Virtualisation coming in like a storm – in Florida

Florida-based users include The John S and James L Knight Foundation, All Medical Personnel, Harbor Federal Savings Bank, Embraer, Mercy Hospital, Homebuilders Financial Network, Gables Engineering and local universities and colleges – right across the spectrum of commerce, industry and education. DataCore says out that after last year’s hurricane season, local reseller Fairway Consulting found itself installing virtualisation technology for a number of companies that had found out the hard way the importance of good disaster recovery procedures and systems. One user says it all; the Knight Foundation, suffered an outage as a result of Hurricane Wilma. “We have staff based in our communities outside of Miami,” says Jorge Martinez, director of Information Systems at the Knight Foundation. “They need to have access to our systems to continue working, which may include providing emergency funding to relief agencies.” The company decided to build a remote data centre in another location as part of an update to its disaster recovery preparedness infrastructure. “We explored this option before, but even with the advent of server virtualisation eliminating some of the hardware replication issues, we still needed to find a way to keep our data current at both sites. While our HP SAN [storage area network] is a great product, replicating our data was an expensive proposition – until SANmelody came in to the picture,” says Martinez. The company wanted to double storage, have that highly available and in a disaster recovery configuration with data in a remote data centre. Virtualization software from DataCore in its Miami center created a near real-time replicated environment between its two data centres. “They will have a high-speed circuit between the two, so even though the centres are miles apart, the latency is really nominal,” says James Price, Fairway Consulting president. “Because DataCore’s technology is hardware independent, Fairway will be able to build greater flexibility and cost savings at the remote site – thereby complementing the Miami data centre, which has the HP server with a Tier 2, Fibre Channel based array.”