STORAGE

Daegu City, the third largest city in Korea with a population of over 2.5 million citizens, has installed DataCore’s SANsymphony to manage and consolidate its storage network of Hitachi and Samsung storage arrays. Daegu City, driven by new government regulations, needed to quickly implement a storage-based disaster recovery solution. However, they soon found that their existing storage arrays did not offer common storage services, such as point-in-time snapshot copies and remote IP mirroring, that would work with dissimilar types of storage from different vendors. Each existing vendor actually proposed a swap-out approach so that all storage would be the same to avoid the interoperability issues involved. While this solution would benefit the winning vendor, this was not what Daegu wanted. Not only would it add substantial cost to buy new storage arrays, it would add a great deal of time and disruption to replace the existing systems already in place. Daegu City decided there must be a better way to get the job done while maintaining the use of their existing storage investment. After researching the marketplace, they turned to DataCore's SANsymphony. “As a direct result of SANsymphony, I now have in place a storage networking architecture with the flexibility to employ different models of Hitachi storage and Samsung disk arrays and make them all coexist and work together, “ stated IT manager, Hea-Chan Park. ”With DataCore we got the ‘best of both worlds’, we maximized our existing investment, and we achieved an affordable IP-based network solution.” Daegu’s main computing center hosts a large number of SUN and Intel-based servers to run city government and public service applications. Prior to DataCore, the city used a number of directly attached storage arrays, which limited the IT department’s ability to meet the growing data requirements. Therefore, Daegu’s IT manager Hea-Chan Park knew it was time to deploy a storage network to better consolidate and manage storage resources and add the necessary flexibility to expand and meet future requirements. The challenge was obvious: find a way to maximize the use of existing storage investments, network them all together, and add the capability to do remote site disaster recovery of data. Due to cost concerns, the city also needed a low cost approach that leveraged existing IP networking infrastructure. Beyond cost and investment protection, a major objective was to reliably protect the city’s data storage by mirroring critical operational data to a dissimilar storage array at the disaster backup site located over 20 kilometers away. “Bottom-line, DataCore offloaded storage management and disaster recovery off my back. Instead of spending all my time focused on interoperability and data protection, I am now concentrating the bulk of my efforts on the important applications that make our city services run smoothly,” continued Park. "Daegu City is just one of many users in Korea who protect their valuable data with DataCore. They clearly demonstrate DataCore’s ability to reduce cost, increase management productivity, and handle complex storage and disaster recovery problems," declared Jong Ho Beyoen, director of Korea’s Operations at DataCore.