DataCore
Data Center Deployments with Cisco and DataCore Hyper-converged Storage and Networking Solutions

Enterprises are looking to deploy business-critical applications, transactional databases (e.g., Oracle), virtual desktop infrastructures, and private clouds in the most cost-effective and flexible manner. With growing data storage needs, IT organizations face challenges with performance, deployment times, and other issues that impact return on investment. “The lack of storage flexibility and productivity has been a major roadblock in creating a truly agile and dynamic data center,” says George Teixeira, President and CEO, Co-founder, DataCore Software.

Cisco UCS platforms combines with DataCore’s powerful unified storage services to provide a comprehensive next-generation platform that unites compute, network and enterprise storage capabilities into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility.

The combination is well suited for applications ranging from performance-hungry financial applications to solutions being integrated within healthcare and retail, cost-sensitive mid-market applications and the demand for ROBO (Remote Office Branch Offices), and high-availability solutions for metro-area clusters, campus-wide and remote-site disaster recovery.

DataCore transforms Cisco UCS servers into software-defined storage solutions that manage demanding application workloads and supports the full spectrum of hyper-converged systems, virtual and traditional SANs, and data stored in private, hybrid and public Clouds. DataCore delivers comprehensive advanced storage and data services spanning the complete infrastructure versus stand-alone managed vendor solutions that propagate inefficient data silos and lower productivity.

“Our SANsymphony™-V software, deployed at over 10,000 customer sites around the world, has passed Cisco’s demanding Interoperability Verification Testing (IVT) and Cisco's Unified Computing System compatibility certification. This combination delivers proven enterprise-class capabilities,” says Teixeira.The storage virtualization platform, together with Cisco’s UCS servers and networking products creates multiple solution scenarios, including: External SAN Pooling via Cisco VIC Connectivity, Metro-Clustering of Existing and New Storage for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery and Extreme Acceleration for Business Applications. “We deliver massive performance gains at a fraction of the cost of legacy storage hardware by enabling organizations to seamlessly manage and scale data storage architectures,” points out Teixeira.

DataCore enables Cisco UCS servers to empower businesses with an enduring and dynamic ‘Software-driven Storage' solution that liberates storage from static hardware-based limitations

DataCore has the most comprehensive storage services in the industry that includes flash, disk, and cloud to create a single storage platform that works across the entire infrastructure. “Our platform allows organizations to remove physical, geographical and device-specific restrictions of data storage equipment that slow down, interrupt or endanger IT operations,” says Teixeira. The software allows them to fully utilize Cisco solutions and existing investments while providing high performance, availability and flexibility.

DataCore customer Bio-design Institute at Arizona State University (ASU) needed to seamlessly manage application performance, storage capacity provisioning and escalating storage growth. ASU tried a hardware approach by moving workloads from traditional EMC gear to array based systems touting higher performance but was still unable to gain the needed flexibility and simplified management to deal with the growing volume of data. DataCore addressed these challenges by complementing and adding its management, data protection, performance and tiering capabilities to everything in the mix. “The Bio design IT team can now easily and readily pool all storage capacity, as well as provide centralized oversight, provisioning and storage administration. Moreover, SANsymphony-V extends the useful life of existing storage assets and makes data migrations, hardware maintenance and refreshes simple and non-disruptive,” explains Teixeira.

Based on the concept of ‘Empowering businesses with an enduring and dynamic Software-driven architecture liberating Storage from static array-based hardware limitations’, DataCore in combination with Cisco, “has taken the unified computing approach to a new level that fully incorporates storage,” he concludes.