Isco Industries Utilizes DataCore Software

DataCore
Software Corporation announced that ISCO Industries, LLC, a polyethylene pipe
distributor, has implemented DataCore’s software SANsymphony-V.

The company is running nearly fully virtual after implementing DataCore and
VMware to virtualize the majority of its desktops, servers and storage
infrastructure. Deployed in combination with Xiotech storage, DataCore’s
SANsymphony-V added flexibility and productivity and it addressed the persistent performance problems as well as the
capacity management issues that ISCO Industries faced with its previously
existing SAN.

"Prior to implementing SANsymphony-V, the performance
and latency issues we faced were hurting our efficiency in many different
areas," stated Kim Byram, director of business and information systems at
ISCO Industries. "Now, with DataCore and Xiotech running in tandem, we
have seen our latency issues completely disappear. Plus our speed of backups
and response time in generating reports has been cut drastically. More
efficiency means more systems uptime and no more systems slowdown because you
no longer have processes and backups running during somebody’s working hours."

Four years ago, ISCO deployed a SAN from Compellent
(acquired by Dell) to cope with the storage growth the company was experiencing
as it virtualized its entire network. However, ISCO kept hitting a proverbial
performance ‘wall’ and system administrators would have to scramble
to add storage space because the Compellent SAN was falsely reporting that it
had maxed-out its capacity.

When DataCore was deployed on Xiotech, the IT team migrated
data over to the new system, which was thin-provisioned through DataCore
storage virtualization software. "We went from nine or ten terabytes of
used space down to six terabytes of available space just by doing the
migration," notes T.J. Duncan, system administrator at ISCO. "In
terms of capacity management and higher utilization rates, we have seen
enormous benefits and now we have means of recovering disk space without having
to create new volumes all the time."

Today, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V serves as ISCO’s de facto
SAN, and is responsible for managing and serving storage across the entire
infrastructure. This enables the company to get the most out of its
infrastructure with its software-based storage virtualization approach.
"With our existing SAN, things were coming to a creeping halt on our
network," explained Byram. "And when we moved everything over to the
very reliable Xiotech platform, we learned that we actually had a lot less data
than what was being reported by our previous SAN."

Fast Performance
"Our performance has gone through the roof,"
continued Duncan.
"It was not unusual to see 10, 15, or 20 milliseconds of latency on a read
prior to DataCore and Xiotech. And that was on volumes that were dedicated to
Tier 1 storage only. Now it is one or two milliseconds, tops, on most of our
transactions. Moreover, reports from the ERP system are literally blazing
through Ð they hardly take any time at all compared to what we were used
to."

With DataCore’s caching software and the Xiotech
running in tandem, system administrators have seen more than a 35 percent
increase in speed and responsiveness from the company’s terminal and mail
servers. Now that the DataCore-Xiotech solution now manages 13 terabytes of
total data, ISCO started seeing the following benefits:

• Cost containment –
  DataCore has saved ISCO at least $100,000 because they were able to re-purpose
  six existing servers supporting VMware ESX and use them to create the DataCore
  disaster recovery SAN server, as well as ESX servers for disaster recovery, and
  the DataCore VDI server.
• Risk reduction –
  For the first time, the UNIX system which is the company’s ‘bread and
  butter’, is now redundant. The entire system and all of the data is
  synchronized in real-time to the disaster recovery site, where a second UNIX
  server is maintained. Before, if ISCO lost its data, it would have taken the
  company 16-24 hours to get the main accounting and sales system back up and
  running. Now, the company can do this in minutes.
• Improved
  productivity – Productivity improvements are tied to the better responsiveness
  of the terminal servers and virtual desktops being supported. All servers have
  had 10-20 percent improvement in performance just by putting in the
  SANsymphony-V and Xiotech solution.

VDI, Servers, and Storage:
End-to-End Virtualization Reduces
Costs and Risks
According to ISCO, the company is nearly fully virtualized.
It uses terminal servers as well as a VDI,
depending on the users and their needs. VMware vSphere is used both for servers
and desktops. Four VMware hosts run VMware ESX 4.1 at the production data
center. There are 32 VMs running from that. The VMs comprise servers dealing
with ISCO’s phone system, terminal servers, a web monitoring server (NIMBUS),
and file sharing servers.

DataCore storage virtualization software runs both on both
the production SAN and the disaster recovery SAN. Asynchronous replication is
used to replicate UNIX system data remotely, and the company plans to embrace
synchronous replication in the near future for added business continuity. SANsymphony-V is deployed on another server to
support the VDI environment. VDI consists of two hosts and 20 VMs. Ten virtual
desktops are supported as well as 8 terminal servers in a load-balanced pool.
Between 15 and 18 people per server are using VDI at any given point in time.

DataCore Software reseller partner The Mirazon Group is
responsible for the implementation at ISCO Industries. The Mirazon Group serves
as a trusted IT advisor to its client base. The firm’s expertise spans both IT
consulting and solutions integration. Mirazon puts virtualization at the heart
of every deployment it undertakes.