In SAN We Trust: Virginia's Dinwiddie County Government Deploys
DataCore Storage Virtualization to Empower VMware; Sets a New Level of
Uptime for Critical Applications
VMware and DataCore Software Are Delivering an "All Virtualized"
IT Environment for Dinwiddie County in Virginia; DataCore Enabled This
Local Government to Repurpose Resources - Rather Than Buy New.
DINWIDDIE, Virginia and FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida - February 25, 2010
- DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization
software, today announced that the government of Dinwiddie County in
Virginia has deployed its SANmelody™ storage virtualization software
along with VMware vSphere. "We were convinced that we needed a robust
SAN to support our objective of server consolidation with VMware as
well as our desire to achieve high uptime," explained Norman Cohen, IT
Director, Dinwiddie County Government. "We are so impressed with our
new virtualization environment and DataCore's role in virtualizing the
storage that we are actively encouraging other county governments in
our state to do what we have done."
This is yet another chapter in the long line of DataCore™ storage
virtualization users in state and local governments that literally
stretches worldwide.
It was server sprawl that first led this county government to
consolidate its physical machines. But various dominos fell thereafter.
"Consolidation" quickly drove the need for "high-availability" for this
customer. "Dinwiddie County Government put their trust in us to do what
was right for them," stated Chuck Renfro, CEO at Thinking Cap
Technologies, the DataCore partner responsible for the implementation.
"The IT Department at Dinwiddie County was so pleased to learn that
DataCore could take advantage of their existing equipment without
having to make any major hardware acquisitions. Beyond this, however,
the overarching objective was to keep their applications running on the
new, virtualized IT infrastructure without downtime. This was a
particular point of emphasis for the Emergency 911 Center and
Sherriff's Office."
Realizing all the benefits of server virtualization - through storage virtualization software
Dinwiddie County Government now has an IT environment that is
totally virtualized. A cornerstone of this implementation has been the
DataCore storage virtualization solution. DataCore has enabled the IT
Department at Dinwiddie County to get the most out of VMware vSphere
and utilize its more advanced functions - such as VMotion -to provide
the high-availability behavior that this customer sought.
"DataCore's storage virtualization software solution has allowed us
to springboard into the world of virtualization - particularly enabling
us to leverage the benefits of VMware," noted Cohen. "The most
important component of our virtualization deployment has to do with
virtualizing our disks with DataCore. We can now utilize disk space -
no matter where those disks reside on campus. But storage
virtualization does so much more than delivering shared storage by way
of pooling disks. With DataCore, our IT environment has attained
high-availability and fault-tolerance, by way of the synchronous
mirroring between two DataCore nodes."
Now the IT department at Dinwiddie County has a pair of DataCore
SANmelody nodes, which are mirrored over the in-place dark fiber
between two facilities on the Dinwiddie County Government campus.
In SAN we trust - a solution that has proven itself by meeting business objectives
"One DataCore-powered SAN is at a facility on one end of our campus
and this is mirrored to another DataCore SAN at a facility at the other
end of our campus to eliminate any single points of failure," explained
Cohen. "The synchronous mirroring between the two SANs has enabled us
to achieve fault-tolerance for our whole IT environment, and this is
something that is particularly mission-critical for our 911 Center.
When we conducted a test, we actually pulled the plug on one-half of
the system - our production environment - on one side of the campus.
The failover DataCore SAN picked this up immediately and kicked in just
like it is supposed to. No users even knew that the system had
'failed'. I cannot stress enough how impressive this was - because
everything stayed up and kept running."
Consisting of only three people, the Dinwiddie County Government IT
Department has been impressed by just how DataCore virtualizes storage
resources through its software and allows system administrators to pick
the hardware of their choice. A fault-tolerant, mirrored SAN solution
is a far cry from where the county was, storage-wise, prior to
embracing virtualization. The number of physical machines prior to
virtualization was six (6). With the newly virtualized environment, two
(2) of physical machines are now running twenty (20) virtual machines.
"The flexibility that we have gained with the VMware-DataCore
combination is just tremendous for us - allowing us to run on any
hardware as well as to re-purpose existing equipment," added Cohen.
"The fact of the matter is that now with DataCore software virtualizing
our storage, we are utilizing all of the capabilities that VMware has
to offer because we have high-availability and distributed resources
doing load-balancing."
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software develops the storage virtualization software
needed to get the highest availability, fastest performance and maximum
utilization from storage resources in physical and virtual IT
environments. It provides the critical 3rd dimension on which the
success of server and desktop virtualization projects hinge, regardless
of the models and brands of storage devices used. For more information,
call (877) 780-5111 or visit www.datacore.com.
DataCore, SANmelody 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.