Datacore’s Partner Waterstons Selects SANsymphony

DataCore Software announced that Gold Accredited Partner Waterstons Ltd. has selected DataCore storage virtualisation software to provide the infrastructure to power their cloud based computing service.
 
Waterstons provide cloud hosting services from a purpose-built tier three data centre in the North of England, monitored and managed around the clock from their regional operations centre in Durham.

Andrew Kershaw, Technical Director at Waterstons, explained: "Waterstons have provided specialist hosting and co-location services for a number of years. Recently we’ve seen demand for these services take off and we needed to invest in a scalable and resilient platform to meet demand for growth. The DataCore solution meets our goals for resilience, flexibility, performance and scalability and supports our goal of providing a high quality and cost effective service to clients."
 
Through this service Waterstons are offering a comprehensive range of options: Customers can take a single virtual machine from Waterstons for even just a month; or an entire network of servers interconnected with one or more private virtual networks residing on a highly available infrastructure. Waterstons offer flexible and resilient internet connectivity options for hosted infrastructure, and offer hosting and co-location of physical hardware. Flexibility is paramount – many customers use a combination of offerings, and Waterstons specialise in providing a tailored service to meet customer needs.
 
Underpinning the service is a pair of DataCore SANsymphony servers on Dell hardware operating in a synchronously mirrored configuration thereby avoiding a single point of failure scenario. Waterstons have made considerable investment in eliminating single points of failure in the infrastructure – seen as critical to providing a high quality service suitable for running hosted line of business applications. Waterstons are currently commissioning a second identical infrastructure in a geographically remote datacentre in order to provide replicated DR.
 
Andrew went on to explain: "Through our cloud based service, we are able to offer new and innovative ways of supporting clients and solving their business and technology problems. We can respond to demands extremely quickly and on a very flexible basis which often is simply not the case with traditional infrastructure."
 
One such customer utilising the service is St Ives, the UK’s leading independent print & display group. Waterstons will provide a highly available and instantly scalable platform to run St Ives’ critical business to business system ‘DNA’ on a three year Managed Services and hosting contract.
 
The challenging infrastructure requirements include high availability, business continuity and the flexibility to scale the environment quickly in response to demand. Waterstons have met these requirements by implementing a shared hosting platform using VMware cloud infrastructure hosting solutions coupled with DataCore storage virtualisation technology. In an extra phase to follow, the complete platform will be duplicated to a secondary data centre 120 miles away, with asynchronous replication used to keep the two systems in sync.

Mudasar Din, St Ives Group IT Director, said: "I have worked closely with Waterstons for over five years, and their hands-on, proactive approach has helped cement our valuable strategic partnership. Waterstons were selected for this contract not only because of the open nature of our relationship, but also because of the access we have to their technical staff and consultants. St Ives aims to continually improve the capability of its value added online solutions. The support of industry leading partners such as Waterstons is key in St Ives’ overall strategy to provide integrated production and service solutions."
 
Keith Joseph, Regional Director at Datacore commented: "DataCore’s SANsymphony in a dual configuration offers all the HA and resilience that Waterstons’ high end cloud hosting service requires. Through SANsymphony’s inbuilt thin provisioning software, Waterstons’ clients can access storage on the fly from the VMware server farm. It’s established, it’s secure, it’s flexible and brings distinct business benefits. Cloud computing at its best."