Marine Corps Community Services Chooses DataCore

DataCore Software announced that Marine Corps Community Services (MCCS) has purchased, deployed and benefited from the productivity and cost savings achieved from using DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualization software.

SANmelody now forms the foundation for the IT department’s consolidation and modernization approach. SANmelody virtualizes, safeguards, manages, and thin provisions storage for MCCS, while optimizing disk storage utilization, simplifying administration and boosting overall performance. “SANmelody has revolutionized and simplified the way we can approach how we deploy applications,” said Robert Wayt, Network Manager, MCCS Okinawa. “It’s faster, easier and efficient. We no longer have a server with all the internal disk space ‘hard-wired’ and solely dedicated to itself. We can network and fully use the storage that we purchased and avoid waste. Now we can share resources through efficient thin-provisioned volumes to other servers that are in need of disk space. SANmelody’s virtual approach has revolutionized the way we work.”
 
MCCS works with the Marine Corps in Okinawa and provides shops, restaurants and recreation activities for the Marines and service members in Okinawa. Anything to do with recreation as well as retail and services, including bowling centers, restaurants and athletics facilities, falls under the remit of MCCS. In short, MCCS operates any non-official duty type of activities, or recreation ‘services’ for the Marine Corps. There are twenty people that make up the IT team with MCCS Okinawa. The group supports all of MCCS Okinawa’s IT needs. This includes enterprise services such as a SQL database, email services, email archive storage, file services, etc. – IT services that rely upon a whole gamut of data storage requirements.
 
SANmelody: Virtual SAN Storage Server Software
“I’ve got to tell you, SANmelody has absolutely changed for the better the way we approach and manage storage,” commented Wayt. “I can now sleep at night and the time that I spent dealing with the storage I now use for something else. We are really happy with the purchase.” He continued, “Up until earlier this year, we had the classic silos of individually hard-wired servers. Each server could only control and use its own little storage area, the internal disks that were directly attached. We were running out of space as our requirements grew. We were operating on less and less space and had no flexibility to port a server that did not have any space left to one that had an excess of storage space available.”
 
Because a ‘day-in-the-life’ before SANmelody was one where servers were constrained in terms of their storage capacity by their own internal drives, the IT team at MCCS Okinawa started looking for storage area network (SAN) solutions and came across DataCore’s SANmelody. SANmelody was instantly appealing because it offered enterprise-class functionality and performance and at an affordable price point. “We did look at competitors to SANmelody as well,” explained Wayt. “However, on the final analysis, it became obvious that SANmelody met our needs technically and came at a price that we could afford.”
 
Once they assessed their data storage problem, it was clear to the IT team at MCCS that they had acute disk capacity issues and that they needed to implement something quickly. As soon as the SANmelody purchase went through the government procurement process, Wayt and his team implemented the virtual SAN right away. Wayt admits that they are just getting started with virtualization and that SANmelody was the first step. From a server application service perspective, MCCS Okinawa had not done any virtualization until SANmelody came along. However, it was clear to the team at MCCS Okinawa that any virtualization needed to start with a storage solution. According to Wayt, “You have to tie it to something on the back-end,” he said. It is only now, post-SANmelody that Wayt and his team have now started dabbling with VMware virtualization on the front-end.
 
“Rob and his team didn’t approach their issues in the typical fashion of simply throwing more disks and hardware at the problem,” said Peter Thompson, Vice President of Asia Pacific, DataCore Software. “They were smart to think long term and recognized the need for a storage infrastructure that was hardware independent and could live beyond the life of individual disk hardware systems. Anything else that they add, such as a virtualized server environment, benefits greatly since the underlying storage is equally as flexible and dynamic, and now MCCS is reaping the rewards of such forethought.”
 
MCCS Okinawa is now managing 5 TBs of data with SANmelody. This comprises the enterprise database (SQL server), the email database, the email archive database, as well as file services and sharing along with some network-based services. In the short term, the IT team states that they will have more systems coming online soon – managed by the virtual SAN. Specifically, MCCS Okinawa plans to do a full deployment of Sharepoint. Without SANmelody, the IT team notes that a deployment of this kind would take far longer.
 
The IT team at MCCS summarizes SANmelody’s impact as enabling them to be flexible in the deployment of their systems as well as empowering their enterprise by providing virtualization on the front-end, while at the same time providing resource sharing on the back-end. “MCCS Okinawa has been up and running on SANmelody now for a good six months and we are looking to do some expansion,” noted Wayt. “The SANmelody virtual SAN has been extremely successful. It has definitely helped us in terms of system reliability and uptime as well as our ability to recover from failovers. Moreover, things have been very stable. We really like the SANmelody solution and we will be doing the expansion prior to the fourth quarter of this year.”