DataCore Software,
a leader in software-defined storage,today announced that Pee Dee Electric
Cooperative, a
non-profit electric cooperative located in Darlington, South Carolina that
supports more than 30,000 consumers, has embraced and utilized a
software-defined storage architecture through their use of DataCore's
SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform.
"In the past, any IT budget spent on
maintaining our IT infrastructure is money that is not being used to improve
consumer satisfaction and pursue technology initiatives that allow us to evolve
our own operations," said Robbie Howle, IT manager at Pee Dee Electric
Cooperative. "By leveraging DataCore, this has changed. Since virtualizing our
storage infrastructure, we've not only seen massive increases in performance and
reliability, but have also been able to reallocate operational and capital
expenditures to other important projects that will allow us to operate more
efficiently. That way, we are now leveraging and powering existing
infrastructure - via DataCore - to improve our overall customer
experience."
When Pee Dee Electric began the
process of virtualizing their servers and desktops, DataCore partner, HillSouth
suggested that the company explore the benefits of virtualized storage. The
original virtualization project required a storage area network (SAN) that could
better meet performance and capacity needs as each server and desktop was
virtualized.
Ultimately, the company chose
DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform for its feature set,
but also found that the ease of deployment made the solution highly attractive.
Initial benchmark testing confirmed that the virtualized infrastructure proposed
by HillSouth would achieve better IOPs and more throughput than EMC could
deliver with a comparable system.
Pee Dee Electric's IT environment
now consists of two, synchronously mirrored SANsymphony-V storage servers as
well as a third replicated node for disaster recovery located offsite. The
system supports more than 200 virtualized servers and desktops and significantly
erased performance or latency issues. The virtualized systems include a maps
database, all of the organization's document imaging, file storage and two web
servers dedicated to handling consumer traffic. The company's most critical
virtualized application is a meter data management solution which stores every
consumer's meter data - in real-time - and allows each household to track daily
electricity usage and generate usage "forecasts" based on past behavior. Their
outage management system is also virtualized, providing alerts and updates,
while managing the information of members coping with power
outages.
"Even during the initial stages of
this deployment, it became very clear to Pee Dee Electric that the benefits of
software-defined storage made just as much sense as virtualizing servers and
desktops," said Paul Murphy, vice president of worldwide marketing for DataCore.
"They were able to get twice the amount of storage along with improved
performance for the cost of one storage hardware array from EMC, while meeting
or exceeding all of their availability and performance goals set at the
beginning of the project."
SANsymphony-V's hardware
independence enabled the company to reduce costs by virtualizing and therefore
extending the life of their existing storage devices. This provided them with
greater flexibility to make hardware purchasing decisions that align with
business strategies and needs. Pee Dee Electric previously relied on an aging
EMC hardware array, but as the company's needs evolved from simply serving as a
local file storage system and archive, the system proved to be much too slow. As
a result of the organization's server virtualization initiative, many tier-1,
mission-critical databases and applications now demanded higher performance from
their storage infrastructure in order to avoid delays in processing
time.
A complete case study discussing the
DataCore deployment at Pee Dee Electric Cooperative is available here:
http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/Pee-Dee-Electric-Cooperative.aspx.