Perth, Australia-based specialists in developing software solutions in Radiology PACS software, Pathology, Clinical and Practice Management systems turn to DataCore to ease the pain of manually managing their data storage infrastructure
SYDNEY and PERTH, Australia – April 14, 2008 – DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization SAN software, today 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 automatically 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 of significant 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 extensively in the software development process, particularly in terms of testing. During a typical software release cycle, DDI might typically 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 ultimately 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.”
About DDI Health
DDI Health produces the Filmless Image Technology (FIT) software for Radiology, a Web based Picture Archive Communications System (PACS) for a distributed Radiology practice network. FIT PACS viewing software is incorporated into the GP desktop via the clinical system Medical Director that is used by over 85% of computerized General Practitioners in Australia. DDI Health also produces Pathology Request workflow software solutions, secure messaging and other specialist systems and practice management solutions. A separate services division covers enterprise IT infrastructure services and support for our clients right across Australia. For more information, visit www.ddihealth.com or email info@ddihealth.com.
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization SAN software, fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage with innovative software that combines advanced functions and services with the agility and savings of hardware independence. DataCore lowers the cost and complexity of IT by making storage efficient, fast, flexible, fail-safe and virtual. DataCore’s portable storage server software simplifies and automates capacity expansion and centralizes storage management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, MacOS, NetWare, VMware and other leading open system and virtual server platforms. DataCore is privately held and its corporate headquarters are in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. For more information, call (877) 780-5111 or visit www.datacore.com.
DataCore, the DataCore logo and SANmelody are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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