China Geological Survey Selects DataCore Multi-Site DR Supplied by Digital China

DataCore Software announced that China Geological Survey (CGS) has deployed a disaster recovery and high-availability storage virtualization solution from DataCore to eliminate costly, storage related downtime and to ensure data availability.

A big advantage for DataCore in terms of its selection and deployment at CGS is that it is an open storage infrastructure platform that offers advanced functions – storage performance acceleration, fast disk to disk backups, thin provisioning, automatic fail-over data protection and reliable remote site disaster recovery – all in a practical, easily deployable software package.
 
“Before finally selecting DataCore Software, China Geological Survey comprehensively compared offerings from IBM, EMC, Symantec and FalconStor,” states Mr. Lang, Chief IT officer, China Geological Survey. “DataCore Software solutions were the best choice in terms of reliability, scalability, support and performance. Therefore, we have decided to migrate our open server storage to the DataCore Software storage virtualization platform.”
 
DataCore reduces downtime, eases management,
and makes backups and remote site recovery reliable
With 26 branches throughout the country, CGS heavily relies on networking and storage IT infrastructure to accomplish data processing jobs. In order to keep up with ongoing business demands, CGS purchased disk arrays from different vendors during the past decades. Managing these numerous storage devices for diverse applications became a very bad headache. The inefficiency of increasing storage capacity by adding servers or direct attached storage devices manifested itself in several ways. For example, storage attached to a server or network segment could not be transparently shared across the organization – making it difficult to control and manage storage utilization rates.
 
In addition, the higher costs of everything, from backup – to creating a comprehensive disaster recovery solution for the storage scattered across the organization’s open systems, made consolidation to a virtualization model attractive. Moreover, according to Assistant General Manager of IT planning Jun Xu, the high cost and impact of handling escalating backups within smaller backup window times was also a major concern.
 
DataCore Disaster Recovery plus high availability
(thin provisioning, snapshots,
synchronous and asynchronous replication)
The main site of China Geological Survey contains a pair of SANsymphony systems, which deliver a true high-availability solution. In addition, eight branch locations (two in Beijing and six located outside of Beijing city) have DataCore SANmelody running at each site. “DataCore optimizes existing storage and network investments and transforms them into business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that are cost effective and simple to use,” notes Peter Thompson, Vice President and Managing Director of Asia Pacific, DataCore Software. “Because DataCore provides full-featured, high availability SAN software and disaster recovery solutions, we were able to prove to China Geological Survey that only with DataCore could it realize simple, fail-safe SAN data protection through DataCore’s unique, automatic failover and failback. The bottom-line at China Geological Survey is that DataCore’s storage virtualization software has made it possible to eliminate costly downtime without paying a premium.”
 
Solution Highlights at China Geological Survey
DataCore’s storage virtualization solutions deliver a more practical HA solution for China Geological Survey’s shared storage requirements. They abstract CGS’s storage into idealized, virtual disks akin to virtual machines. The software pools and mirrors disk blocks across available devices despite differences in make and model.

Additional highlights include:

• Making business continuity and disaster recovery practical for general IT consolidation
• Eliminating storage-related disruptions due to inevitable maintenance, reconfiguration, upgrades, expansion and failures
• Speeding up application performance by removing disk I/O bottlenecks
• Maximizing use of available disk capacity
• Centralizing and automating storage

 

“DataCore Software consistently provides excellent technical consultations. Their China team is great, a group of true IT professionals that I would refer to any other company,” concludes Mr. Lang.