Stories about: DataCore

First will come virtualization, then utility storage. That's long been the vision of how enterprise storage will evolve as IT grows increasingly dynamic and on-demand becomes business as usual.

Downtime is a disaster for any business and at Perth-based DDI Health it was disrupting daily operations as the IT team struggled with constant disk provisioning issues.

Storage virtualisation vendor, DataCore, has undertaken a local channel revamp.

Melbourne-based Kingston City Council has virtualised its storage environment with high-availability data protection and off-site disaster recoverywhich integrates seamlessly with its VMWare server environment.

Now you can have a virtualised and thinly-provisioned storage area network (SAN) in a total virtual server and hardware-independent environment, as DataCore has released its SANmelody and SANsymphony products as virtual machines.

Whether it's to hold a table at a favorite restaurant, book a dream vacation or rent a car, making reservations usually pays off. But for storage and IT administrators feeling the squeeze of shrinking data center floor space and power constraints, the practice of departments "reserving" excess storage they may never actually need is becoming a major problem.

Pillar Data Systems, the storage vendor funded by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, is getting ready to bolster its line of features with technology that helps businesses avoid wasting storage space known as thin provisioning.

The convergence of server and storage management is slowly taking place as enterprises look for more automated ways of managing their data center assets. Spurring the trend toward convergence -- which remains somewhat hampered by a lack of available tools -- is virtualization technology.

Fibre Channel was definitely not top of mind when Chris Brown hit the wall on disk space and, in mid-2005, decided to go shopping for a SAN. Brown is IT manager for DeltaValve, a division of Curtiss-Wright Flow Control. "I have an IT staff of two," he explains, "and we do not have the resources to support Fibre Channel."

SAN storage virtualization vendor Incipient has announced support for Cisco MDS9000 switches, which the company claims is the first true enterprise-class SAN virtualization product.

As senior director of enterprise technology operations at Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a prison management firm that handles more than 60 facilities, Brad Wood faces several challenges. His group manages approximately 100TB of data -- including inmate medical records, operational records, e-mail, and so forth -- across four Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) storage arrays in two datacentres. Because of federal and state rules, much of the company's data is mirrored three or four times to keep it accessible in case of failure. Adding to the complexity, Wood buys his hardware based on current price and performance, so he has a mix of suppliers.