Miami Law Firm Achieves HA With DataCore

DataCore Software
Corporation announced that longtime customer, Rennert Vogel Mandler &
Rodriguez, P.A. (Rennert Vogel), has deployed the last version of its
SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor.

The Miami-based business law firm enlisted DataCore’s technology to achieve HA
in its virtual environment, allowing for non-stop business operations and staff productivity, while improving network performance and storage
capacity management.

"We often come into
contact with people from larger law firms that have bleeding-edge systems and
they are envious of our virtual infrastructure," said Mike Ferguson,
IT director for Rennert Vogel. "They
learn about our HA, the centralized management, performance – even across Layer
2 transport – and are amazed at the benefits the SANsymphony-V storage
hypervisor offers. Add to this savings from not having to refresh hardware and
it’s clear we made the right choice with DataCore."

The DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor is a portable,
centrally-managed software suite capable of enhancing the combined value of
multiple disk storage systems, including the many purpose-built storage
appliances and SSDs type devices arriving to the market daily. The storage
hypervisor supplements the individual capabilities of specialized equipment
with a broad range of device-independent, integrated services. It executes on physical and virtual servers or can co-reside with server
hypervisors. Other features include ‘Quick serve’
storage provisioning, automated tiering across SSDs, disk devices and different
cloud storage providers and CDP.

Rennert Vogel’s relationship with DataCore began in early 2008 with
a foray into storage virtualization that entailed the onsite deployment of a
SANmelody storage hypervisor (the precursor to the SANsymphony-V storage
hypervisor). Rennert Vogel acquired another storage
hypervisor from DataCore and set up a standalone node in what is known as a ‘cage’
at Host.net, a co-location, managed services and cloud services provider in
nearby Boca Raton. An ensuing phase moved almost all of Rennert Vogel’s
production environment servers to the virtualized infrastructure at Host.net.

Today, Rennert Vogel has two DataCore SANsymphony-V storage
hypervisors running as synchronously mirrored copies in the same cage, meeting
a prime objective of data redundancy. These ‘front’ two storage arrays from
Promise Technology, with four Dell PowerEdge R610 servers located on the iSCSI
SAN fabric. VMware vCenter runs within that setup. Three VMware ESX hosts are
on the Dell servers, connected to the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisors,
running a mix of SAS and slower SATA drives. All the
virtual disk capacity for the firm’s IT needs is carved out and served from the
virtual infrastructure as an HA configuration. The system supports over 25 virtual
machines and Rennert Vogel is connected via a 100 MB dedicated internet access
(DIA) line.

Rennert Vogel has virtualized all the systems one would associate
with a dynamic, knowledge-based enterprise, including the accounting system,
case management system, file servers, a Citrix server for remote access, a fax
server, as well as two Linux servers. A Microsoft Exchange server will also
soon go from physical to virtual, protected by the HA configuration powered by
SANsymphony-V. The virtualized databases and applications are literally the
lifeblood of the firm, with the file servers supporting the Corporate, Tax,
Real Estate and Litigation departments.

Rennert Vogel’s virtualized infrastructure also ensures the
availability of multi-media files and depositions that represent hours of
transcribed audio files. Moreover, the mandate at the firm is to store nearly
everything – files, emails and all attachments. This great volume of documents
has also been addressed through virtualization; stored and made readily
available with a capacity that now supports 8TB of data.
Additionally, Florida’s hurricane season used to be cause for real trepidation
because if the building operator needed to close the building, the entire firm
was required to leave the premises. Now, work no longer has to grind to a halt;
employees can work remotely and Rennert Vogel is prepared for disaster with two
copies of its data and HA.

Equally important, the availability ‘hiccups’ Rennert Vogel had
encountered prior to embracing storage virtualization – relying on lone servers
that routinely failed to work – have gone away. Moreover, the virtualized
environment has accelerated performance. The centralized management functions
of both VMware (through vCenter) and SANsymphony-V have made management easy. Server consolidation has freed up hardware for reuse, saving money,
and because underlying disk and server hardware is interchangeable with the
storage hypervisor software, Rennert Vogel can swap out any device at any time
for added investment protection.

"The gains we have
achieved by deploying DataCore technology to virtualize storage resources
include increased reliability, performance, and peace-of-mind for all of us,"
added Ferguson. "We benefit from
centralized management, from being able to consolidate servers, less refresh of
hardware and more. Using SANsymphony-V for storage virtualization has improved
the utilization of the firm’s existing hardware one-hundred times over, while
future-proofing us for easy expansion down the road."