CompuTech City Selects DataCore

DataCore Software Corporation announced
that CompuTech City, a provider of
healthcare IT solutions, has selected the DataCore SANsymphony-V storage
hypervisor to manage its virtualized data storage capabilities without the need
for additional hardware.

"Our clients generate a
lot of data and have very sophisticated requirements for their storage and
infrastructure needs," said Dave Patel, COO at
CompuTech City. "The storage
hypervisor enables us to offer scalable, flexible and cost efficient options
that can adapt to our clients’ ever changing business needs. This allows us to
maximize our revenue streams since we can extend the benefits of own dynamic
infrastructure out to meet the needs of our clients."

Serving over 500 medical practices throughout Florida, CompuTech
City provides IT infrastructure management services with a primary focus on
healthcare information technology. Healthcare IT makes extraordinary demands on
a computing infrastructure. In addition to providing the reliability and
availability doctors and patients demand, healthcare systems must comply with
the stringent privacy requirements of the HIPAA.

CompuTech City was an early adopter of storage virtualization
technology. When the company expanded its services to include a SaaS Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solution, they
found that their existing storage solution was not up to the challenge. The
company’s most critical requirement was HA, something the previous solution did
not consistently offer.

"We had a lot of feature
and support issues with our previous storage virtualization solution,"
Patel said. "And it was not very
scalable. We were eager to get rid of it."

The company had already built a server virtualization infrastructure, so
SANsymphony-V’s ability to create a storage virtualization environment from
existing equipment and storage devices made it a "no-brainer" according to Patel.

Furthermore, DataCore’s pass-through functionality made migration painless by sparing CompuTech’s IT team from having to re-copy TB
worth of data.

"The non-disruptive migration that
DataCore’s pass-through feature gave us was a godsend," said Patel.
"We were back up and running with a
very, very limited amount of downtime."

CompuTech City now relies on DataCore as the cornerstone of its SaaS
healthcare IT model. The company’s EMR solution, with DataCore at the heart of
the virtualized environment, currently supports 800 users. At least 100 doctors
connect to the system on a daily basis in order to schedule their patients, to
review and update their medical records, as well as to bill them.

Onsite synchronous mirroring between Computech City’s DataCore
servers provide the HA and business continuity demanded by HIT customers. In
addition to HA, the system delivers improved performance, storage hardware
flexibility, and scalability through a combination of Dell PowerVault MD 1000s
and MD 3000s, comprising sixty disks in total – thirty on one side and thirty
on the other. They also have a mix of SATA drives.

"The great thing is that
with DataCore running we don’t have to wait for a weekend to make system
changes," said Patel. "We
simply shut one side down and the redundant system takes over seamlessly
without any interruption to service – all during business hours."

DataCore’s Level-1 caching has improved the performance
of CTC’s virtualized environment, according to Patel, who added that he now
sees storage I/O speeds of 270-300 Mbps – double what the company got before –
a difference he described as "astronomical."

Patel also lauded the flexibility and scalability of SANsymphony-V:
"DataCore has given us enormous
flexibility in terms of hardware independence," he said. "For us, it has been fantastic. I can throw
any disks under the system without any degradation in performance or
availability, so we can use all the disk drives we have and choose the best
storage hardware deals for expansion."

Patel said that the simplicity and intuitive design of the
SANsymphony-V management console were important reasons why CompuTech City
wanted to bring the benefits of storage virtualization to its infrastructure
and cloud computing clients as a VAR.

"We were fascinated by what DataCore
brought to us as a customer and quickly realized that its capabilities are
vital to the vertical market we serve – even if the concept of a highly
available SAN might be new to our customers," said Patel. "The benefits of software-based storage
virtualization are just too numerous for us not to bring DataCore SANsymphony-V
into our established client base and into new accounts as we move forward."

To read the full case study