Citrus County Picks DataCore

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- DataCore Software today announced that the City of Inverness in Citrus County, Florida, has selected DataCore's SANmelody storage virtualization solution to manage and protect their data center. With SANmelody, not only was the City of Inverness able to use existing hardware, it was able to get twice as much use out of its existing storage space as well as adding a new level of business continuity protection and scalability for the future, which the city did not previously have.

When Joey Johnston, IT director, City of Inverness, came on board he inherited approximately thirteen server systems. He knew enough about VMware to know that he could greatly improve productivity and cost savings.Therefore, he decided to consolidate these servers. In order to take full advantage of the functionality of VMware across systems, he also knew he needed to deploy a SAN. Johnston did his research and a key priority at the outset was finding a SAN that would work with VMware and provide a level of automated failover protection. Johnston soon found DataCore in his research and identified the company's SANmelody as a potential solution that supported and was fully compatible with VMware. He also spoke with EqualLogic and LeftHand Networks as well as some other, major SAN solution providers. What Johnston soon realized was that other SAN solutions were not very scalable in comparison with DataCore's SANmelody.

Taking EqualLogic, for example, if he would have purchased a 3TB solution and then needed to add another terabyte or two in the future, he would have then needed to buy another storage hardware module as an upgrade. This could cost $25,000 just to accommodate the additional storage capacity. Also, while fiber channel (FC) was not an immediate requirement, the fact that SANmelody supported all of its services over FC or iSCSI protocols on Ethernet connections left the option open for the future.

"With DataCore, you can simply add an additional license to manage three more terabytes of storage -- or sixty terabytes, or an unlimited option,"said Johnston. "The high-availability option was also a very big deal as was being able to re-provision servers. We could take a server that might not be up to the task of managing a geographical information system (GIS) or a mail host and re-provision it as a SAN server solution running SANmelody. It is very easy to just add more disks to a SANmelody server, since it is a standard server just like the ones running other applications. You simply populate the SANmelody server with more disks to get to six terabytes in capacity -- in our case all for under $5,000. On another vendor's solution, you will easily spend three or four times the amount just to get the same capacity." DataCore Software Corp.