DataCore Software, the storage hypervisor leader and premier provider of storage virtualization software, today announced that companies and organizations around the globe are realizing the benefits of the software-defined data center and simultaneously improving the performance of their Tier-1, mission-critical business applications through its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software. The SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor boosts the speed, throughput and availability of virtualized, I/O intensive Tier-1 applications like Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange, as well as SAP, Oracle and others. Customers report two to five times faster application performance and achieve better than 99.999 percent uptime after virtualizing their existing storage with SANsymphony-V.

Three Real World Use Cases: 

San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital: 500 Percent Improvement in Microsoft SQL Database Performance; Better Response Times Enable More Precise Treatment and Care

Download full customer presentation:  http://www.datacore.com/San-Gorgonio-Memorial-Hospital

San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital in Banning, California has achieved a completely software-centric data center and is reaping the benefits of having virtualized its critical healthcare and database applications. Richard Trower, senior programmer and database administrator, is able to deliver non-stop business operations serving more than 500 physicians, nurses and healthcare professionals who rely upon the system's availability to fulfill San Gorgonio's mission to "provide safe, high quality, personalized healthcare services."

When San Gorgonio migrated its data center to a new facility, Trower took the opportunity to virtualize his infrastructure. He took all the physical servers offline, virtualized and restored everything on virtual machines, with all of the hospital's primary servers now running on VMware and SANsymphony-V. The storage hypervisor-powered SANs support the mission critical databases for the hospital: McKesson-Paragon, McKesson HPF and all of the virtual supporting servers. The McKesson-Paragon database runs on a high performance, RAID-10, while the others are on RAID-5s. According to Trower, with his DataCore^TM powered RAID-10, tasks like defragmentation of indexes, which previous took him an hour and a half, can be completed in about three minutes.

"I cannot stress how absolutely paramount uptime and speed are in healthcare," stated Trower. "When systems go down, our ability to deliver services to our patients is affected, which is unacceptable. By virtualizing San Gorgonio's infrastructure with VMware and DataCore, we can now assure non-stop performance and availability to the healthcare professionals who rely on IT to provide proper care and treatment for our patients."

Trower further explains that in moving to a software-defined data center environment, he was not only able to reduce the infrastructure's physical footprint by half, but he was enabled with greater freedom of choice and flexibility in future hardware investments. "SANsymphony-V is the backbone of our storage infrastructure," furthers Trower. "Virtualization has allowed us to increase efficiencies, performance and availability, which not only makes our faculty happy, but also our business office. This freedom of choice allows us to make wiser purchasing decisions and gain truly maximum ROI from our hardware investments."

Telecommunications and internet service provider, Great Plains Communications is enhancing the performance and resiliency of virtualized corporate applications using VMware and DataCore's SANsymphony-V. The company's software-defined data center is split between two facilities, located 10 miles apart. Their multi-tiered storage infrastructure incorporates cutting edge, high performance flash drives from Fusion-io, along with a variety of other SAS and SATA drive devices. Corporate applications such as Oracle, Microsoft Exchange, Lync and SQL Server are powered by VMware vSphere and user mailboxes are hosted by LinuxMagic MagicMail.

Chris Jones, information technology manager, shares that Great Plains Communications' infrastructure is 90 to 95 percent virtualized. "Our databases, applications, web servers and email servers are a critical part of our business and we rely upon them to provide services to our tens of thousands of customers," explains Jones. "Our ability to deliver on-demand internet, emails and unified communications to not only our employees, but more importantly our customers, is positively critical. In this industry, there is plenty of competition and service downtime and outages are the fast track to lost customers."

"In today's competitive service provider market," continues Jones, "response times and always-on availability are king. Having a storage environment powered by the SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor and Fusion-io has had an enormous impact on performance and our business critical applications respond at a simply blinding speed. I feel we have the fastest I/O performance available on the market and running various reports have gone from taking several minutes to mere seconds."

Thorntons Accelerates Microsoft SQL, Exchange; Reduces 10-Hour Backup Times to 3.5 Hours; Continuous Availability Keeps Businesses Moving and Drives Sales

DataCore customer Thorntons operates 167 gasoline and convenience retail stores, car washes and travel plazas in Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, and Florida. Thorntons dove into server virtualization in 2007 and has now virtualized more than 90 percent of the company's systems. Senior Network Engineer, James Haverstock, reports that Thorntons has virtualized all of their production SQL servers and data. Six production SQL VMs maintain around 150 SQL databases consuming several terabytes (TB) of storage. Their Exchange server also runs on virtual machines, all powered by the SANsymphony-V virtualized storage platform and hypervisor.

"We have many Tier-1 applications virtualized through VMware and DataCore," said Haverstock. "Of particular importance to us, were the uptime and performance of Exchange and SQL. Once we made the move to a SANsymphony-V powered storage environment, our data and system response improved dramatically. Needless to say, our user community, which depends upon the availability of these applications, was very pleased."

Bottom-line: The deployment of SANsymphony-V significantly boosted overall systems performance. SANsymphony's RAM cache vastly decreased latency for all of Thorntons' storage, resulting not only in faster application performance but also much faster backups. A monthly profit/loss report backup previously required about 10 hours to run. "We've got it down to about three and a half now," explained Haverstock. "Overall backup times, whether for VMs, SQL databases or full system, were cut nearly in half."

For more on virtualizing and running I/O intensive Tier-1 applications, go to: http://www.datacore.com/Solutions/Applications.aspx