Healthcare Customers Gain Critical Performance and Flexibility Benefits with DataCore Hyperconverged and Software-Defined Storage Solutions

Healthcare IT departments are challenged every day to deliver life-saving system performance while keeping costs within budget. That's why a growing number of healthcare institutions are turning to DataCore Software, a leading provider of Hyper-converged Virtual SAN, Software-Defined Storage and Adaptive Parallel I/O Software. DataCore enables these organizations to address mission-critical IT challenges while maximizing the performance, availability and utilization of IT resources - enhancing patient outcomes while keeping costs low.

"In healthcare, ultra-fast application response times are critical," said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software. "Slow response from systems such as X-Rays, MRIs, or CAT scans, or the inability to immediately access critical patient information can have life-altering consequences, and as a result, delays are simply unacceptable."

Furthermore, with the ongoing and massive data growth from medical images, including multi-dimensional, 3D and even motion-based image formats, as well as the continuing move to electronic health records, storage requirements and the cost to manage them are also on the rise.

DataCore software delivers record-breaking performance via its Parallel I/O technology, which pairs well with Lenovo's powerful servers featuring x86-64 processors. The combination offers the industry's fastest I/O response time and the best price-performance with self-tuning features that automatically move data between spinning disks and flash based on workload priorities. An example of a healthcare customer that relies on DataCore and Lenovo is the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Puerto Rico (CCCUPR) -- one of the most advanced hospitals and cancer research facilities in North America.

The Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Puerto Rico (CCCUPR)

CCCUPR needed a powerful, easy to operate and flexible solution to manage its critical medical records and the growing oncology imaging requirements from its Picture Archive & Communications System (PACS). Since the hospital and the research center are separated by about two miles, patient information also needed to be shared and protected from unplanned events at all times.  

According to Luis M. Wilkes, director of Information Systems for CCCUPR, "The combination of DataCore and Lenovo has maximized IT infrastructure performance, availability and utilization by delivering a high availability, software-defined storage solution to support our operations. The DataCore-Lenovo solution ensures that critical health information systems, such as our PACS, are available online and on demand. Going forward, we have the flexibility to meet changing demands with DataCore software running on Lenovo and virtualizing, protecting and accelerating our systems and applications."

CCCUPR now has six Lenovo Series x3650 servers running DataCore software at the primary site. For disaster recovery, the solution includes advanced DataCore replication to two additional Lenovo Series x3650 servers at the secondary location.

A common thread among the many new healthcare organizations that have deployed DataCore is that all have done so to achieve significant gains in performance, scalability and reliability. DataCore enables users to:

• Speed Up Applications - Faster applications (databases, critical applications, virtualized applications, etc.) means more transactions are processed in less time, and more data is analyzed faster, leading to increased productivity.

• Scale within Budget - DataCore ensures the lowest TCO to scale-up or scale-out. This enables users to run more workloads, with better performance and availability, on far fewer servers and utilize the infrastructure already in place for remarkable cost savings, both direct and indirect (less power, cooling and space). Hardware-independent software ensures services live beyond current generation of infrastructure technology and change.

• Protect Data and Applications - DataCore provides the highest availability with the fewest nodes. Highly-available infrastructure reduces disruptions to business operations and decreases risk.

The result is greater consolidation savings, better performance and higher availability for critical healthcare applications, databases, and other virtualized applications.

For more information about DataCore's healthcare customer experiences with hyper-converged and software-defined storage,                                    

please visit https://www.datacore.com/solutions/major-verticals/healthcare.

Digitalisation World: Learning Loves Core IT Challenges

https://digitalisationworld.com/article/50447/editorial

DataCore Software says that a growing number of UK educational institutions are deploying its scalable storage services platform, SANsymphony™ to address their critical IT challenges, increase performance and reduce infrastructure costs.

From leading data and research-rich university seats of learning - including Oxford University and University of Birmingham - through to independent and state secondary schools, DataCore’s solutions are seeing an increased uptake for storage savings, failover, resilience and much faster performance. Spencer Webb, the University of Birmingham noted:-

 “Prior to the install of DataCore, failover was complicated and fully manual. We needed automatic resilience without human intervention. It needed to be fast, easy and cost effective, to work with our existing storage and support VMware.”

Modern Educational Instituions Today Demand a Faster and More Reliable Architecture to Drive their Key Applications and Workloads without the Enterprise Price Tag:

Just as enterprises need better performance and higher SLAs from their key applications, educational institutions now need the same, but typically have stricter budget considerations than their enterprise cousins. Successful education establishments need to seamlessly run any application, 24x7, deploying apps on any storage across many different environments. They can now do this and protect their existing investments by allowing legacy storage to sit behind DataCore to gain intelligent storage services such as auto-tiering, faster performance and a single management interface and view of their storage infrastructure.

So no matter how diverse the storage may be, or which topology the education establishment has chosen or inherited, DataCore’s software-defined solution offers the following benefits:

- Applications run faster and uninterrupted.

- Existing storage is pooled, tiered and data protected automatically.

- Storage assets are centralised and managed universally.

The net result is better performance and availability for databases, VDI, and other applications, both virtualised and physical, at a much lower cost. That’s a critical point as another leading London University noted:

“DataCore is installed at both data centres and is critical to keep services running. We used to suffer downtime, now we can fail over to either site and we can still meet our SLAs – upgrades and maintenance can occur without any downtime on critical apps. As a result of running DataCore, Regents University have reduced storage related costs by 25%.” Zubair Fakir, Regents University, London.

Meanwhile, in the secondary school sector, whilst the number of uses and data sets are reduced and planned windows of maintenance are increased in the school holidays, availability of data and apps are now deemed as critical. One leading independent grammar school in the North of England noted:

“We are now thrilled with our optimised and highly available virtual environment. You simply get what you pay for in life. With DataCore, the install has been a breath of fresh air and I’m very confident in its ability to protect and optimise us for years to come.” Simon Thompson, Network Manager, Bradford Grammar School.

Benefits these institutions are receiving with DataCore include the ability to:

-        Maximise the value from storage investments, current and future.
-        Optimise performance of latency-sensitive applications.
-        Automate and centralise storage management.
-        Enable “zero downtime, zero touch” availability of data.

Schools & Further Education Colleges Need Hyper-converged Too – To Gain Greater Productivity, Ease and Flexibility:

One such further education college in Southampton that wanted all the benefits of compute, storage, networking and virtualisation from a single hardware appliance, was Richard Taunton Sixth Form College, with over 1,300 students. Here, the IT team were keen to adopt hyper-converged across 40TB of usable storage space, which was delivered as a mirrored hyper-converged host using DataCore’s Virtual SAN Hyper-converged solution. At the sixth form college, local storage was presented as an iSCSI target to local VMs, and mirrored in an active-active configuration to the other host. Using DataCore’s inbuilt Auto Tiering functionality, the college is now able to utilise SSD Flash technology for rapid access to all their hot data, while seamlessly apportioning less utilised ‘cooler’ data to large SAS disks, saving on budget. The sixth form college was also able to downgrade their former maintenance contracts from the costly 24x7 with 4 hour response SLAs, to next business day SLAs, given that their hyper-converged mirrored system now seamlessly defaults to the other host.

“For schools and colleges of all sizes, it’s about maximising IT infrastructure performance, availability and utilisation by productively using smart software to virtualize and add the needed flexibility to meet changing demands,” said George Teixeira, CEO and Co-Founder of DataCore. “Educational institutions’ IT infrastructures are often complex and decentralized, being the product of many years of accumulations and different departmental agendas. Additionally, their high-performance applications require predictable performance and scalability for a wide variety of mission-critical workloads such Oracle and SQL Server databases. By offering the best price-performance on the market, DataCore can ensure industry-best response times – making institutions’ IT faster and meaning their infrastructure can be massively consolidated, eliminating complexity.”

The last words revert back to Spencer Wood, University of Birmingham:

“Within the data centres, DataCore has exceeded our requirements. Day to day, we are not sure how we would operate without it. It immediately improved the performance of the VMs. We are now Auto Tiered to make the most of our storage which has lowered our costs, as we have been able to move off Fibre Channel. Downtime is now really simple for us. We can simply take a data centre offline and no services will be disrupted.”

Promise Technology's VTrak E5000 Series of Storage Solutions Certified as DataCore Ready

http://vmblog.com/archive/2017/02/07/promise-technology-s-vtrak-e5000-series-of-storage-solutions-certified-as-datacore-ready.aspx#.WJo4z28rKUl

Leading storage solutions provider Promise Technology Inc. today announced that its VTrak E5000 Series of Fibre Channel to SAS storage solutions have been certified as DataCore Ready for DataCore Software's SANsymphony software-defined storage and virtualization platform.

As consumers and businesses become more mobile, the need for data access, retrieval, and distribution from anywhere at any time means that data must be protected and available at all times. The changing nature of the data center also means that growing infrastructures are pushing the limits of bandwidth. A full-featured, affordable enterprise-level storage system that can accommodate business environments of all sizes, Promise's E5000 Series is versatile and scalable enough to meet the demands of IT departments, data centers, virtual environments, and high-performance computing. Redundant and active-active components of controllers, power supplies and cooling units provide optimal data availability and ensure continuous operation. The E5000 gives IT managers the ability to deploy 6/12 Gb SAS/SATA hard drives and SSDs, and contains flash arrays to optimize speed for key enterprise applications that need high-speed transfer rates and reduced latency.

When combined with DataCore's SANsymphony software-defined storage virtualization solution, the VTrak E5000 maximizes the performance, availability and utilization of IT infrastructures by virtualizing the storage hardware. This enables the E5000 to leverage SANsymphony's data services, and further augment reliability, functionality and performance. Data services supported by SANsymphony include synchronous mirroring, asynchronous replication, CDP, snapshots/backups, storage pooling, thin provisioning, data migration, and deduplication/compression. To learn more about SANsymphony, visit https://www.datacore.com/products/SANsymphony.aspx.

"DataCore's key strengths, in addition to parallel processing of I/O to increase workload productivity, include speeding up the response of mission-critical, enterprise-level applications and reducing the cost to meet performance expectations," said Carlos Carreras, senior vice president of worldwide business development and strategic alliances, DataCore Software. "As a result, we are pleased to certify the VTrak E5000 Series as DataCore Ready to help Promise Technology deliver the ultimate benefits of an affordable, high-performance Fibre Channel to SAS storage solution with advanced enterprise-level reliability and functionality."

The DataCore Ready Program identifies solutions that are trusted to enhance DataCore SANsymphony infrastructures. While DataCore solutions interoperate with common open and industry standard products, those that earn the "DataCore Ready" designation have completed additional verification testing. The DataCore Ready designation is awarded to third party products that have successfully met the verification criteria set by DataCore through the successful execution of a functional test plan and performance envelope tests.

"Promise has been working closely with DataCore for years to bring our customers additional capabilities to meet the bandwidth and storage requirements of IT departments, data centers and virtual environments," noted Vijay Char, president, Promise Technology USA. "With the VTrak E5000 Series now certified DataCore Ready, customers can seamlessly integrate our solutions with SANsymphony storage virtualization software for a superior level of compatibility and optimized performance."

The Register: NetApp Launches Two New All-Flash Arrays and Comparison with DataCore's Recent SPC-1 Results

Read the full article here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/01/fresh_fast_little_flashers_from_netapp/

SPC-1 result

NetApp claims that the A700s is the fastest enterprise storage, citing a Storage Performance Council SPC-1 Result, saying:

The AFF A700s achieved 2,400,059.26 SPC-1 IOPS at an average response time of 0.69 milliseconds. It is the top-performing enterprise all-flash array among the major storage providers and in the top three overall on the SPC-1 Performance list.

A Huawei OceanStor 18800 V3 is number 2, scoring 3,010,007.37 IOPS at an average 0.92ms and a price/performance rating of $0.79. The A700s’ price/performance was better, at $0.62.

A 2-node DataCore Parallel Server holds the SPC-1 record, scoring 5,120,098.98 SPC-01 IOPS with an average 0.28ms response time and $0.10 price performance rating. It did so with a pair of Lenovo X3650 M5 servers, a mix of SSDs and HDDs mounted internally and externally, and 1.54TB of DRAM for caching plus parallel IO-serving software having multiple CPU cores handle the IO.

The A700s configuration in the benchmark featured a 12-node cluster (6 x 2-node HA pairs), each node having 512GB of DRAM/cache, meaning a total of 6TB DRAM.

How would NetApp describe DataCore's SPC-1 result coming from a system costing $506,525.24 while the A700s was priced at $1,493,103.71? Roughly speaking that's NetApp offering half the DataCore performance for more than twice the price.

Adam Fore, NetApp's director for product and solutions marketing, said: "We can't speculate on how DataCore got its results. However, in our view, comparing NetApp and DataCore's offerings is like comparing apples to oranges. The NetApp AFF A700s brings the full suite of enterprise-grade data management and data protection that customers are looking for as they build out the cloud-connected data centre."

Comment

The point of the SPC-1 benchmark is to compare systems in an apples-to-apples way with submitted systems subject to review. Here's what the Storage Performance Council says:

The SPC-1 Benchmark is designed to be vendor/platform independent and are applicable across a broad range of storage configuration and topologies. Any vendor should be able to sponsor and publish an SPC-1 Result, provided their tested configuration satisfies the requirements of the SPC-1 benchmark specification.

In effect NetApp says, yes, the DataCore system is faster and costs less but it doesn't run our proprietary software, and that makes it unsuitable for enterprises.

It would be very interesting to see Dell EMC VMAX, Unity and XtremIO SPC-1 benchmarks, as well as ones for HPE's 3PAR, IBM's FlashSystems and also Pure's FlashArray. We're not holding our breath.

The rate of AFF innovation looks high, and this leaves us wondering when a new generation SolidFire array, one designed and engineered under NetApp ownership of SolidFire, will emerge.

We haven't seen any pricing but expect that the A200 will significantly lower the AFF entry-level pricing, while the A700s should do the same for entering the A700 performance level.

Oxford University and University of Birmingham - UK Educational Institutions Turn to DataCore to Overcome Critical IT Challenges

http://vmblog.com/archive/2017/01/24/uk-educational-institutions-turn-to-datacore-to-overcome-critical-it-challenges.aspx#.WJS4VlMrKUl

DataCore Software has announced that a growing number of UK educational institutions are deploying its scalable storage services platform, SANsymphony to address their critical IT challenges, increase performance and reduce infrastructure costs. From leading data and research-rich university seats of learning - including Oxford University and University of Birmingham - through to independent and state secondary schools, DataCore's solutions are seeing an increased uptake for storage savings, failover, resilience and much faster performance. Spencer Webb, the University of Birmingham noted:

"Prior to the install of DataCore, failover was complicated and fully manual. We needed automatic resilience without human intervention. It needed to be fast, easy and cost effective, to work with our existing storage and support VMware."

Modern Educational Institutions Today Demand a Faster and More Reliable Architecture to Drive their Key Applications and Workloads without the Enterprise Price Tag:

Just as enterprises need better performance and higher SLAs from their key applications, educational institutions now need the same, but typically have stricter budget considerations than their enterprise cousins. Successful education establishments need to seamlessly run any application, 24x7, deploying apps on any storage across many different environments. They can now do this and protect their existing investments by allowing legacy storage to sit behind DataCore to gain intelligent storage services such as auto-tiering, faster performance and a single management interface and view of their storage infrastructure.

So no matter how diverse the storage may be, or which topology the education establishment has chosen or inherited, DataCore's software-defined solution offers the following benefits:

• Applications run faster and uninterrupted.
• Existing storage is pooled, tiered and data protected automatically.
• Storage assets are centralised and managed universally.

The net result is better performance and availability for databases, VDI, and other applications, both virtualised and physical, at a much lower cost. That's a critical point as another leading London University noted:

"DataCore is installed at both data centres and is critical to keep services running. We used to suffer downtime, now we can fail over to either site and we can still meet our SLAs - upgrades and maintenance can occur without any downtime on critical apps. As a result of running DataCore, Regents University have reduced storage related costs by 25%." Zubair Fakir, Regents University, London.

Meanwhile, in the secondary school sector, whilst the number of uses and data sets are reduced and planned windows of maintenance are increased in the school holidays, availability of data and apps are now deemed as critical. One leading independent grammar school in the North of England noted:

"We are now thrilled with our optimised and highly available virtual environment. You simply get what you pay for in life. With DataCore, the install has been a breath of fresh air and I'm very confident in its ability to protect and optimise us for years to come." Simon Thompson, Network Manager, Bradford Grammar School.

Benefits these institutions are receiving with DataCore include the ability to:

• Maximise the value from storage investments, current and future.
• Optimise performance of latency-sensitive applications.
• Automate and centralise storage management.
• Enable "zero downtime, zero touch" availability of data.

Schools & Further Education Colleges Need Hyper-converged Too - To Gain Greater Productivity, Ease and Flexibility:

One such further education college in Southampton that wanted all the benefits of compute, storage, networking and virtualisation from a single hardware appliance, was Richard Taunton Sixth Form College, with over 1,300 students. Here, the IT team were keen to adopt hyper-converged across 40TB of usable storage space, which was delivered as a mirrored hyper-converged host using DataCore's Virtual SAN Hyper-converged solution. At the sixth form college, local storage was presented as an iSCSI target to local VMs, and mirrored in an active-active configuration to the other host. Using DataCore's inbuilt Auto Tiering functionality, the college is now able to utilise SSD Flash technology for rapid access to all their hot data, while seamlessly apportioning less utilised ‘cooler' data to large SAS disks, saving on budget. The sixth form college was also able to downgrade their former maintenance contracts from the costly 24x7 with 4 hour response SLAs, to next business day SLAs, given that their hyper-converged mirrored system now seamlessly defaults to the other host. 

"For schools and colleges of all sizes, it's about maximising IT infrastructure performance, availability and utilisation by productively using smart software to virtualize and add the needed flexibility to meet changing demands," said George Teixeira, CEO and Co-Founder of DataCore. "Educational institutions' IT infrastructures are often complex and decentralized, being the product of many years of accumulations and different departmental agendas. Additionally, their high-performance applications require predictable performance and scalability for a wide variety of mission-critical workloads such Oracle and SQL Server databases. By offering the best price-performance on the market, DataCore can ensure industry-best response times - making institutions' IT faster and meaning their infrastructure can be massively consolidated, eliminating complexity."

The last words revert back to Spencer Wood, University of Birmingham:

"Within the data centres, DataCore has exceeded our requirements. Day to day, we are not sure how we would operate without it. It immediately improved the performance of the VMs. We are now Auto Tiered to make the most of our storage which has lowered our costs, as we have been able to move off Fibre Channel. Downtime is now really simple for us. We can simply take a data centre offline and no services will be disrupted."