Warwick Chooses DataCore

MUNICH and MARKTNEUKIRCHEN, Germany -- DataCore Software, the leading provider of hardware independent, storage virtualization SAN solutions, today announced that Warwick GmbH & Co. Music Equipment KG, manufacturer of high-end musical instruments and equipment, has deployed SANmelody to virtualize and manage its data storage. Faced with a constantly growing illustrated catalog of instruments, Warwicks storage capacity was being pushed to the limit. Instead of a simple capacity upgrade and just buying more systems, the company decided to implement a server and storage virtualization infrastructure based on VMware and SANmelody. Since embracing virtualization, Warwick now reaps the benefits of high availability data protection, higher capacity utilization as well as unexpected levels of flexibility and responsiveness.

“We took the storage capacity growth bottle-neck and a move to a new building as the opportunity to completely address and reorganize our server and storage environment,” said Mario Rockoff, system administrator at Warwick. “We wanted to build up a second data center that not only guaranteed high availability but also allowed us to handle our resources more efficiently.” After having finished the construction work at a new building, IT service provider Godyo started the virtualization project for Warwick. To virtualize the server, two HP Opteron Quadcore machines were implemented for the VMware ESX Server in the main and the emergency data center running five virtual servers for the UNIX cluster. This includes a database, an ERP system and a number of Windows applications. One MSA 1500 system was added and implemented remotely in the new data center and is connected redundantly (the data is mirrored synchronously) over a Fibre Channel network. Both storage subsystems were upgraded with extra SCSI disks. Altogether, over 11 TB of capacity was made available.

The allocation of the storage capacity is provided by DataCore’s SANmelody 2.0. SANmelody™ is a cost-effective solution that protects and automates capacity expansion to application servers and virtual machines. SANmelody makes thin provisioning an open, network-based service that works with nearly all storage brands – enabling any business to fully participate in the cost saving benefits of virtualizing, optimizing disk space utilization and consolidating its storage.

Warwick has the highest confidence with the high availability DataCore virtual SAN that is now in place. “By allocating the resources separately in two isolated areas and implementing DataCore’s auto failover and failback synchronous mirroring, we have achieved high availability for our business applications,” said Rockoff. “Since the implementation of VMware and DataCore’s SANmelody, our systems run failsafe, are cheaper to administer, are hardware independent and therefore they give us a new level of flexibility to easily expand. Without SANmelody, our ability to truly virtualize our systems would not be complete. Storage virtualization has allowed us to gain productivity by automating many time intensive storage processes and tasks. This brings long-term benefits to us, including better productivity and resource utilization, less administration, and best of all, no downtime.”

DataCore Software Corp.