DataCore Software, the leader in Parallel-Powered Software, Application-Adaptive Data Infrastructure and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solutions, today announced that Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota has deployed DataCore SANsymphony software to deliver agile data infrastructure that is Always-On - enabling the organization to better realize its objective of responding to Minnesota's changing needs by being wholly committed to making life better for its citizens.

"DataCore provides us with all of the features we need to solve the problems with our current storage while still being able to use our existing storage hardware, which is a vitally important benefit for us," explained Jeff Rogers, system administrator, Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota. "Additionally, DataCore has helped our team seamlessly manage storage within the organization's Virtual Machine (VM) infrastructure."

Like most non-profit organizations, Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota does not have the budget to buy a lot of high-end storage with all the necessary features the organization requires. The organization decided to purchase DataCore for a variety of reasons, including its robustness in managing storage and its performance and the fact that any brand of storage hardware can be used, enabling Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota to save a substantial amount of money. Additionally, they found that the UI is very easy to use, and has great reporting tools.

The storage and broader data infrastructure issues facing Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota prior to DataCore were numerous - most notable was the problem of failover and high availability. The prior storage infrastructure was not able to seamlessly failover without trouble from the VM, which ultimately caused a lot of corrupted VMs. Now with DataCore, fail over to other storage nodes in the cluster is simple.

Another issue the organization faced before deploying DataCore's Software-Defined Storage platform was that when an administrator allocated storage to a VM, it would take all the allocated space from the SAN. However by using DataCore SANsymphony, Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota is able to overcommit storage because DataCore keeps real-time statistics on how much 'actual' storage is being used by its VMs. Additionally, having the real-time statistics that SANsymphony provides via its inherent reporting tools helps the organization troubleshoot VMs that may be using too much I/O. Before deploying SANsymphony, if a VM caused any I/O issues, it was very hard to track it down - even by using third-party tools. DataCore's real-time reporting statistics now help Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota track down the troubled VM very quickly.

Rogers further added that when he and his team tested DataCore in their lab by running 'hardcore I/O tests against it', that "DataCore out-performed other products by at least five times more IOPS."

Reseller Velocity Tech Solutions Joins the DataCore Revolution and Quickly Solves the Data Infrastructure Needs for Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota
Velocity Tech Solutions is one of the more recent value-added reseller (VAR) partners that has joined with DataCore to revolutionize data infrastructure to help its client base.

"Velocity Tech Solutions sees DataCore as a springboard to delivering best-of-breed storage solutions and empowering our customers," stated Kay Winchell, president, Velocity Tech Solutions. "This has been the case at Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota. It does not matter to DataCore what hardware is running, and what is even better - the hardware does not have to be brand new. DataCore helps to position our firm in the storage space, which was exactly what we wanted in becoming a DataCore VAR."

Another Believer in the DataCore "Difference"
According to Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota's Jeff Rogers, "My favorite feature of DataCore is the auto tiering. I can just assign the storage to different tiers, and over time, DataCore calculates the hot vs. cold data, and moves them to the appropriate disks. With the UI you can see the hot and cold blocks of storage in real-time. This helped me to show management that about 90% of our data is cold, so we can get away from buying SSDs and start buying less expensive disks. We have SQL, Exchange, VDI, and file servers all running on the same DataCore nodes, which was not possible with our other storage hardware."

See the DataCore News Blog for an article concerning Velocity Tech Solutions and Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota.