DataCore and Waterstons create virtualisation melody

Silver accredited DataCore reseller installs SANmelody for retail display equipment firm

SANmelody has been installed as the firm’s new SAN virtual infrastructure

Collaborating with Silver partner Waterstons, virtualisation vendor DataCore Software has provided the Radford HMY Group with a SANmelody.

Building upon the retail display equipment supplier’s existing VMware ESX virtualisation environment, the SANmelody has been installed as the firm’s new storage area network (SAN) virtual infrastructure.

Keith Joseph, regional manager at DataCore Software, said: “Waterstons and Radford HMY Group wanted to achieve highest degrees of resilience but did not want to incur heavy set-up or annual support costs.

“The combination of two commodity servers running cost-effective SANmelody software provides this re-assurance and enterprise functionality such as thin provisioning, snapshoting, and increase in performance to boot.”

By connecting the two storage servers over isolated Gigabit Ethernet links, all disk write I/Os are replicated instantly.

In this configuration an entire storage server on the SAN can fail without impact to the attached Exchange mailstore or ESX hosts.

Mark McDonald, IT Manager at the Radford HMY Group, said: “Together with Waterstons we have embarked on implementing a new Virtual Infrastructure that guarantees the highest level of fault tolerance and availability.

“To do this, we have used a combination of two IBM servers running DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualisation software to provide synchronously mirrored high availability architecture.”