DataCore Software, the leading provider of hardware independent, storage virtualization SAN solutions, today announced that the data center division at Technical University Kaiserslautern has consolidated a portion of its storage and created a Storage Area Network (SAN) to optimize its existing VMware environment using DataCore SANmelody™ virtual storage software. Combined with server virtualization, TU Kaiserslautern benefits from a comprehensive virtual infrastructure on several levels: higher availability, greater flexibility and better performance. Additionally, the university relies on DataCore’s thin provisioning to improve the utilization of its existing storage hardware investments.  

“SANmelody adds high availability, flexibility and greater performance to our SAN,” stated Dr. Tonnis Pool, head of the department applications group in the data center at TU Kaiserslautern. “We now have the ability to optimize the use of our disk space capacity, save money and improve our response times to the storage needs of our faculty in minutes, delivering storage services via our SAN over Fibre Channel or iSCSI.”

SANmelody equitably distributes and provisions the available disk space to multiple applications via iSCSI and Fibre Channel networks, independent of the hardware, model or disk technology. The disk server software provides advanced features including high speed data mirroring for high availability, auto failover and recovery as well as thin provisioning that maximizes capacity utilization and cost efficiency of IT infrastructures.

“SANmelody is ideal for midsize environment and university campus environments that need the flexibility of hardware independence and the ability to grow and scale to meet new challenges over time,” commented Christian Hagen, vice president EMEA, DataCore Software. “It’s a natural solution for use in the educational sector, where cost is an important driver. It’s great to see that today more and more universities worldwide are adopting the benefits of our storage management and virtualization solutions.”

At TU Kaiserslautern, SANmelody runs on existing HP Compaq servers and uses EONStor SATA-disk systems for storage. Three VMware ESX servers and two file servers also have access to the SAN. Plus, an existing HP storage array was effectively re-purposed so that its storage could be made part of the SAN to increase the total storage capacity available to provision over the iSCSI and Fibre Channel connections.

DataCore partner SHE Informationstechnologie AG, delivered and implemented the solution.