Australian Construction Company Glenvill Group Builds Its Storage Foundation Using DataCore SAN Virtualization.

Glenvill Relies on SANmelody to Manage Its Growth Needs, While Providing the Highest Levels of Availability and Protection for Exchange Email Servers, SQL Databases and Web Services Delivery

MELBOURNE, Australia -- DataCore Software, the leading provider of hardware independent, storage virtualization SAN solutions, today announced that Australian construction company Glenvill Group has enhanced storage management productivity, responsiveness and business continuity by utilizing SANmelody[TM] software for its storage virtualization infrastructure that supports a range of user applications and the company's database, email and web server farms. Glenvill has created a reliable storage infrastructure foundation that meets its changing business requirements for the long term. In addition, they have gained a new level of flexibility and "the best of both worlds" storage networking - simple, cost-effective iSCSI SAN connectivity over Ethernet for application delivery to users as well as Fibre Channel SAN performance and redundant data protection for Exchange and database back-ends.

"Since we were building a new IT center from the ground up, we really didn't want to worry about storage details or failures. Our focus was on making sure we could manage growth, respond rapidly to new requirements and keep our business critical applications and services up and running," stated Michael Dickson, General Manager, Glenvill Group. "DataCore has done the job for us. The SANmelody solution has been running for almost a year now with 100% uptime, allowing us to concentrate on managing and growing our business, not worrying about our IT storage needs."

The challenge: A growing company in need of data storage that is highly available, scalable and cost-effective

Glenvill is a long-standing Australian residential construction company, specialising in high-quality homes. For nearly 50 years, they've been building homes for Australian families, and setting standards for the industry. Today, with over 150 staff and a state-wide network of regional offices and display homes, Glenvill's business is growing as quickly as its reputation. When Glenvill moved to a new purpose-built head office in Caulfield, they asked David Childs, of the Melbourne consultancy USPL, to help transform their IT infrastructure.

Like many of today's companies, Glenvill was finding an ever increasing need for data storage to meet application requirements, while at the same time needing that storage provided with the highest level of availability. No longer was it enough simply to add more disks to servers on an ad-hoc basis as requirements grew; Glenvill was looking for a long term scalable solution. "They knew that any infrastructure they chose needed to be flexible for the long term, reliable, scalable and cost-effective to support their users and a range of database, email and web servers," said Childs, Director of USPL. "At the same time a critical factor was business continuity and redundancy. Storage virtualization and fault tolerance was the answer they were looking for to solve a range of problems and provide a platform to move forward."

The solution: SANmelody delivers reliability and the "best of both worlds" iSCSI and Fibre Channel support

Childs and colleagues at USPL contacted DataCore. After a close analysis of Glenvill's needs, a solution encompassing DataCore SANmelody deployed on mirrored servers was developed. This provided easily, auto-expandable disk capacity to the application server farm and at the same time provided a robust automatic fail-over platform for data protection in case of hardware problems. Being network agnostic, DataCore also provided Glenvill with the ability to use either Fibre Channel for performance or iSCSI where needed to keep costs in line and work with existing networks, The current environment uses iSCSI over Ethernet connections to serve storage to users and their application servers and Fibre Channel for high speed synchronous mirroring protection for the backend applications.

Asked why he and Glenvill chose a solution from DataCore, Childs commented, "We needed a vendor who offered a proven, reliable and cost-effective solution. We knew that storage virtualization was the way forward and when we did our research it was obvious that DataCore met all our requirements. We have a 24/7 support service as part of our package should we need it and we have the comfort of knowing our storage solution can grow with us."

After almost a year in production the DataCore SANmelody solution has performed flawlessly. The previous bottlenecks caused by traditional disk-in-a-box solutions have been removed by the disk-on-a-wire solution that DataCore provides. "As the Glenvill business continues to grow, additional storage space can be served to the users seamlessly," said David Bull, Technical Sales Director, DataCore Australia. "At the same time, the business has the comfort of knowing that all data is replicated over the two SAN servers, removing the single point of failure inherent in traditional storage solutions."

To the outstanding benefits of virtualization, DataCore adds enterprise-class advanced storage services capabilities, like thin storage provisioning, remote site disaster recovery, business continuity (auto-failover high-availability), all at SME prices. For information on DataCore solutions or becoming a DataCore partner in Australia/New Zealand, please e-mail: [e-mail].

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