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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Sept. 13 -DataCore Software today announced it is seeing significant customer adoption of both VMware and DataCore in its own backyard of South Florida, which is in line with the traction virtual infrastructure products are gaining both nationally and internationally. DataCore's Florida-based customers include The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, All Medical Personnel, Harbor Federal Savings Bank, Embraer, Mercy Hospital, Homebuilders Financial Network, Gables Engineering and local universities and colleges, among others.
DataCore's success in the South Florida market is due in no small part to its local virtualization reseller, Fairway Consulting Group. After last year's highly destructive hurricane season, Fairway Consulting Group found itself installing virtualization technology for a number of companies that had found out the hard way the importance of good disaster recovery (DR) procedures. One customer of DataCore and Fairway is one of the twenty-five largest, private foundations in the U.S., and the largest in Florida. Its primary data center is in Miami, and the company suffered a brief outage after Hurricane Wilma. "We have staff based in our communities outside of Miami," said Jorge Martinez, Director of Information Systems at the Knight Foundation. "They need to have access to our systems to continue working, which may include providing emergency funding to relief agencies in our communities or nationally."
The company decided to build a remote data center in another location as part of an update to its disaster recovery preparedness infrastructure. "We explored this option before, but even with the advent of server virtualization eliminating some of the hardware replication issues, we still needed to find a way to keep our data current at both sites. While our HP SAN is a great product, replicating our data was an expensive proposition; that is, until SANmelody came in to the picture," added Martinez.
According to James Price, president, Fairway Consulting Group, "They wanted to double storage, have that storage be highly available and in a DR configuration with their data in a remote data center." The company chose to install storage virtualization software from DataCore in the Miami center to create a near real-time replicated environment between the two data centers. "They will have a high-speed circuit between the two, so even though the centers are miles apart, the latency is really nominal," explained Price. Because DataCore's technology is hardware independent, Fairway Consulting Group will be able to build greater flexibility and cost savings at the remote site -- thereby complementing the Miami data center, which has the HP server with a Tier 2, Fiber Channel based array.
Like most of DataCore's customers, those in South Florida wanted to move away from hardware and supplier constraints and become able to provide their enterprises with the opportunity to expand and serve storage as needed. To do so effectively requires a storage area network (SAN) at the right cost that virtualizes and centralizes storage management and storage services. In terms of flexibility and better productivity, DataCore adds on the storage side what VMware does on the server-side. The combination of server and storage virtualization also offers companies of all sizes real advantages in terms of cost savings.
"South Florida is nothing but a microcosm of what is happening at the global level," said George Teixeira, President and CEO, DataCore Software. "DataCore has thousands of virtual SAN deployments around the world and many of the users who choose to adopt virtual infrastructures tell us that while they may have been hesitant at first, once they did make use of virtual server technologies -- such as deploying VMware virtual servers or DataCore software for storage virtualization -- that they became champions for the need to further virtualize their IT environments. As a Fort Lauderdale-based company, it is, however, particularly gratifying to see companies in our own backyard choosing the virtualization path."
Most of DataCore's customers cite cost savings, hardware independence, better resource utilization and of course greater productivity and faster response to change as the main reasons why they have "gone virtual." Storage virtualization offers the benefit of giving storage administrators the ability to buy cheaper storage for use in a tiered environment and delivers the overall opportunity for them to bring costs down through better utilization of storage. Companies are also just as keen to nowadays to adopt a virtual infrastructure for replication and disaster recovery.
In Florida and beyond, the growing success of DataCore in conjunction with VMware is due in part to some major market trends: the growth of virtualization (for example, providing robust storage and SANs required for VMware server consolidation projects), the need for more affordable disaster recovery solutions and the adoption of new technologies like iSCSI Ethernet- based IP SANs. The increasing popularity of iSCSI-based storage networking (a no cost option included in DataCore software), VMware's latest release of software that supports iSCSI and new, low cost Fibre Channel SAN connectivity have dramatically opened up new opportunities for DataCore. This is the case not only in large enterprise accounts -- but more and more within small to mid-size firms, which need high-end features that are affordable. DataCore's Florida-based customers are all cases in point.
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage. 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 with corporate headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For more information, visit http://www.datacore.com.
DataCore, the DataCore logo, SANsymphony, SANmelody, SANmaestro, SANmotion and Powered by DataCore are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
