Statewide Title Chooses DataCore SANmelody

DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced that its SANmelody software has been selected and deployed at Statewide Title Company, Inc., based in Indianapolis.

The main reason for embracing storage virtualization with DataCore was to put a SAN in place before consolidating their servers under Citrix XenServer. SANmelody now pools and virtualizes the back-end storage for the company’s dual-node XenServer configuration. Statewide Title is a subsidiary of Feiwell Hannoy – a law firm that specializes in bankruptcy, default and foreclosure processing. Statewide Title does the title processing for home sales associated with these defaulted accounts.
 
“The selection of DataCore was designed to pave the way for the Citrix XenServer implementation that we are now in the process of deploying,” explained George Overstreet, systems administrator, Statewide Title, Company, Inc. “For purposes of ease of management, efficiencies and centralizing storage, we went with SANmelody.”
 
Meeting Business Objectives:
Consolidate and Centralize Existing Resources
Statewide’s virtualization initiative avoids major hardware acquisitions by using virtualization software from DataCore and Citrix to leverage existing systems. They started with a handful of isolated servers that were running out of internal disk space.
 
“Our objective was simple. Update the hardware and maximize what we have – so that we did not just plunk down a lot of money for new hardware,” explained Overstreet. “Statewide’s parent company had just gone through a major server virtualization project so we knew just what could be achieved as far as consolidation and maximizing hardware resources. The key for us was achieving this virtualization project within an environment that is highly available to minimize downtime and outages – all of those goals led us to the need for a SAN.”
 
DataCore SANmelody was also selected to enable Statewide Title to do reliable disk-to-disk backups, since its NAS device had been giving the firm inconsistent results. “We knew we needed something more reliable than the NAS device that was in place,” continued Overstreet. “What we found was that DataCore was pivotal in enabling us to more easily do back-ups and for automating the routine, cumbersome and labor-intensive tasks associated with storage management.”
 
High Availability: A Key Requirement
Knowing they were going with XenServer for server virtualization, Statewide Title turned to DataCore partner ESI Technology Advisors to deliver a highly available virtualization environment. They advised Statewide that there was no way to realize their high-availability objectives without having shared storage.
 
“DataCore is the perfect complement to server virtualization with XenServer. They are hardware independent, portable – and above all, ‘open’ solutions,” said Benjamin Crill, partner, ESI Technology Advisors. “Both DataCore and XenServer are feature rich and value-packed. DataCore’s storage virtualization solutions make storage management easy. They enable customers to maximize resources and lower costs, while delivering high availability, better utilization as well as enhanced performance and productivity.”
 
DataCore Offers Unmatched Flexibility and Disaster Recovery
For system administrator George Overstreet, the choice was clear. “With DataCore, you just have greater flexibility,” he said. “It allows you to upgrade a whole lot easier. You are not constrained by the hardware – in fact you can grow your system however you want. And on top of this, with DataCore we can also meet all of our disaster recovery (DR) requirements as well – as far as off-site replication or even just fault-tolerance at a local level.”