DataCore Software announced that DDI Health in Australia has selected, deployed and is realizing notable benefits from DataCore’s SANmelody virtual SAN software to manage its storage and support its software development servers and VMware systems. DDI Health produces a range of solutions across the diagnostic health services sector. The company was grappling with wasted disk space, ‘out of disk space’ warnings that force systems and applications to be shut down to add more disks and constant disk provisioning issues. Whereas one set of servers would be full, another set would have disk space to spare, thereby making the provisioning of disk space between systems an on-going and fairly labor-intensive undertaking. With SANmelody in place to allocate disk space to physical and virtual servers as well as workstations, the administration team’s disk management headache has disappeared. Now there is very little wasted disk space. Not only had disk administration been labor-intensive, it was also fairly problematic and the resulting downtime was very disruptive to daily operations.

“DataCore has removed a great deal of the complexity and management burden from our IT systems staff by automating tedious tasks that were error prone, disruptive and time consuming. Our overall productivity and the high levels of system uptime being achieved are greatly improved since we deployed SANmelody,” said Paul Graham, head of software development, DDI Health.

Automating the delivery of disk space
Solving the management issues of disk space for the organization has been a benefit. “With SANmelody all of the storage overhead and time we were spending has gone away because the administration and provisioning of disk space has become significantly easier – it is now an automated process,” added Graham. “Now we equip each storage-hungry server with at least two terabytes of virtual capacity via DataCore’s thin provisioning technology.” The applications running on the six servers that DDI maintains have each been allocated a 2 TB portion of the overall storage pool. Thin slices of storage are automatically allocated from the SAN when needed and administrators no longer have to worry about resizing partitions and, more importantly, about any users being disrupted by systems running out of disk space.

Providing storage flexibility, high-availability and VMware support
DDI Health uses VMware in the software development process, particularly in terms of testing. During a typical software release cycle, DDI might use up 100 GB of capacity in a day, by way of creating virtual environments. “Using SANmelody we get full use of our disk capacity and we can very quickly and easily expand the partitions that are required to accommodate this extra data with very little or no effort whatsoever,” explained Graham.

DDI Health fits the profile of a small-to-midsize enterprise (SME), which develops and sells software-based solutions to healthcare entities across Australia, in many cases to radiology practices as well as primary healthcare providers. Thirty development staff are currently using the system for which SANmelody serves as a backbone – providing both capacity “on demand,” enhancing performance and ensuring high availability and data protection. Importantly, the technology is completely transparent to users. It works behind the scenes and provisions disk space for all to use.

Bottom-line: Cost savings, fewer headaches for IT administrators and a more efficient business
DDI Health has realized a huge cost savings by virtue of the fact that with SANmelody the company could use its choice of any Intel or AMD server hardware platform. “Rather than going with a SAN vendor that required us to use proprietary hardware, we found that with SANmelody we were able to get a top of the line SAN supporting thin provisioning and yet spend only a tenth of what a traditional SAN would have cost,” said Matthew Bardsley, managing director, DDI Health.

DDI feels that SANmelody serves as a competitive advantage, for the simple and straightforward reason that it enables their IT team to do what they need to do and to do it better and faster.

“The combination of SANmelody with standard off the shelf hardware has provided DDI Health with significant cost savings as well as increased flexibility in the way we run our business,” commented Graham. “SANmelody delivers not only cost savings, but enables us to see real productivity increases. It has meant fewer headaches for IT staff and less business interruption issues for our company as a whole. Our overall productivity has certainly increased because of the uptime SANmelody delivers.”