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DataCore's Virtual SAN Protects City's Critical Information Services

Kingston City Council, a leading municipality of Melbourne, has selected DataCore's virtual SAN solution. The solution, proposed and implemented by DataCore solutions partner, Lincom Solutions, gives the Kingston City Council a robust virtual storage infrastructure providing high-availability data protection and offsite disaster recovery that fully complements its existing storage systems and integrates into their VMware virtual server environment.

By selecting DataCore, Kingston City Council was able to expand on existing storage investments while having access to emerging and more cost effective storage arrays and disk technologies such as server-attached storage (SAS). The success criteria for the winning solution included price, meeting critical regulatory requirements and implementing the most flexible technology. The ultimate aim was to make disaster recovery (DR) truly the last point of reliance. To do so, Kingston City Council selected a design based on a high-availability, mirrored SAN in production replicated to a DR SAN. The effective nature of this design is that if one of the SANs fails in production, it automatically switches to the mirror and restores once the service is available again. The lag-time between the mirrors is at a minimum to ensure the most current version of data is available.

Kingston City Council administers essential government services to thousands of residents and businesses in a large and growing region. Local law enforcement, rate collection and business registration are but a few of the services governed and controlled by the Kingston City Council. More important is the management of local aged and health care services. This responsibility requires the IT environment to adhere to stringent service level agreements, with the possible consequences of a failure being dire.

"A core strategy for our IT services was to implement a robust and secure storage environment in our production data centre that we could extend to our DR site for replication. DataCore's SANmelody provided our business with the technology to build an active cluster in production ensuring we have maximum uptime, almost identical to what we have achieved by implementing VMware ESX for our server infrastructure," stated Kevin Chan, IT spokesperson for Kingston City Council. "DR was simplified by using Asynchronous Mirroring and the ability to utilize any underlying storage arrays gives us flexibility to utilize lower cost storage to build the DR Storage solution. We worked with our partner Lincom Solutions to design, proof of concept and deployed the solution, which was done seamlessly with minimal downtime to our operation."

Early in 2006, Kingston City Council realized it needed to adopt an underlying SAN infrastructure. The council had numerous servers with directly attached storage, making administration and the sharing of storage across systems difficult at best. In addition, the integration of businesses it had acquired to help support delivery of core services had further complicated the environment. When Kingston City Council put out a tender for a SAN, traditional storage hardware vendors, including HP, EMC, Hitachi and their partners, responded to the tender.

Big box solutions often consume so much of the budget that critical requirements are left unmet until the customer can afford to buy yet another expensive box to fill the gap left by the last. It becomes a vicious cycle as each wears out over time. On the other hand, DataCore fulfills the full range of storage requirements, such as storage management, high availability and disaster recovery, with hardware independent software that runs on any standard Intel or AMD based system. Thus, when systems need to be upgraded or expanded, the investment in software is preserved; only the hardware changes. The customer is free to choose physical storage solely on the basis of storage characteristics desired and its budget.


This piece is brought to you by the DM Review editorial staff.

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