Friday, 4 April 2014

Italy's Ministry of Economy and Finance Chooses DataCore Software-Defined Storage to Modernize their Storage Infrastructure




The "Ministero dell'Economia e delle Finanze" (the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, MEF) located in Rome deployed DataCore's SANsymphony-V solution to improve productivity and modernize its mission-critical IT infrastructure. The DataCore software-defined storage platform has been implemented to centralize storage management and improve the utilization across a wide range of storage hardware systems and devices from different vendors including EMC and HP. DataCore consolidates and simplifies the provisioning of storage resources, significantly accelerates performance and adds high availability and a new level of flexibility to the existing mix as well as to future storage additions.

Italy's Ministry of Finance software defines its storage "We chose DataCore because we wanted a solution that would allow MEF to modernize and virtualize our storage and IT infrastructure without being locked- in to specific hardware vendors or technologies. This gives us flexibility, scalability and freedom in our choice. SANsymphony-V allows us to use the most appropriate and innovative offerings on the market and makes it easy if needed to grow or adapt our environment to meet future requirements. DataCore not only reduces our storage related costs by consolidating management, it enables us to buy less expensive hardware and it also enables us to protect our existing investments. Moreover, the software-defined layer in our infrastructure gives us flexibility to optimize whatever we use and puts us back in control to shop storage for the best value to allow us to cost-effectively deal with growth," comments the information systems manager at MEF.

The Ministry of Economy and Finance, also known by the acronym MEF, is one of the most important and influential ministries within the Italian Government. It is the executive body responsible for economic, financial and budget policy. The organization manages the planning of public investments, coordinates public expenditures and verifies its trends, revenue policies and the overall tax system. The MEF operates the State's public land and heritage, land register and customs; it plans, coordinates and verifies operations to foster economic, local and sectorial development, and is responsible for setting out cohesive policies, processes and the requirements pertaining to the public budget.

As part of the project to optimize and consolidate IT data centers, MEF selected DataCore's software-defined storage solution with the primary objective of preserving their existing and very diverse set of storage investments made over many years - comprising of a range of systems from EMC VMax and EMC Centera to HP EVAs. In addition, it was critical for MEF to streamline and centralize management in order to gain productivity and to provision highly available storage capacity when needed, where needed quickly within minutes.

The DataCore SANsymphony-V software is deployed on four standard x86 server platforms, providing redundancy and data protection together with centralized management of over 200TB of storage across multiple EMC VMax, EMC Centera and HP EVA systems. MEF will also benefit from the addition of high-end advanced storage features including thin provisioning, metro-wide mirroring, high-speed adaptive caching, replication and auto-tiering, all of which can be applied to their existing and future storage investments.

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