DataCore Software Customers Showcase Why Software-Based Solutions Can Lower Total Cost of Storage and Empower the Full Business Value of Virtualization

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/08/08/datacore-software-showcases-why-software-based-solutions-can-lower-total-cost-of-storage-and-empower-the-full-business-value-of-virtualization.aspx

DataCore Software today showcased customer examples and announced the availability of a new white paper titled “Achieving the Full Business Value of Virtualization with a Scalable Software-Based Virtualization Solution” authored by International Data Corp (IDC), the premier global provider of market intelligence. The paper details storage efficiency increases due to heterogeneous storage virtualization. It highlights key IDC recommendations for improving utilization and productivity by consolidating assets, automating provisioning, leveraging storage tiers and combining server and storage virtualization to significantly reduce capital and operational expenses associated with facilities and infrastructure.

The paper, combined with DataCore’s growing base of customer testimonials, highlights how the company’s virtualization software solutions overcome budget, performance and business continuity challenges impacting the transition and broader adoption of virtualization. In particular it uncovers how to make “better use of ‘in place’ storage assets while also ensuring that IT organizations can fully achieve a return on their investments.”

Compelling Economic Benefits

“A key business value of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V technology is its device-independent approach: the software removes hardware dependencies that can limit customers’ purchasing power and flexibility by locking them into specific vendor technologies and price points,” said Peter Dobler, assistant vice president, Corporate MIS Dept., Northeast Health. “DataCore brings a rich set of features, including auto-tiering and thin provisioning which can significantly impact cost savings. These features work across many flavors and brands; therefore, they can spread the benefits across the entire infrastructure and not to just a single device. They extend the useful life of past storage investments, and provide more competitive choices when shopping for new equipment resulting in greater ROI, lower total cost of ownership and reduced business risk.”

As noted in the white paper:

• The DataCore SANsymphony-V solution allows organizations to leverage the amazing processing power of today's multicore x86 server platforms to virtualize installed storage systems while also tuning them to meet specific needs for performance, capacity, availability and cost-effectiveness.
  
  
• The DataCore productivity and cost-saving software solutions:
  
  • Improve utilization of existing storage assets (in many cases doubling useful capacity), thereby delaying the need to buy new storage systems;
  • Enable more modular and seamless storage expansion, thereby reducing the need to pre-buy capacity that may not be needed for several years; 
  • Optimize and automate storage provisioning, tiering storage resources for optimal performance and capacity, and managing data protection and auto-recovery across installed heterogeneous storage systems, thereby reducing management complexity; and 
  • Enable seamless cross-system data movement, enabling easy and intelligent migration or replication of data between storage classes.
    
    

“We help organizations virtualize in half the time and half the expense without wasting either on the need to replace or write off their storage investments,” said Linda Haury, vice president of marketing at DataCore Software. “DataCore customers routinely report 200 percent or more gains in performance, a doubling in administrative productivity, no downtime due to storage failures, and cost savings of 60 percent or more. This is accomplished through greater ‘open market’ purchasing power, better use of storage via auto-tiering and from greatly improving efficiencies of storage capacity utilization and provisioning from 30 percent typical usage rates to as much as 90 percent. Bottom line: DataCore can remove inefficiencies and fully maximize your IT investments.”

A few recent examples of customer gains realized through DataCore include:

• AcXess: This cloud services provider enables on-demand sales demos, proof-of-concept labs and training sessions in virtualized environments for thousands of employees, partners and customers worldwide. Through the combined use of DataCore and Microsoft Hyper-V, the organization has doubled its number of client users year-over-year and grown their business 300 percent. AcXess also reports a number of economic benefits from the solution that includes a savings of $5 million in hardware costs.

• Hemer Pulmonary Clinic: A Center for Pneumology and Thoracic Surgery, the German clinic implemented DataCore SANsymphony-V and realized a $425,000 cost savings. More than this, it has seen an increase in performance and greater efficiency in supporting over 50 VMware virtualized database and application servers all while adding a new level of high availability to its hospital operations.

• ISCO Industries: This worldwide manufacturing and piping distributor has saved at least $100,000 by re-purposing existing equipment and prior investments using DataCore and VMware. For the first time, ISCO’s UNIX system, regarded as its “bread and butter,” is fully redundant and synchronized in real-time to a disaster recovery site. In the past, when ISCO lost data, the main accounting and sales system took 16-24 hours to recover – a process which now takes only minutes.

• Scottsdale Community College: Based on technology from DataCore and Citrix, the College created an end-to-end virtualization solution that now provides access to more than 220 applications, serving 11,000 students and 1,000 employees. It is now saving $250,000 annually that would have been spent on hardware, accompanied by a marked improvement in storage performance.

To read the full IDC white paper sponsored by DataCore, please visit “Achieving the Full Business Value of Virtualization with a Scalable Software-Based Virtualization Solution.”