SANs and the City: Local Governments Worldwide Flock to DataCore Software for Virtualization, Data Protection, Storage Management Services and Cost Savings

Business Wire, Nov 5, 2007

County of Orange, California Combines VMware and DataCore for "Total Enterprise Virtualization" - Consolidating, Managing, Virtualizing and Optimizing Their Server and Storage Resources

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- DataCore Software today announced that California's County of Orange has joined a growing, global list of city and county governments that are seeing results with DataCore[TM]. Recently, scores of city and country governments have selected DataCore. These include: City of Elk Grove, CA (US), City of Atascadero, CA (US), City of Saratoga Springs, NY (US), Georgsmarienhutte (Germany), Viernheim (Germany), Sacramento County District Attorney's Office, CA (US), Town of Branford, CT (US), City of Newport News, VA (US), City Of Inverness, FL (US), Bruchsal (Germany), City of Carmel, IN (US), Greven (Germany), Baden Baden (Germany), Ashfield District Council (UK), Barsinghausen (Germany), Ahaus (Germany), Deggendorf (Germany), Witten (Germany), Kingston City Council (Australia), Gangjin Province (Korea), Shepway District Council (UK), Paju City (Korea), and many more.

Longstanding local government users of DataCore Software include: Augsburg (Germany), Bournemouth Borough Council (UK), Butte County, CA (US), City of Norfolk, VA (US), DaeGu City (Korea), Damyang Province (Korea), Frankfurt Kassen und Steueramt (Germany), Heidelberg (Germany), Kwangyang City (Korea), Mannheim (Germany), Nordhorn (Germany), Poole Borough Council (UK), Siegburg (Germany), Suncheon City (Korea), Taipei (Taiwan), Town of South Windsor, CT (US), Townhall of Asni[c]res (France), Townhall of Chelles (France), Waverley Borough Council (UK), West Dorset District Council (UK), and Youngju City (Korea), among others.

USA - County of Orange

"A total virtualization environment across servers and storage really gives us tremendous flexibility in terms of what we can do," K.C. Roestenberg, director, business IT shared services, County of Orange.

The Orange County Data Center (OCDC) hosts many different servers - both virtual and physical - using a combination of VMware and physical hosts that support other outlying agencies within the County of Orange. Before DataCore was added to virtualize, consolidate and mange the SANs, OCDC had two HP Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs) storing their data and they had just finished purchasing their third EVA - supporting their third separate storage area network.

Bottom-line:

OCDC had three business objectives for deploying DataCore's SANsymphony[TM]: 1) Consolidating multiple SANs for ease of management and improved utilization; 2) Alleviating data migration issues from SAN-to-SAN and making that more efficient; 3) The third reason for DataCore's adoption had to do with disaster recovery. This is more of a long-term goal; however, in the next fiscal year of the data center, the IT team will be implementing a disaster recovery site. When IT managers at OCDC were made aware of DataCore's asynchronous capabilities with AIM, they saw the opportunity to build a SAN-to-SAN replication-type infrastructure without having to stick with HP EVA or any other hardware-specific type of storage. A remote site DataCore mirrored SAN scenario will enable OCDC to be able to leverage older storage solutions or even direct-attached storage at a DR site.

USA - City of Inverness

The City of Inverness in Citrus County, Florida, sits in the middle the hurricane zone and is prone to power outages due to tropical storms. It is responsible for parks, water lines, tree management as well as roads, street management, and providing many other city services to nearly 10,000 residents. With a limited budget and growth on the horizon, the city needed to modernize its IT department and maximize uptime and productivity. To do so, they chose a VMware and DataCore virtual infrastructure.

"DataCore offers up functionality and the most competitive price point," said Joey Johnston, IT director, City of Inverness. "We were able to repurpose existing servers to run SANmelody. These storage servers gave us a simple to use SAN that combined well with VMware and delivered auto-failover data protection, automatic thin-provisioning, SANmotion data migration, as well as AIM - asynchronous mirroring for remote site disaster recovery. And the total price point was just over $15,000 for all that functionality and two licenses. This is less than half of what I was quoted for one box from a traditional SAN hardware solution."

Bottom-line:

The City of Inverness bought DataCore and VMware in tandem. Not only has DataCore delivered an affordable SAN, but now the city has at its disposal a fully automated, high-availability SAN that can grow with its needs. The City of Inverness bought a scalable storage infrastructure and not a box that it would soon outgrow.

Australia - Kingston City Council

Kingston City Council, a leading municipality of Melbourne, has selected DataCore's SANmelody[TM] 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.