Datashare Solutions Partner Shares DataCore Customer Experiences in UK

DataCore Software Corporation and Datashare Solutions Ltd, (Shift F7 Group) a DataCore Silver partner, are noticing the momentum in the UK towards adoption of SDS solutions from hardware-based alternatives, to achieve business objectives while enhancing the agility and the productivity of their customers’ storage infrastructure.

So much so, Datashare Solutions have compiled a testimonial briefing pack outlining buying criteria and customer adoption reasons. Regardless of vertical market, reasons for ratification of SDS are repeatedly cited as storage management simplification; application performance enablement; BC and future scalable flexibility.

Shift F7 Ltd‘s marketing manager, Sue Beckwith, explains more: “It’s been refreshing to compile this testimonial document as it really brings the ‘software defined’ experience to life. SDS has been much hyped of late, but as you can see from our customer endorsements, we have been successfully implementing DataCore’s software abstraction layer across any storage and on any hypervisor for many years now. It truly and flexibly stands the test of time.“

DataCore’s NE territory director, Glenn Bullingham, agrees: “This is a great document to share with anyone dealing with storage issues and it spans multiple industries and vertical markets. In my mind, the quote from Paynes Hicks Beech stating fantastic ROI across 6 years is perhaps the most notable, but all cite application performance and flexibility as key attainments gained through the provision of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V platform.“

Within estimonial document, the following customer experiences were noted:

Performance Improvements of Critical Apps
When UK Housing Associations’, A2Dominion Housing Group Ltd, had a requirement to increase the performance of their core housing application and improve the recovery capabilities for the application in the event of a disaster, they engaged with Datashare Solutions for a solution. Their existing SAN was not able to deal with the high I/Os from replication and suffered a significant number of cache misses with an adverse effect on the performance of their critical applications for the users.

The existing hardware-based SAN seemingly offered enough spindles for adequate disk performance, good capacity and RAID resiliency but was unable to cope with the load placed on it by the users. Installing SANsymphony software-based storage, enabled the organisation to increase their cache hits; increase server RAM and add a layer of high performance SSD. The solution also enabled near synchronous replication between A2Dominion’s primary and backup data centres, reducing their RTO.

“There has been a marked improvement in application performance since the implementation – we were very impressed with the fact that we could improve performance and our recovery objectives with DataCore,” said Mark Prosser, head of service delivery, A2 Dominion.

BC Assured
Dermalogica, a professional UK skin care organisation, required assurances that their critical business systems and corporate communication platform was both fault tolerant and offered increased resiliency. Datashare Solutions (Shift F7 Group) introduced SANsymphony platform, which together with Nexsan‘s storage and the fault resilient features of the VMware hypervisor, allows Dermalogica to enjoy consistent system and storage redundancy throughout the entire network.

“Ensuring that our business systems would not be affected whatever the circumstances was a key consideration. Datashare Solutions provided us with a solution from DataCore and Nexsan that guarantees just that,” said Alan Norman, IT manager UK, Dermalogica.

Regent’s University needed a cost effective, resilient, replication solution for NetApp filer and auto tiering for VDI workload balancing.

The University had invested heavily and commissioned two data centres within their campus and were looking for a solution that would increase resiliency through replication between different storage vendors. They also required extra storage capacity for VDI and other solutions they were deploying. Datashare Solutions installed a DataCore mirrored system backed by Nexsan storage to replicate data resident on their existing NetApp Filer. This was achieved, maintaining levels of resiliency and much more cost effectively in comparison to an end-to-end NetApp solution. Datashare Solutions also deployed a VDI solution across the two data centres using application acceleration within the DataCore servers to achieve automated data tiering.

“The DataCore solution with Nexsan storage allowed us to increase flexibility on existing infrastructure and benefit fully from the investment we had already made in our data centres and VDI solution,” commented Carlos Nogueira, head of ITS, Regents University.

Needed DR and Zero Downtime of Critical Apps
Synonymous with quality and one of the UK’s top legal practices based in Lincoln’s Inn, Payne Hicks Beach (PHB) required a system to support the processing of critical applications along with fault tolerant split clustering between two of their offices. Today, the Firm is able to withstand the failure of an entire building with a synchronous mirror of data and systems created between their locations utilising DataCore and VMware’s VSphere 4.x. Applications are accessed and available 24 x 7, with no downtime tolerated for upgrades.

“The ROI has been fantastic with DataCore. It has run to the point where performance has never been an issue and without any unplanned downtime for more than 6 years,” said Michael Leedham, IT manager, PHB.