Jump to:
Contact information
Address
DataCore Software
Green Park
200 Brook Drive
Reading
RG2 6UB
Telephone: +44 (0)1189 497 024
Email: info@datacore.com
Website: www.datacore.com
Press Releases
IP Expo Release
London Borough of Sutton Safeguards and Commutes Data with DataCore.
Scottish Agricultural College selects DataCore SANsymphony-V and Microsoft for Unified Storage to optimise and harvest their Network Attached Storage
DataCore Software Adds Device-Independent Auto-Tiering to Its Storage Virtualisation Software
SANsymphony-V Recognition
DataCore and Citrix Make Advanced Server and Storage Virtualisation Easy for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V
DataCore Software
The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club takes advantage of DataCore virtualisation for flexible storage provisioning and Disaster Recovery for its Wimbledon tennis operations
Case Studies
London Borough of Sutton
EducationBorough’s school network achieves disaster recovery protection, high availability and new levels of efficiency with auto-provisioning.
Case Study - London Borough of Sutton - Print.pdf 264.60 kB
Oxford University Computing Services uses DataCore’s SANmelody solution to consolidate and virtualise storage.
World’s top university infrastructure service group recommends DataCore’s SANmelody as the storage platform of choice for their automated virtual infrastructure.
Oxford University Computing Services Case StudyFinal-OUCSMB.doc 39.50 kB
iomart uses SANsymphony
100% Uptime for iomart hosting – made highly available by DataCore’s SANsymphony™.
When 24x7 100% uptime is your very reason for existence, you need a high availability solution that is equally robust across a heterogeneous storage environment. iomart hosting, one of the UKs fastest growing managed services providers, offering managed services ranging from a single server to complex managed environments, found this assurance through DataCore’s SANsymphony™ solution for iomart’s hosted customers.
Richard McMahon is the companies’ Infrastructure Manager responsible for all hardware and software deployments and services within the group. 25 people operate from within iomart’s 5 state-of-the-art data centres located in London, Maidenhead, Glasgow, Nottingham and Leicester. All centres are linked via Dark Fibre or GigE connections. “Our 100% uptime guarantee is not a marketing ploy – it’s iomarts motto and mantra. We live and breathe it to facilitiate our customers’ business models. Therefore total high availability is top of our priority list.”
Recently to help clients facilitate cloud computing, iomart launched a dedicated virtualised server service, offering VMware dedicated servers capable of running multiple operating systems and applications from one physical server.
With these services in mind, the challenge that iomart faced was managing 30TB of storage across a heterogenous environment in the City of London and Maidenhead data centres. So iomart approached DataCore, EMC, Netapp and 3PAR for proposed solutions. The suggested environment from DataCore involved using standard x86 hardware, highly specified due to being of a hosting nature, each having 128GB RAM for caching, 4 Quad Core Processors and 8GB HBA’s for connectivity. The disk that sat behind the server was classified as low end commodity disk. On top of this hardware, DataCore’s SANsymphony solution was used in a mirrored SAN-SAN configuration to virtualise and manage the environment across fibre link. In total the solution was less than a 1/3 of the cost of the equivalent software and hardware alternative proposals.
But cost savings were not the most important factor in iomart’s search. What they really wanted was to achieve total control of the environment and have the ability to migrate customer data between storage systems and disk types and to easily replicate to remote sites.
Mirrored high availability between sites over 20 miles away also provides iomart with enhanced disaster recover capabilities. In their configuration, the environment is distributed throughout several locations and ensures that they have a fully distributed HA model but across DR geographies. DataCore’s Synchronous replication functionality operates on a forced cache coherency model, based on a grid architecture that replicates the i/o block between the cache on each DataCore server before sending the acknowledgement to the application server and committing the data to disk. This overcomes the problems associated with clustered storage whilst allowing iomart a greater degree of performance and flexibility.
Richard concludes. “What we have achieved with SANsymphony is totally flexible, highly performing SAN to SAN mirroring, but straight out of the box and backed by a decent price point. We can now move data at will between vendors and seamlessly achieve LUN virtualisation across RAID arrays. No other solution offers us this.”
About iomart hosting:
iomart hosting holds a unique place in the hosting market in that it genuinely offers a ‘one source’ approach. By physically owning and managing its own network infrastructure, including 5 state of the art Data Centre facilities, it offers world beating levels of service to its customers. iomart hosting offers managed services, ranging from single server management through to complex managed environments. All hosting services are customized to suit a client’s exact requirements and are designed for superior performance, reliability, security and scalability.
Visit http://www.iomarthosting.com
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualisation software solutions, fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage with innovative software that combines advanced functions and services with the agility and savings of hardware independence. DataCore lowers the cost and complexity of IT by making storage efficient, fast, flexible, fail-safe and virtual. For more information, call (877) 780-5111 or visit http://www.datacore.com.
DataCore, SANmelody, SANsymphony and the DataCore logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Media Contacts:
Sharon Munday
KPR Global
+44 (0) 1329 833304
smunday@kprglobal.com
-- or --
DataCore Software
publicrelations@datacore.com
iomart overview.doc 39.50 kB
Wimbledon/DataCore Case Study
The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club takes advantage of DataCore Virtualisation for flexible storage provisioning and disaster recovery for its Wimbledon tennis operations.
Flexible storage utilisation gained using DataCore’s SANsymphony solution.
The prestigious All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon annually hosts the world’s most famous tennis tournament. The Wimbledon Championships attracts all of the World’s top tennis stars, along with tens of thousands of spectators and millions of viewers via television and the Internet. Behind the scenes of this premier tournament is a complex IT and support infrastructure that supports an IT population swelling from 200 to 6000 users across a three week period.
The Situation:
The IT Department is managed year round by a staff of 7 from one of two main data centres within the 42 acres of Club grounds. The data centres are linked by fibre and located ½ mile apart. Running everything to do with IT security and data integrity is Andrew Jones, IT Infrastructure & Security Analyst, responsible for the platforms and infrastructure that ensure the smooth running of operations at the Club. Critical applications that the department run include, amongst others, the ballot and ticketing systems; Wimbledon Information System (containing Championship stats); support for the 1000 visiting press and players; video screens; Hawk-Eye technology (line calling system run on Centre and No 1 Court); TV graphics and information systems; and a comprehensive CCTV system.
CCTV Backup Solution initial requirement:
Andrew noted, “Our initial requirement was to reduce the costs of deploying and running our CCTV system. The system had a very high storage requirement - between 16-20 TB as a monthly load which we then intended to overwrite – and this was even at a heavily compressed rate.” The resultant footage from the CCTV cameras is used for crowd analysis and crowd flow control. This year the amount of cameras is also increasing dramatically (for instance the new state-of-the-art Centre Court moving roof contains 4 cameras providing a birds-eye view on Centre Court proceedings). Andrew recognised that pools of data this large needed to be linked into the existing SAN, but also recognised that this integration would provide management headaches and significant strain on the present SAN backbone of an IBM Fibre Channel SAN Storage 4300 solution. The IBM SAN was effective and provided great data mirroring, facilitating the VMware ESX server virtualisation, but the Club recognised that to accommodate this level of generated data, they required a cost effective flexible storage solution for CCTV that would have otherwise entailed the purchase of numerous additional trays of disks.
The Solution:
Initially the IT Department contacted DataCore and an accredited partner for impartial advice that would just address the storage aspect of the CCTV solution. The partner, identified that implementation of DataCore’s SANsymphony solution could address so many more of the Club’s present and needs; including critically, the mammoth expansion on the network usage throughout the run-up, duration and immediately following the Championship. In addition they recognised the opportunity to tie in an effective Disaster Recovery solution (including the implementation of a full scale off site DR emergency centre).
Effectively restricted in previous years by a hardware based fixed SAN; the proposal demonstrated the flexibility of being able to allocate and provision storage wherever required through a simple iSCSI plug in from wherever on the network. Previously the distinct peaks throughout June and July each year had to be facilitated by additional hardware, which then was effectively unused for the remainder of the year. With SANsymphony, Andrew noted he would be able to quickly provision cheaper iSCSI storage and double existing disk utilisation by pooling disk space and allocating just enough capacity to needy servers. In fact, the DataCore proposal showed a staggering £15,000 immediate capital saving outlay compared to the alternative of allocating more disk to cope with demand. With such compelling financial and business benefits, the business case was easy to justify to the board
SANsymphony installed:
The flexibility of the proposal prompted the Club to place an order for three SANsymphony nodes late in 2008 which run on IBM servers and complement IBM standard DS3400 storage arrays. Two were housed in the separate Wimbledon data centres in a mirrored environment for failover purposes and it was proposed that the third would be housed at the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton for full DR purposes. Installation occurred across a week after Andrew had completed a brief DataCore training course on SANsymphony.
Easy Administration:
One of the first noted effects of SANsymphony was the ease of administration. Previously the team had to manage five different interfaces at any one time, controlling everything from switches; storage arrays to the iSCSI/FC management interfaces. With SANsymphony Andrew noted, “Everything is now presented to the DataCore virtualisation servers, who through their drag and drop interface control all aspects of the SAN. From an administration perspective there is a lot less to monitor, control and manage.”
Immediate Recovery:
Even without the full offsite DR plan being implemented, the Club has benefited from SANsymphony’s automatic failover configuration. Ongoing building works at the Club around Centre Court entailed the brief loss of fibre connectivity. The resultant effect on the SAN was negligible. SANsymphony’s auto-failover kicked in; simply switching the servers to the mirrored site and causing no loss of data or applications.
Once a year expansion that is difficult to predict:
As you would expect from one of the worlds leading sporting events, there are many different suppliers throughout the Championship who rely on the SAN infrastructure to seamlessly accommodate their needs. These include 11 external suppliers providing key Championship services and analysis, that range from TV graphics to the Hawk-Eye line calling system. Without this infrastructure fully functioning 24X7 throughout the tournament, the knock-on effects could be critical. Imagine Wimbledon without an effective ticketing system; or Wimbledon’s catering team unable to fulfil the strawberries and cream orders; or Wimbledon umpires without a referee system being available; or the Press Office down. In the past, every year these were the possible nightmare scenarios that the team had to plan for and faced the onerous task of predicting the different hardware requirements that would need supporting and the resultant disk capacity that would need to be provided on the network. And with the eyes of millions of viewers worldwide upon you, in the past the IT team have had no choice but err on the side of caution and over-provision required disk. However, this year Andrew and the team are confident that they can flexibly and agilely use resource pooling through thin provisioning provided by SANsymphony to gain higher storage capacity, without lock-in to further hardware outlay.
Futures:
Full Scale DR in progress:
The third SANsymphony server has been allocated to the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, some three miles away, so that in the event of a dramatic loss of functionality (hosting the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament means that security at the Club is treated very seriously), the third SANsymphony has been planned to provide asynchronous mirroring and snapshotting to mean that almost instantly in a full scale disaster the entire system can be back up and running with only a five minute lag in data.
Additional growth is now easy to provide:
SANsymphony’s scalable approach provides additional re-assurance and room to grow. Adding more storage is now a question of simply purchasing additional licences; complex provisioning and rezoning of disk is a thing of the past and as data storage grows and retained digital image sizes increases, the team are now confident that in the future they can instantly serve back large files such as video restore.
Andrew summarises, “With DataCore’s SANsymphony solution running effectively we have moved the Club’s infrastructure into the next layer of availability and flexibility. It really has provided a cost-effective alternative that added needed flexibility to our traditional hardware approach.”
Overview:
Company:
All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Association
Location:
Wimbledon, UK
Line of Business:
World’s most famous Tennis Club; hosts of the Wimbledon Championships
Challenge:
Explosion of users once a year to facilitate Championships; explosion of data to facilitate CCTV footage.
Solution:
2 DataCore’s SANsymphony 6.0 running on 2 IBM servers creating two identical mirrored SANs for failover and high availability; 1 DataCore SANsymphony server off-site for DR purposes
Results:
Total flexibility and ease of management through peak usage periods; financial benefits utilising available disk; no hardware lock-in; guaranteed restoration; Disaster Recovery capabilities.
www.wimbledon.org
www.datacore.com
Wimbledon Case StudyAJJune23GT.docx 52.81 kB
Whitepapers
Benchmarking a Scalable and Highly Available Architecture for Virtual Desktops
Equating the storage element of VDi
Summary
This paper reports on a configuration for Virtual Desktops (VDs) which reduces the total hardware cost to approximately $32.41 per desktop, including the storage infrastructure. This number is achieved using a configuration with dual node, cross-mirrored, High Availability storage. In comparison to previously published reports, which tout the storage infrastructure costs alone of VDI at from fifty to several hundred dollars per virtual machine, the significance of the data becomes self evident. In this report, storage hardware costs become inconsequential.
Even more significantly, the reported configuration achieves this result with 220 VDs running on a simple pair of low cost servers. The primary innovation consists in co-locating the redundant storage virtualization systems onto the same hardware platforms as the VDs, thus eliminating the need to amortize high-cost, stand alone storage controllers against many Virtual Server platforms and thousands of VDs. Previous publications have reported on configurations which use thousands of VDs to defray the cost of these controllers. Reading between the lines, it becomes immediately apparent that per VD hardware costs rise very sharply as such configurations are scaled downward. Yet, it is precisely these smaller VDI configurations which are the more important from most practical standpoints.
VDI_benchmark_paper.pdf 626.60 kB
Dynamic Storage Mobility for HyperV
Migrating VHD LUNs between Storage Devices without DowntimeVHDs used to store Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) images frequently need to be relocated to different storage devices. Requests for a different quality of service, a hardware refresh, or capacity expansion likely trigger the move. Understandably, system administrators try to schedule disruptive LUN relocations around other planned outages, but that seldom meets the business urgency.
DataCore™ SANsymphony™-V software migrates VHD LUNs non-disruptively behind the scenes and later reclaims the disk space from the decommissioned location. Transparent virtual LUN migration is one of several device-independent functions provided by DataCore’s storage virtualisation software for the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V platform.
Dynamic Storage Mobility for Hyper-V - DataCore Software.pdf 1.07 MB
An IDC Viewpoint
Removing Storage-Related Barriers to Server and Desktop Virtualization: What makes server, desktop, and storage virtualization attractive.
IDCVP08R_Print.pdf 238.69 kB
Storage Switzerland Report
Virtualising Storage along with Servers and Desktops - Essential to Realise Expected Benefits
VirtualisingStorageSwitzerlandWhitePaper.png 160.44 kB
Products
SANsymphony-V
Full feature descriptionFull feature description
SANsymphony-V Feature Description DataSheet.pdf 5.01 MB
SANsymphony-V
The Storage HypervisorDevice-Independent Storage Virtualisation Software, Core to Your IT Infrastructure
Over the past decade DataCore has developed sophisticated storage virtualisation technologies to overcome device-specific differences and limitations so that you may experience non-stop, lightning-fast, waste-free SANs despite continuous changes in the makeup of your storage pool. We use software to transform imperfect storage hardware devices into ideally behaved disks; i.e., “virtual disks” that have plenty of capacity, run fast, are easily shared, never age and are always accessible. This unique emulation overcomes differences, limitations and flaws inherent in all real devices, whether they are basic disk drives or top-of-the-line disk arrays.
The software harnesses the power of dedicated x86/x64 Windows servers to speed up disk response, execute replication, data protection, and other advanced functions, while generally managing the allocation of the virtual storage pool. The servers effectively turn into locked down, “storage virtualisation nodes” and cease to be general purpose machines. They may be chosen from your preferred manufacturer and sized to your specific I/O requirements.
Configuring the DataCore nodes for N+1 redundancy eliminates single points of failure. This allows one node and its resources to be taken out-of-service for repairs, upgrades, expansion and replacement while another takes over its duties without disruption.
Unlike device-specific firmware, there’s no discarded investment and no upheaval in your storage practice when you transition to the next hardware platform. It’s as portable as moving your database server and its licenses to a faster machine. You can run DataCore software on physical and virtual machines for the widest choice of platforms and compatibility. Up to 1 TB of SAN-wide cache per DataCore node can be configured for unprecedented, lightning-fast response from modest back-end disks.
The software pools free space from any disks internal to the nodes and any direct-attached or SAN-based external arrays. The system administrator carves out virtual disks from this resource pool according to the specific capacity, availability and performance needs of your computers. For example, some groups of virtual disks may be defined to be cached, locally mirrored, remotely replicated and thinly provisioned. In the background, the DataCore software will tap multiple real devices and the necessary computing and network connections to meet those requirements. The virtual disks are then assigned to specific iSCSI or Fibre Channel ports on the computers needing storage where they appear as conventional disks on a SAN.
DataCore supports storage consumers running any of the popular operating systems. It is compatible with Windows, MacOS, Linux, HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris, but does not depend on host-based agents to provide services. Server and desktop virtualization products from companies like Citrix, Microsoft and VMware depend on DataCore SANs for well behaved, highly-available, shared storage. They realize distinct availability and performance advantages when implementing virtual machine migrations, workload fail-over and dynamic load balancing.
SANsymphony-V Abbreviated Feature Description DataSheet.pdf 871.82 kB
