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
DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, recently announced that its storage virtualization software has been deployed along with VMware vSphere for the government of Dinwiddie County in Virginia. "We were convinced that we needed a SAN to support our objective of server consolidation with VMware as well as our desire to achieve uptime," explained Norman Cohen, IT Director, Dinwiddie County Government. "We are so impressed with the new virtualization environment and DataCore's role as the virtual storage dimension to everything that we are actively encouraging other county governments in our state to do what we have done in our VMware-DataCore deployment."
This is yet another chapter in the long line of state and local governments that literally stretches worldwide as DataCore storage virtualization users. See "Storage Virtualization in Local Governments Worldwide Booms."
It was server sprawl itself that first led to this county government wanting to simply consolidate its physical machines. But various dominos fell thereafter. The "consolidation" domino was followed by the "high-availability" one. "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 impressed with DataCore because it can run on any hardware and because it can enable them to repurpose existing equipment. Beyond this, however, an overriding objective was to attain high-availability in terms of their applications running on the new, virtualized IT infrastructure. This was a particular point of emphasis for the Emergency 911 Center and Sherriff's Office."
Realizing all the benefits of virtualization – through storage virtualization
Dinwiddie County Government now has an IT environment that is totally virtualized. A cornerstone of this implementation has been DataCore's storage virtualization solution. By turning standard servers into storage area networks (SANs), 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 – as well as to provide the high-availability and disaster recovery (DR) component 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 remote replication that is made possible by the two DataCore-powered SANs."
Now the IT department at Dinwiddie County has a pair of DataCore SANmelody-powered SANs, which are mirrored at two facilities within the campus that Dinwiddie County Government occupies. Adding to the deployment was the fact that this county government had dark fibre already installed.
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 for disaster recovery purposes," explained Cohen. "The remote replication 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. Then, Dinwiddie County had a very basic set-up throughout their IT environment, where multiple servers were prevalent. 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."
The biggest business objective for Dinwiddie County was disaster recovery (DR) – specifically recovering at both a software–level and at a hardware-level. And now, the bottom-line for this county government is that one system can now totally shut down on one-side of the campus and the failover system picks up right where the "down" system left off – keeping everyone who depend on the system up and running.
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, visit www.datacore.com.
SOURCE: DataCore Software