Mid-America Transplant Services Chooses DataCore

DataCore Software Corporation, announced that Mid-America Transplant Services (MTS) has achieved a new level of HA for continuous operations and realized business benefits from implementing DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform.

SANsymphony-V allows MTS to create a software architecture enabling the organization to address and overcome the storage and BC challenges of server virtualization with a robust, software-defined solution.

“You need HA not only to keep end user applications up and running, but also to make sure the vSphere infrastructure is continuously in operation,” said Phil Hawkes, director of information systems, Mid-America Transplant Services. “DataCore’s storage virtualization platform made the deployment of server hypervisors a practical reality for our organization.”

Having already chosen VMware for server virtualization, MTS was aware of the storage challenge they would be facing, but knew that VMware includes a number of features designed to assure that the virtual servers would not go down. However, storage remains the biggest challenge to overcome when organizations embrace server virtualization.

“The storage challenge is building an architecture that is flexible and allows you to incorporate the right equipment on the backend to make sure your users have the availability they need,” notes Hawkes.

MTS’s IT team concluded that a pure software-based approach to storage virtualization best fit their business needs and is complementary to server virtualization. The Mirazon Group, LLC, a DataCore Premier Partner, implemented the solution for MTS.

“The combination of DataCore and VMware made it easy to implement a true software-defined data center in which MTS was able to gain the productivity benefits of having all their computing and storage resources fully virtualized and highly available to support continuous operations,” said Craig Stein, solutions architect, Mirazon.

A software-defined storage solution enables organizations to more effectively reap the benefits that server virtualization affords. MTS found the value that SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software brought to its IT infrastructure was, more than anything else, HA and hardware independence.

“You put all of your eggs in one basket once you virtualize everything,” states Hawkes. “Our storage challenge was to make sure we had something extremely robust on the backend that we knew we could rely on.”

Beyond the uptime assured by the HA, SANsymphony-V’s other features, such as automated storage tiering, adaptive high-speed caching and rapid provisioning, allow organizations of all sizes to take advantage of enterprise storage virtualization to speed up critical business applications and meet the dynamic demands of virtual data centers powered by hardware agnostic and flexible, software-defined storage.

With regards to the overall deployment at Mid-America Transplant Services, Barry Martin, CTO at Mirazon, concludes: “MTS has embraced ‘software-defined storage’ as an essential element of its software-defined data center. Virtual storage infrastructures make sense as the foundation for scalable, elastic and efficient computing. For companies embarking upon server virtualization initiatives, MTS is a real-world testament that it is crucial to have a robust, software-defined SAN solution on the backend.”

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