DataCore Software today announced that California’s County of Orange has joined a growing, global list of city and county governments that are seeing results with DataCore™. Recently, scores of city and country governments have selected DataCore. These include: City of Elk Grove, CA (US), City of Atascadero, CA (US), City of Saratoga Springs, NY (US), Georgsmarienhütte (Germany), Viernheim (Germany), Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office, CA (US), Town of Branford, CT (US), City of Newport News, VA (US), City Of Inverness, FL (US), Bruchsal (Germany), City of Carmel, IN (US), Greven (Germany), Baden Baden (Germany), Ashfield District Council (UK), Barsinghausen (Germany), Ahaus (Germany), Deggendorf (Germany), Witten (Germany), Kingston City Council (Australia), Gangjin Province (Korea), Shepway District Council (UK), Paju City (Korea), and many more.

Longstanding local government users of DataCore Software include: Augsburg (Germany), Bournemouth Borough Council (UK), Butte County, CA (US), City of Norfolk, VA (US), DaeGu City (Korea), Damyang Province (Korea), Frankfurt Kassen und Steueramt (Germany), Heidelberg (Germany), Kwangyang City (Korea), Mannheim (Germany), Nordhorn (Germany), Poole Borough Council (UK), Siegburg (Germany), Suncheon City (Korea), Taipei (Taiwan), Town of South Windsor, CT (US), Townhall of Asnières (France), Townhall of Chelles (France), Waverley Borough Council (UK), West Dorset District Council (UK), and Youngju City (Korea), among others.

USA – County of Orange

“A total virtualization environment across servers and storage really gives us tremendous flexibility in terms of what we can do,” K.C. Roestenberg, director, business IT shared services, County of Orange.

The Orange County Data Center (OCDC) hosts many different servers – both virtual and physical – using a combination of VMware and physical hosts that support other outlying agencies within the County of Orange. Before DataCore was added to virtualize, consolidate and mange the SANs, OCDC had two HP Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs) storing their data and they had just finished purchasing their third EVA – supporting their third separate storage area network.

Bottom-line:

OCDC had three business objectives for deploying DataCore’s SANsymphony™: 1) Consolidating multiple SANs for ease of management and improved utilization; 2) Alleviating data migration issues from SAN-to-SAN and making that more efficient; 3) The third reason for DataCore’s adoption had to do with disaster recovery. This is more of a long-term goal; however, in the next fiscal year of the data center, the IT team will be implementing a disaster recovery site. When IT managers at OCDC were made aware of DataCore’s asynchronous capabilities with AIM, they saw the opportunity to build a SAN-to-SAN replication-type infrastructure without having to stick with HP EVA or any other hardware-specific type of storage. A remote site DataCore mirrored SAN scenario will enable OCDC to be able to leverage older storage solutions or even direct-attached storage at a DR site.

USA – City of Inverness

The City of Inverness in Citrus County, Florida, sits in the middle the hurricane zone and is prone to power outages due to tropical storms. It is responsible for parks, water lines, tree management as well as roads, street management, and providing many other city services to nearly 10,000 residents. With a limited budget and growth on the horizon, the city needed to modernize its IT department and maximize uptime and productivity. To do so, they chose a VMware and DataCore virtual infrastructure.

“DataCore offers up functionality and the most competitive price point,” said Joey Johnston, IT director, City of Inverness. “We were able to repurpose existing servers to run SANmelody. These storage servers gave us a simple to use SAN that combined well with VMware and delivered auto-failover data protection, automatic thin-provisioning, SANmotion data migration, as well as AIM – asynchronous mirroring for remote site disaster recovery. And the total price point was just over $15,000 for all that functionality and two licenses. This is less than half of what I was quoted for one box from a traditional SAN hardware solution.”

Bottom-line:

The City of Inverness bought DataCore and VMware in tandem. Not only has DataCore delivered an affordable SAN, but now the city has at its disposal a fully automated, high-availability SAN that can grow with its needs. The City of Inverness bought a scalable storage infrastructure and not a box that it would soon outgrow.

Australia – Kingston City Council

Kingston City Council, a leading municipality of Melbourne, has selected DataCore’s SANmelody™ virtual SAN solution. The solution, proposed and implemented by DataCore solutions partner, Lincom Solutions, gives the Kingston City Council a robust virtual storage infrastructure providing high-availability data protection and offsite disaster recovery that fully complements its existing storage systems and integrates seamlessly into their VMware virtual server environment.

“A core strategy for our IT services was to implement a robust and secure storage environment in our production data centre that we could extend to our DR site for replication. DataCore’s SANmelody™ provided our business with the technology to build an active cluster in production ensuring we have maximum uptime, almost identical to what we have achieved by implementing VMware ESX for our server infrastructure,” stated Kevin Chan, IT infrastructure manager, Kingston City Council.

Bottom-line:

By selecting DataCore, Kingston City Council was able to expand on existing storage investments while having access to emerging and more cost effective storage arrays and disk technologies such as server-attached storage (SAS). The success criteria for the winning solution included price, meeting critical regulatory requirements, and implementing the most flexible technology. The ultimate aim was to make disaster recovery (DR) truly the last point of reliance. To do so, Kingston City Council selected a design based on a high-availability, mirrored SAN in production replicated to a DR SAN.

United Kingdom – Bournemouth Borough Council

Situated on the south coast of England, Bournemouth is popular as a destination for holidaymakers and as a venue for large conferences, as well as being home to some 160,000 residents. Bournemouth Borough Council provides all local government services to the community, ranging from payment of benefits to park maintenance, social services, and refuse collection. Facing a 25% per year growth rate in its volume of data and with increasing requirements to embrace information technology within local government, Bournemouth Borough Council is constantly confronted with increasing storage needs.

Mark Royal, senior support analyst at Bournemouth Borough Council, explained, "The requirements of new legislation will increase the need to store and keep available ever larger amounts of data. We chose SANsymphony to provide flexibility and scalability, allowing us to respond to the ever-changing demands of local government, without incurring the additional costs often associated with managing data."

Bottom-line:

SANsymphony provides the means for storage consolidation and enables the administration of the changing storage environment to be simplified. The solution provides a stable, open, storage vendor independent platform to build on for the future.

Korea – Daegu City

Daegu City, the third largest city in Korea with a population of over 2.5 million citizens, has installed DataCore's SANsymphony to manage and consolidate its storage network of Hitachi and Samsung storage arrays.

"As a direct result of SANsymphony, I now have in place a storage networking architecture with the flexibility to employ different models of Hitachi storage and Samsung disk arrays and make them all coexist and work together," stated IT manager, Hea-Chan Park. "With DataCore we got the 'best of both worlds,' we maximized our existing investment, and we achieved an affordable IP-based network solution."

Bottom-line:

DataCore offloaded storage management and disaster recovery off the backs of the IT team. Instead of IT managers spending all of their time focused on interoperability and data protection, they are now concentrating the bulk of their efforts on the important applications that make city services run smoothly.

Germany – Stadt Heidelberg (City of Heidelberg)

Stadt Heidelberg is a large local municipal administration serving the community of Heidelberg and its more than 139,000 residents. Like any modern local authority, Heidelberg has a duty to provide reliable and high quality services to the local population.

Manfred Leutz, deputy IT Manager of Stadt Heidelberg commented, "SANsymphony has proved to be the high performance solution we had hoped for and met all the data availability requirements demanded by our tests...we now have a flexible and secure platform on which to base our current and future storage needs."

Bottom-line:

In addition to deploying virtual storage allocation, Stadt Heidelberg has, by exploiting SANsymphony network mirroring, implemented a cost-effective, remote site solution ensuring that their data is mirrored and protected between two locations, using reliable but relatively inexpensive storage devices.

Germany – Stadt Mannheim (City of Mannheim)

The university city of Mannheim is the cultural and economic center of the Rhein/Neckar triangle region in Germany and with a population of 320,000 is the second largest city in Baden-Württemberg.

"SANsymphony as the central management interface is the ideal solution for us and provides our storage architecture with high availability and flexibility," stated Gerd Armbruster, IT manager, City of Mannheim Administration. "In view of tight budgets, particularly in the public sector, there is another decisive argument: with SANsymphony we were able to reduce staff activity for storage management by almost 50 percent."

Bottom-line:

Mannheim benefits from the platform's open network architecture. As regards the storage itself, the solution is independent from hardware and the IT team can implement projects that demand additional storage capacity by simply adding hard disk capacity. SANsymphony ensures high availability throughout the network.

France – Town Hall of Asnières

The Town hall of Asnières, located near Paris, has more than 76,000 inhabitants. A city budget of over 130 million euros is used to meet the needs and services of its base of citizens - impacting many aspects of life in Asnières in terms of administration, public services, construction, rehabilitation, education, sports, social projects, etc. The city also services the needs of its business community. More than 2,200 companies are located within the boundaries of Asnières.

"We were enamored by SANsymphony's capabilities in terms of virtualization and central management of storage within our environment," said Jean Michaut, Town Hall of Asnières IT manager. "The software automated many time consuming storage tasks. The snapshot functions within SANsymphony let us conduct tests without impacting users, and the virtual capacity feature made it simple and efficient to serve storage capacity. Now, when we need to, we can add disk space progressively and according to our real needs, without impacting users and our operations."

Bottom-line:

The Town Hall of Asnières selected SANsymphony to achieve hardware independence and open up its storage purchasing process. SANsymphony provides an open and hardware-independent approach that also delivered robust high availability and auto-provisioning features.

City governments around the world are turning to virtualization to enhance productivity and maximize cost savings. County of Orange, California is a prime example of an organization that recently selected DataCore and embraced a “Total Enterprise Virtualization” approach. The county is realizing the benefits of a flexible multi-vendor approach that combines VMware and DataCore to consolidate, manage, virtualize and optimize their server and storage resources.