Cashman Picks DataCore

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- DataCore Software Corporation, the leading provider of hardware independent, storage virtualization software solutions, today announced that Cashman Photo Enterprises, one of the leading fine photo and video studios in the country, has embraced DataCores SANmelody™ software for the company’s storage area network (SAN). Each year, Cashman records thousands of weddings and special events at most of Las Vegas’ major hotels and attractions. Cashman’s problem was trying to manage the massive amounts of data storage – over 100 terabytes – in the form of direct-attached storage, connected to a number of different computers. After researching DataCore’s storage virtualization and iSCSI SAN solutions, the IT team at Cashman Photo Enterprises selected SANmelody in August 2007. A full deployment of the product is underway.

Cashman offers professional event photography and videography and the company’s history goes almost hand-in-hand with the history of Las Vegas itself. Its photos have been featured in many major magazines and web sites and are renowned for both their quality and creativity. Because Cashman is a company that deals with anything photo-related as well as video production, it will save images for many years. In the case of Cashman, the “data” being stored is actually photos and videos. “We save photos and videos for an extended period – years upon years,” said Brian M. Amira, Director of Information Technology, Cashman Photo Enterprises. “Because there is always a chance that a bride and groom may circle back five years down the line and order more pictures.”

The “day-in-the-life” scenario at Cashman prior to DataCore was one in which those in charge of IT infrastructure saw that things were growing too large for the data pool and knew that there was a need to re-allocate some storage that was going unused on any given machine to other machines. The tipping point for the SANmelody selection came after the company had investigated using a VMware ESX server environment. “While researching how to go with ESX, we started looking at storage area networks (SANs),” said Amira. “When doing so, we realized that all the storage area network products we were exposed to were products you had to buy from scratch – at a cost of, on average, $40,000 for 10 terabytes.” With one-hundred terabytes of direct attached storage that he was not looking to replace (just better utilize), Amira and his team wanted to go with something that supported VMware and a VMotion environment. It was then that they started looking into iSCSI storage solutions and software iSCSI targets.

“We started our search the good old-fashioned way, through Google,” said Amira. “After doing research, I came across a number of trusted reviews, written by individuals I know, which convinced me that DataCore was far more prolific than I had previously been aware,” added Amira. According to Amira, a summary of key reasons for purchasing SANmelody includes – better utilization of the 100 terabytes of storage that Cashman Photo Enterprises already maintains, a significantly better price/performance compared with any other SAN solution and well proven in the marketplace to work with VMware ESX environments.

DataCore Software Corp.