February 7, 2006 – DataCore Software has announced the general availability of Windows data migration capabilities that enable users to move and migrate live data disks over a SAN to other Windows systems across their organization. The new capabilities, launched today as SANmotion, offer a simplified and centralized approach to perform Windows volume administration by supporting pre-existing Windows formatted data volumes.

DataCore claims that this feature allows Windows disk data to be accessed, re-purposed or moved rapidly across the SAN or over Ethernet connections (over iSCSI). The SANmotion technology is now available in all new SANmelody 2.0 software releases, DataCore’s disk server storage virtualization and management product.

SANmelody already presents new virtual disk drives to users’ systems. Users would then create file formats on this new drive and add all of their files onto that new drive. With SANmotion, if a user or admin wants to send an existing disk from his server or PC to another disk on another machine in another building, then that user could do this, provided the machines are on the same Ethernet or SAN. The new machine gets a ready to use disk, with whatever files exist on that disk. A user could start working on that new machine just as if it was the machine they normally used.

SANmotion also delivers a new level of Windows disk provisioning with live data instead of just a new disk and more capacity. An administrator can create a bunch of disks locally on the server, format a file system on it and add to those whatever files or applications that an employee might use within that enterprise. The administrator can also map these volumes to the servers and to the workstations that need them, so that a virtual image of these disks can populate the different computers. Computers can be set up and provisioned rapidly since they can use the disks they receive from the central SAN. The work of the Windows administrator is done at one place, the disks can be served and shipped out over the SAN or Ethernet (iSCSI) and then anyone with access to the SAN or LAN can work on the disks that have been newly provisioned by SANmotion.

SANmotion also offers centralized Windows volume administration and the ability to migrate disparate Direct Attached Storage (DAS) disk hardware off of independent Windows Application servers and workstations to a centralized location managed by SANmelody Network services.

According to DataCore, the key benefit of this approach to data migration is its simplicity. Once the migration is completed, the application server can utilize the data on the newer disk technology. The old disk with the old data can be retired completely from the system or re-purposed for less important uses, such as near-line backup, less important applications or as secondary disk to be used only in case of a primary disk failure.