run FusionIO Solid State Disks under the DataCore virtualization and management solution was critical. We gained tremendous performance from adding FusionIO SSDs and overall we reduce energy and cooling costs.”

In terms of background, it is important to note that the demanding databases that support ERP systems, especially in manufacturing applications such as at the NIEDAX GROUP, often do not consume very large amounts of storage. Instead, however, they do require extremely high performance. With the Fusion IO NAND SSD flash memory technology in place, the NIEDAX GROUP was able to achieve 100,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) and rates of 600 MB/s with only 15 Watt power consumption, when running in production. By comparison, if they had used conventional Fibre Channel storage disks alone to achieve these levels of performance, they would have consumed somewhere around 4,000 Watts.

“With the implementation of DataCore‘s virtualization storage software we were able to meet all of the customers technical requirements,” said Alwin Kohl, consultant at S&L Netzwerktechnik GmbH. “In addition, with the combination of DataCore’s virtualization software and FusionIO‘s SSD NAND flash memory we were able to protect NIEDAX’s current investments in their SAN and extend it – making it green and significantly reducing long-term costs for our customer.”

Through the successful completion of the NIEDAX Group deployment and other customer projects, S&L Netzwerktechnik GmbH has gained the status of being a DataCore Gold Partner in addition to its certifications as Microsoft Gold Partner and Citrix Gold Partner. With DataCore’s storage virtualization certification, S&L Network Technology Ltd. Has proven it has the expertise to implement virtualization technology across servers, storage and desktops.

“We are pleased that S&L Netzwerktechnik GmbH has earned its designation as a Gold Partner through its professional implementation of virtualization projects with DataCore,” said Siegfried Betke, Director of Central Europe at DataCore Software. “We know the value that our customers place on having experienced experts that they can rely on, and this is particularly important with virtualization projects since many customers have realized the benefits of a comprehensive 3-dimensional approach to virtualization covering desktops, servers and storage.”

Source:http://www.datastorageconnection.com/article.mvc/DataCore-Software-Virtualizes-FusionIO-Solid-0001?VNETCOOKIE=NO

DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization software, recently announced that Waterstons, a Gold Accredited Partner, has selected DataCore storage virtualization software to provide the infrastructure to power their cloud-based computing service.

Waterstons provides cloud hosting services from a purpose-built Tier 3 data center in the North of England, monitored and managed around-the-clock from their regional operations center in Durham. Andrew Kershaw, Technical Director at Waterstons, explained, “Waterstons has provided specialist hosting and co-location services for a number of years. Recently we’ve seen demand for these services take off and we needed to invest in a scalable and resilient platform to meet demand for growth. The DataCore solution meets our goals for resilience, flexibility, performance and scalability and supports our goal of providing a high-quality and cost-effective service to clients.”

Through this service Waterstons are offering a comprehensive range of options: customers can take a single, virtual machine from Waterstons for only a month, or an entire network of servers – interconnected with one or more private, virtual networks – residing on a highly available infrastructure. Waterstons offers flexible and resilient Internet connectivity options for hosted infrastructure and offers hosting and co-location of physical hardware. Flexibility is paramount – many customers use a combination of offerings, and Waterstons specializes in providing a tailored service to meet customer needs.

Underpinning the service is a pair of DataCore SANsymphony servers on Dell hardware, operating in a synchronously mirrored configuration and thereby avoiding a single point of failure scenario. Waterstons has made a considerable investment in eliminating single points of failure in the infrastructure, which is seen as critical to providing a high-quality service suitable for running hosted line of business applications. Waterstons is currently commissioning a second identical infrastructure in a geographically remote data center in order to provide replicated disaster recovery (DR).

Kershaw went on to explain, “Through our cloud-based service, we are able to offer new and innovative ways of supporting clients and solving their business and technology problems. We can respond to demands extremely quickly and on a very flexible basis, which often is simply not the case with traditional infrastructure.”

One such customer utilizing the service is St Ives, the UK’s leading, independent print and display group. Waterstons will provide a highly available and instantly scalable platform to run St Ives’ critical business-to-business system (known as “DNA”) on a three-year managed services and hosting contract. The challenging infrastructure requirements include high availability (HA), business continuity and the flexibility to scale the environment quickly in response to demand.

Waterstons has met these requirements by implementing a shared hosting platform, using VMware cloud infrastructure hosting solutions coupled with DataCore storage virtualization technology. In an extra phase to follow, the complete platform will be duplicated to a secondary data center 120 miles away, with asynchronous replication used to keep the two systems in sync.

Mudasar Din, St Ives Group IT Director, said, “I have worked closely with Waterstons for over five years and their hands-on, proactive approach has helped cement our valuable strategic partnership. Waterstons was selected for this contract not only because of the open nature of our relationship, but also because of the access we have to their technical staff and consultants. St Ives aims to continually improve the capability of its value-added online solutions. The support of industry-leading partners such as Waterstons is key in St Ives’ overall strategy to provide integrated production and service solutions.”

Keith Joseph, Regional Director at DataCore, commented, “DataCore’s SANsymphony in a dual configuration offers all the HA and resilience that Waterstons’ high-end cloud hosting service requires. Through SANsymphony’s built-in thin-provisioning software, Waterstons’ clients can access storage ‘on-the-fly’ from the VMware server farm. It’s established. It’s secure. It’s flexible. And it brings distinct business benefits. It is cloud computing at its best.”

Source:http://www.datastorageconnection.com/article.mvc/Waterstons-Teams-With-DataCore-Virtualization-0001