Quoting from the press release:

DataCore Software today announced that Wasatch Advisors, an independent investment management firm specializing in managing assets for institutional and individual clients through investments in small and mid-size companies, has gone far beyond its initial application of DataCore's SANsymphony solution, which is now responsible for enabling the company's comprehensive business continuity plan. Wasatch deployed DataCore's SANsymphony three years ago in order to add storage capacity among existing servers with ease. Wasatch also embraced DataCore for its hardware-independent approach. The third reason for initially choosing DataCore was the asynchronous mirroring component for remote site disaster recovery. "When we first selected DataCore, we took advantage of DataCore's fast synchronous real-time mirroring at our site but we envisioned being able to mirror our whole SAN from one location to another and have that tie into our business continuity plan," said Ryan Engh, Network Manager, Wasatch Advisors. "This is a very significant step for us and we just accomplished our asynchronous mirroring project using SANsymphony."

Adding Storage Capacity with Ease

Wasatch turned to DataCore originally for the purpose of easily adding storage capacity. Rather than migrating data from one RAID set to a new RAID set, which had been accomplished by means of upgrading servers, Wasatch sought out DataCore as a means to over-allocate the disks within the storage area network (SAN). Known as "auto-provisioning," this capability gave Wasatch the ability to serve up a 2 TB volume to a server when the actual physical space was not available. This enables enterprises to manage the storage on the SAN, without having to add and manage storage on each of the servers -- thereby improving productivity and delivering more uptime.

A Hardware-Independent Approach

Going with DataCore meant that the company would not be locked into a specific storage vendor wherein their hardware required proprietary software and, if more capacity were required, being beholden to a certain vendor. The ability to use various storage solutions from different vendors behind the DataCore software was also paramount to DataCore's original selection by Wasatch. And over the last 3 years, Wasatch has benefited from the approach as it has purchased and changed out servers and storage while maintaining the benefits of DataCore's flexible storage infrastructure.

The Next Step: Real-Time Protection for Virtual Machines

Wasatch has migrated about 75% of its systems over to VMware and these VM servers are attached to the SAN. VMware allows users to take a hardware machine and create a virtual machine, whereby an IT administrator can run multiple, virtual servers on one set of physical hardware. In the event of a disk failure, DataCore enables storage from the SAN to be seamlessly failed over to mirrored copies so that the operations on these virtual machines are not impacted. Disaster recovery of these machines also has been simplified. Because these virtual machines are stored as a disk file, if they are asynchronously mirrored to another site, then the complete system is completely mirrored in near real-time over to the business continuity site. "This will save us an unimaginable amount of time to get the systems back online if there was a disaster," added Engh. Currently, Wasatch has approximately 30 virtual servers that are being mirrored asynchronously right now.

By setting up their SAN to do the replication, all Wasatch has had to do is set that up one time. This way, administrators are managing virtual servers and they do not have to worry about managing the replication, which is all done behind the scenes at the block level using DataCore.

"Change is inevitable. Wasatch knew that fact early on and therefore they decided to build a flexible, hardware-independent infrastructure to cope with new requirements, additions of new hardware and growth," said George Teixeira, President and CEO of DataCore Software. "By going virtual with DataCore and VMware, they are reaping the benefits of better utilization of resources, better productivity and making it easier to implement their disaster recovery and business continuity plans."