Storage Virtualization: Australia's Kingston City Council Chooses DataCore For New Virtual Storage Infrastructure And Disaster Recovery

DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualisation solutions, recently announced that Kingston City Council, a leading municipality of Melbourne, has selected DataCore's virtual SAN solution. The solution, proposed and implemented by DataCore solutions partner, Lincom Solutions, gives the Kingston City Council a robust virtual storage infrastructure providing high-availability data protection and offsite disaster recovery that fully complements its existing storage systems and integrates seamlessly into their VMware virtual server environment.

By selecting DataCore, Kingston City Council was able to expand on existing storage investments while having access to emerging and more cost effective storage arrays and disk technologies such as server-attached storage (SAS). The success criteria for the winning solution included price, meeting critical regulatory requirements, and implementing the most flexible technology. The ultimate aim was to make disaster recovery (DR) truly the last point of reliance. To do so, Kingston City Council selected a design based on a high-availability, mirrored SAN in production replicated to a DR SAN. The effective nature of this design is that if one of the SANs fails in production, it automatically switches to the mirror and restores once the service is available again. The lag-time between the mirrors is at a minimum to ensure the most current version of data is available.

Kingston City Council administers essential government services to thousands of residents and businesses in a large and growing region. Local law enforcement, rate collection and business registration are but a few of the services governed and controlled by the Kingston City Council. More important is the management of local aged and healthcare services. This responsibility requires the IT environment to adhere to stringent service level agreements, with the possible consequences of a failure being dire.

"A core strategy for our IT services was to implement a robust and secure storage environment in our production data centre that we could extend to our DR site for replication. DataCore's SANmelody provided our business with the technology to build an active cluster in production ensuring we have maximum uptime, almost identical to what we have achieved by implementing VMware ESX for our server infrastructure," stated Kevin Chan, IT spokesperson for Kingston City Council. "DR was simplified by using Asynchronous Mirroring and the ability to utilise any underlying storage arrays give us flexibility to utilise lower cost storage to build the DR Storage solution. We worked with our partner Lincom Solutions to design, proof of concept and deployed the solution, which was done seamlessly with minimal downtime to our operation."

Early in 2006, Kingston City Council realized it needed to adopt an underlying SAN infrastructure. The council had numerous servers with directly attached storage, making administration and the sharing of storage across systems difficult at best. In addition, the integration of businesses it had acquired to help support delivery of core services had further complicated the environment. When Kingston City Council put out a tender for a SAN, traditional storage hardware vendors, including HP, EMC, Hitachi, and their partners, responded to the tender.

"Often, a ‘big box' solution' isn't a complete ‘solution' at all," said David Bull, technical sales director, DataCore Australia. "It is a very simplistic approach that does not take into account future needs and the role of storage and data protection within the bigger picture. It is also a very expensive option, one that normally costs over $100,000."

Big box solutions often consume so much of the budget that critical requirements are left unmet until the customer can afford to buy yet another expensive box to fill the gap left by the last. It becomes a vicious cycle as each wears out over time. On the other hand, DataCore fulfills the full range of storage requirements, such as storage management, high-availability and disaster recovery, with hardware independent software that runs on any standard Intel or AMD based system. Thus, when systems need to be upgraded or expanded, the investment in software is preserved; only the hardware changes. The customer is free to choose physical storage solely on the basis of storage characteristics desired and its budget.

"What Kingston really needed was to go beyond storage and to secure and protect its data environment," explained Anand Karan, senior business manager, Lincom Solutions. "Our proof of concept for Kingston City Council across two servers demonstrated throughput well above expectations but just as impressive was the ease of management and seamless failover. We see storage technology moving in the same rapid manner as server technology. Proprietary solutions will not only become too expensive, these solutions often have no inherent flexibility to utilise the best technologies available. Therefore, businesses will turn to products such as SANmelody to implement the best solutions available. At the end of the day, it's about protecting your data."

DataCore partner, Lincom Solutions, provided the knowledge to help Kingston City Council's immediate need to protect its data for multiple businesses and meet its future requirements for flexibility and growth, while staying within strict budget constraints. Kingston City Council had already contracted Lincom Solutions to deploy VMware and consolidate servers, centralize management, and gain the benefits of hardware independence for their servers. All that remained was to build the same functionality to the storage level. Using DataCore, Kingston City Council has completed the virtualisation picture end to end.

About Lincom Solutions
Lincom Solutions is a specialised professional services company focused in the design, deployment and support of enterprise class data center solutions, based on the best of breed technologies. Lincom Solutions is Australian-owned and operated with its success credited to strong delivery experience and enterprise partnerships with both global and local technology organisations. For more information, please call Anand Karan on 0400 041707 or visit www.lincom.net.au.

About DataCore Software
DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualisation software, 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's disk server software easily adds capacity expansion and centralized storage management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, VMware, MacOS, and NetWare systems. DataCore is privately held and its corporate headquarters are in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. For more information, call U.S. (877) 780-5111 or visit www.datacore.com.

SOURCE: DataCore Software