Join DataCore for breakfast in Sydney & Melbourne next week!

Further to the success of last month’s DataCore breakfasts in Sydney and Melbourne, we have the pleasure in inviting you to two more exclusive and delectable breakfast events.

Melbourne's breakfast will be hosted in one of Melbourne’s finest eateries; Feddish restaurant, Federation Square, on 26th August 2014. 

Sydney's breakfast will be hosted in one of Sydney's finest eateries; Gowings Bar & Grill, in Sydney's CBD, on the 27th August 2014.

These breakfast events are being hosted by DataCore Software with the aim of informing you of DataCore’s unique value proposition and how using DataCore will vastly improve your growing storage challenges.

This is your time to find out why organisations around the globe, are turning to DataCore for their storage.

DataCore clients are reporting the following:

DataCore’s breakfast is an exclusive opportunity to sit down with some of your colleagues, enjoy a delicious breakfast, while listening to a presentation by David Bull, Director, Technical Sales, DataCore Software, on Software defined Storage in Action.

We ask you to please register your attendance to our Sydney or Melbourne breakfast and we look forward to seeing you on the 26th & 27th August 2014. 

- To register for our Sydney breakfast event please click here and enter your personal details.

- To register for our Melbourne breakfast event please click here and enter your personal details.

We look forward to meeting you there!

Virtual SAN Product Review: DataCore versus VMware

DataCore’s Virtual SAN or VMware’s Virtual SAN

Full Report: Virtual SAN Product Review - DataCore versus VMware

"DataCore’s Virtual SAN or VMware’s Virtual SAN - this type of comparison and question easily comes to mind whenever the use of storage virtualization is being evaluated. Other important issues to consider is the ease of deployment and ability to  scale these systems in terms of performance and capacity, a key point  highlighted by converged system suppliers such as Nutanix for example. With this backdrop and the introduction of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V10, and the recent release of VMware’s Virtual SAN, we decided there was a need to offer a comparative analysis overviewing the “virtual SANs” and their essential differences."

"...When comparing DataCore’s SANsymphony-V10 Virtual SAN  with VMware’s VSAN, one aspect is particularly striking: VSAN is suitable only for ESXi-based hosts which have a directly connected storage device - hard drives and SSDs/flash memory devices.  By contrast, SANsymphony-V is suitable both for physical environments and virtualized infrastructures..." 

Read the full NT4Admins Product Review: 

Virtual SAN Product Review - DataCore versus VMware

Rights Advocacy Agency Relies on a DataCore Virtual SAN and Hyper-V for Disaster Recovery, Greater Agility and Optimal Use of Dell Servers

Software-defined storage architecture benefits non-profit legal rights advocacy agency to achieve greater flexibility and cost-savings.

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2014/08/20/disability-rights-texas-relies-datacore-virtual-san-and-hyper-v-disaster-recovery-greater#ixzz3AwLX9cy1 

DataCore announced today that Disability Rights (DRTx), a non-profit legal and protection advocacy agency, has attained a new level of agility and productivity by going virtual and software-defined with DataCore and Microsoft Hyper-V. DRTx started out on its virtualization journey by successfully implementing a redundant pair of DataCore SANsymphony-V software empowered “nodes” (SAN 1 and SAN 2) in the main center. DRTx leveraged the storage virtualization and synchronously mirroring capabilities of DataCore to prevent downtime and ensure continuous data availability for business operations.

Next, the organization added a DataCore Virtual SAN running on a Dell server, which resides in a remote location (SAN 3). Critical data and VMs are now constantly replicated to the remote site for disaster recovery (DR). DataCore and Microsoft Hyper-V now work in tandem to virtualize the physical server and storage environment, and they simplify and speed up recovery in the event of a disaster. Microsoft in effect significantly improved server agility; likewise DataCore did the same for storage.

“We would not have been able to achieve the overall agility, cost-savings and productivity benefits without SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software from DataCore,” said Carlton Whitmore, IT manager, Disability Rights Texas. “The DataCore Virtual SAN and SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform have combined to enable DRTx to fully use existing investments and significantly increase our flexibility, portability and cost-savings to meet future needs.”

Whitmore is also extremely pleased with the fact that as a Dell user he can use a mix of state-of-the-art Dell servers and older servers with different speeds and types of disk drives.

“The DataCore Virtual SAN software and the ability to use our existing Dell servers made it cost-effective and practical to set up a new disaster recovery site,” he stated, “We can build virtual SANs on lesser systems that don’t cost nearly as much as the main SAN that we are using.”

The flexibility and the portability inherent to DataCore SANsymphony-V enabled DRTx to save money by bringing the price point down on the overall IT infrastructure. In particular, it greatly helps avoid the recurring costs associated with having to “rip and replace” a traditional hardware SAN.

“Before implementing DataCore we got hit pretty hard with maintenance costs – or we would need to buy new equipment to replace what was constantly being phased out,” stated Whitmore. “As far as tangible costs saved with DataCore, we are probably saving at least $7,000 - $8,000 a year, every year as far as maintenance fees and additional hardware costs that we no longer have to pay now that we have virtualized both servers and storage.”

As a legal and protection advocacy agency, DRTx depends heavily on the case management system, Legal Files, as its virtualized case management system. This application and the case information are mission-critical to the firm and therefore it needs a reliable server and storage infrastructure. DataCore’s software has seamlessly increased the speed and response times of these key systems and processes – making them more efficient and productive.

The flexibility and the portability inherent to DataCore has enabled DRTx to cut expenses by allowing the agency to continue utilizing low-cost hardware and bringing the price point down on the overall IT infrastructure. This empowerment in terms of cost containment goes a long way for a non-profit organization.

A complete case study concerning the DataCore deployment at Disability Rights Texas is available here: http://datacore.com/testimonials/disability-rights-texas.

About Disability Rights Texas
Disability Rights Texas (previously named Advocacy Inc.) is the federally designated legal protection and advocacy agency (P&A) for people with disabilities in Texas. Our mission is to help people with disabilities understand and exercise their rights under the law, ensuring their full and equal participation in society. Visit http://www.DRTx.org for more information on our scope of services.

DataCore: The Software-defined Storage Solution for Healthcare IT Data Challenges

The Healthcare IT landscape has changed considerably over the last decade. Today, a myriad of challenges exist such as new healthcare regulations, high performance applications, massive data growth, and the need for non-stop data availability. Architecting a storage solution that meets these requirements while remaining financially viable is a daunting task.

New whitepaper: The Solution for Healthcare IT Data Storage Challenges.

...If I was to list out the top three highest priority challenges for Healthcare IT managers to address, they would be: Data Availability, Storage Scalability, and Storage Performance.

Challenge: Data Availability - Achieving Maximum Application Uptime
Data availability is focused on maintaining uninterrupted data accessibility, even in the event of a catastrophic failure, within the storage infrastructure due to user error, hardware malfunction, site failures and/or regional disasters. Uninterrupted data accessibility is an absolute must in the healthcare industry. Failure to sustain uptime could result in a negative impact on patient health, including loss of life, and/or severe financial penalties.

Challenge: Storage Scalability - Expanding Storage Capacity Without Disruption
Storage scalability has a dual focus. The first is how efficiently data is being stored on the existing storage hardware. The second is the presentation of additional capacity, ideally without interruption, to the production systems. With the increasing capacity demands from strict data retention policies and data-intensive healthcare applications such as EHR and PACS, maintaining a scalable storage platform is critical to operations.

Challenge: Storage Performance - Minimizing Application Latency
Storage performance is the main variable affecting  application performance, which directly impacts patient care. Simply introducing high speed storage within the  infrastructure for a particular application is no longer tenable when addressing performance. There are too many applications, too many databases, and too many systems involved to improve performance this way.

Conclusion
Healthcare IT is expected to maximize the return on every investment. But, there is also a great need for high-performance, reliable, enterprise-grade storage systems, which are expensive.

Consider the impact on ROI and TCO with a purpose built solution that allows you to leverage any make and model of storage system, all while providing blazing performance and the most advanced forms of data protection to safeguard your data. And as conditions change over time, expand without interruption, the resources needed to fulfill the demands of the new requirement.

For more information on the solution to these challenges, download our whitepaper: The Solution for Healthcare IT Data Storage Challenges.

DataCore to Showcase Virtual SAN Software, SANsymphony-V10 and New VMware Integration Plans at VMworld 2014

DataCore will be showcasing its new Virtual SAN capabilities and SANsymphony-V10, the latest version of its comprehensive storage services platform at VMworld 2014. The DataCore team will be on site to highlight how its Virtual SAN software federates converged storage with external storage arrays, across any hypervisor. DataCore will also offer a show special SANsymphony-V software license for virtualization and storage experts to test-drive the new capabilities, discuss VMware integrations (e.g., VVOLs, VAAI) and ‘Data Anywhere’ plans, as well as meet with attendees interested in engaging in alliance partnerships. DataCore will be present in booth #1445, next to VMware’s main booth at the conference.

WHO: Meet George Teixeira, CEO of DataCore, and other key senior level executives from DataCore that oversee strategic alliances, technology and product planning, sales and market positioning

WHAT: Showcasing DataCore SANsymphony-V10 and Virtual SAN capabilities

WHERE: VMworld 2014 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, booth #1445

WHEN: August 24 – 28, 2014

Free DataCore Software
DataCore is commemorating its 10th generation release by offering free, non-production version of its SANsymphony-V10 software licenses. Intended primarily for technical specialists, virtualization consultants, certified storage experts, instructors and architects evaluating technologies to manage and optimize storage infrastructures, the software will help organizations evaluate and experience the value of a converged infrastructure. To request a copy and learn more, please visit: www.datacore.com/products/features/virtual-san.

To schedule a meeting, visit the DataCore website or stop by the DataCore booth #1445. For more information on the event, please visit:http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us.

ABOUT DATACORE
DataCore is a leader in software-defined storage. The company’s storage virtualization and virtual SAN solutions empower organizations to seamlessly manage and scale their data storage architectures, delivering massive performance gains at a fraction of the cost of solutions offered by legacy storage hardware vendors. Backed by 10,000 customer sites around the world, DataCore’s adaptive and self-learning and healing technology takes the pain out of manual processes and helps deliver on the promise of the new software defined data center through its hardware agnostic architecture.

Leading Medical Center at the forefront of Healthcare IT and Storage Virtualisation

“As a result of DataCore’s software-defined storage platform, we have seen significant savings in hardware and personnel costs, while increasing the performance of applications,” said Gabriel Sandu, CTO at Maimonides Medical Center. “DataCore’s SANsymphony-V allows us to manage all these discrete systems from different vendors seamlessly and without compatibility issues, which gives us tremendous negotiating power to drive down costs.”

The flexibility of DataCore’s software has enabled Maimonides, a Brooklyn NY-based and leading independent teaching hospital, to meet the dynamic range of performance, availability and capacity growth demands needed to stay ahead of compliance regulations and their ever-changing applications and system requirements.

Safeguard Data and Eliminate Downtime
"At Maimonides we don't have the luxury of downtime... that's why we use DataCore, we are able to maintain our uptime at 100%."  states Walter Fahey, the Chief Information Officer at Maimondies. 
 
The hospital uses DataCore to split storage between two data centers using stretched metro-clusters and DataCore’s built-in metro-wide mirroring, enabling them to provide responsive applications and uninterrupted patient care during routine maintenance, equipment failures and facility upheaval. For example, when the hospital experienced a major power outage in one data center, the doctors, staff and patients had continuous access to their vital data from the virtualized storage pool at the redundant site. Once power was restored, the systems returned automatically to normal operations. If outages occur, IT systems don’t go down with the affected site and continue providing non-stop business operations.

Store Optimally - Centrally manage data and reclaim unused capacity
More than 800 physicians rely on Maimonides information systems to care for patients. Before working with DataCore, the organization had a number of disparate systems not working in conjunction with each other. This ad-hoc approach decreased efficiencies and intelligence around what departments were in need of storage resources.

With all storage now managed through DataCore software, the medical center can fully leverage existing storage assets, reduce costs, and track storage consumption, as well as more efficiently budget for the future by easily identifying usage patterns. Maimonides also now utilizes previously unused storage throughout the hospital because resources are pooled and easily optimized.   

Accelerate Access: Increase Application Performance 
“DataCore’s self-tuning caching capabilities also allow Maimonides to super-charge application performance,” said Rogee Fe de Leon, head of the storage group at Maimonides Medical Center. 

DataCore uses RAM to self-tune cache data, which eliminates bottlenecks by markedly increasing the performance of latency-sensitive applications. Maimonides has seen increased performance of its primary business-critical applications under the central control of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V, which include:

• GE’s imaging system (PACS)
• Numerous Oracle databases for human resources
• Microsoft SQL servers for clinical programs
• Primary databases for neonatal, geriatric, pediatric and research
• Microsoft Exchange and IBM DB2 databases that support medical records

Learn More about how other Healthcare Institutions have utilized DataCore, or check out ourHealthcare Solutions.