SAN FRANCISCO--BUSINESS WIRE--At VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, DataCore Software, a leading provider of software-based virtualization solutions empowering storage, today announced that American Society of Health-System Pharmacists ASHP has implemented a new stretch cluster and stretch high-availability HA storage configuration based on DataCore storage virtualization software and VMware server virtualization software to ensure uptime and business continuity. This new, stretch, dual-node configuration was implemented by DataCore partner Helixstorm, Inc. and together, DataCore and VMware form an HA configuration that spans floors – serving as an industrial-strength production system with fault-tolerance.

“It was not intuitive until I actually saw it. But now that I have, I am no longer skeptical. Going forward, I will put the bulk of all the money earmarked for network storage into expanding the DataCore configuration as well as building in remote disaster recovery.”

The goal is to transition all of ASHP’s data onto the newly configured, fault-tolerant, virtualized environment. “I am now a believer in the software-based approach to high-availability and storage virtualization,” states Jack Spencer, vice president of operations and CIO at American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. “It was not intuitive until I actually saw it. But now that I have, I am no longer skeptical. Going forward, I will put the bulk of all the money earmarked for network storage into expanding the DataCore configuration as well as building in remote disaster recovery.”

Enterprise Scalability, Seamless Business Continuity, Data Resiliency and High Performance That Supports the ASHP Membership

ASHP serves the professional pharmacist – i.e. health-system pharmacists, including clinical pharmacy, specialized pharmacy for instance oncology, research, compounding, etc. and hospital pharmacy. ASHP is also an accrediting body – serving as a grantor of continuing education certifications. A membership organization lives and dies because of the data associated with its members. Both member information as well as the ability to fulfill its mission of being responsible for professional licensing – in terms of granting continuing education credits – has to be protected for an extended period of time by ASHP’s IT systems.

ASHP has 35,000 individual members. The staff at ASHP itself comprises 210 people. All benefit from the uptime the virtualized environment, with DataCore at the heart of it all. “The DataCore Software stretch HA solution delivers enterprise scalability, seamless business continuity, data resiliency, and high performance for a cost-effective price tag when comparing it to traditional storage arrays,” states Aaron Schneider, principal and co-founder, Helixstorm, Inc. “The best part about it is that if ASHP lost a floor to power or critical disaster, the users would not experience an outage because of seamless I/O failover to the surviving node. You get high availability right out of the box just by deploying the virtual storage software in two locations.”

The New HA Configuration: DataCore + VMware Form an Industrial-Strength Production System with Fault-Tolerance

The two HA systems are stretched across two floors at ASHP using synchronous mirroring – thereby providing data redundancy. In total, the data pool – near-line and on-line – comprises sixty 60 terabytes at ASHP. Because ASHP publishes 500+ different publications, storage has always been a big requirement. Three years ago, ASHP became interested in the flexibility, ease-of-use, centralized management and reduced costs that DataCore’s software-based approach to managing and virtualizing their storage assets afforded. DataCore was not, however, ASHP’s first step into virtualization. Prior to DataCore, VMware was deployed at ASHP and the virtual machine VM farm has grown four-fold over five years.

“We designed and implemented a true highly available SAN solution,” states Eric Henry, CTO and co-founder, Helixstorm, Inc. “It’s a shared nothing environment, which means the disks do not share a backplane with the controllers like traditional arrays. ASHP has eliminated all single points of failure between the application servers and the storage controllers along with increasing the data resiliency by ‘stretching’ the SAN between two floors via redundant fiber channel connections for synchronous mirroring. You just can’t get any better business continuity than that!”

The next phase entails adding a third, remote node for disaster recovery DR purposes. Historically, ASHP has used SunGard Data Systems for DR. However, it is far more appealing to Spencer and his team to purchase another SANmelody™ storage domain server and deploy that at an off-site location – connecting it to his production asynchronously and providing remote replication.

A Mission-Critical Solution and Configuration

Spencer extols the value-added utilities and features of SANmelody as well as its ease of use – chiefly its simplicity in terms of set-up and maintenance. “Trying to carve out a LUN on a big SAN is a true hassle,” explains Spencer. “Then trying to maintain and keep track of the different LUNs – just the maintenance of the configuration – is very complicated. Software-based SANmelody makes it simple. It is elegantly straightforward and simple in terms of removing labor-intensive aspects of SAN maintenance.”

About ASHP

For more than 60 years, ASHP has helped pharmacists who practice in hospitals and health systems improve medication use and enhance patient safety. The Society's 35,000 members include pharmacists and pharmacy technicians who practice in inpatient, outpatient, home-care, and long-term-care settings, as well as pharmacy students. For more information about the wide array of ASHP activities and the many ways in which pharmacists help people make the best use of medicines, visit ASHP's Web site, www.ashp.org, or its consumer Web site, www.SafeMedication.com.

About DataCore Software

DataCore Software develops the storage virtualization software needed to get the highest availability, fastest performance and maximum utilization from storage resources in physical and virtual IT environments. It provides the critical 3rd dimension on which the success of server and desktop virtualization projects hinge, regardless of the models and brands of storage devices used. For more information, call 877 780-5111 or visit www.datacore.com.

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