Oxford University Computing Services Picks DataCore's SANmelody

In a bid to offer high-quality and cost-effective IT services, Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) has decided to deploy DataCore’s SANmelody as the storage platform in their VM4 Rent service.

 

DataCore SANmelody converts standard Intel (News - Alert)/AMD servers, blades or virtual machines (VMs) into fully capable storage servers that virtualizes disks and serve them over existing networks to application servers.

 

DataCore Software claims their offering fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage as it combines advanced functions and services with the agility and savings of hardware independence.

 

OUCS Network Systems Management (News - Alert) Service (NSMS) provides IT services inside the Oxford University campus which includes 25 colleges and 15 departments via the University's primary computing infrastructure and services on a charge-back basis.

 

As a department, NSMS' time is frequently spent supporting smaller departments with very limited IT resources. The storage services were provided across Fibre Channel SANs served by IBM/EMC (News - Alert) direct-attached storage.

 

Now NSMS has decided to move over to a self-automated, self-provisioning, Web-based virtualized model known as "VM4rent" that allows the renting of virtual machines to its customers.

 

The VM4 Rent offering makes use of two centralized VMware ESX 3.5 servers and virtualized storage through DataCore's SANmelody. SANmelody equitably distributes the available disk space on demand to multiple applications spread across several machines by carving out smaller logical disks from larger physical disks. This virtualized computing on demand service is extremely useful for those departments who require a temporary service - such as a research project that has been granted funding for a year.

 

Using SANmelody NSMS can cost-effectively optimize, manage and protect data storage and disk space. Storage and new VMs can be served within minutes as images of the server template are already stored within SANmelody. Another unique ability NSMS gets from this solution is that it can bring together different departments and their budgets to utilize joint active system failover protection offered through SANmelody.

 

SANmelody also lowers the virtualization price tag (News - Alert) by reducing the cost of the shared storage required to support it. Jon Hutchings, Senior Systems Engineer in OUCS Network Systems Management Service noted that SANmelody complements the idea behind their VM4 Rent scheme.

 

Recently, Australia’s itX Group Limited signed on as a new DataCore value-added distributor. Also, DataCore announced its partnership with Fujitsu (News - Alert)-Siemens Computers across Europe.