Reducing the IT administration burden and eliminating the catastrophic effects of Florida hurricanes drove the need for change

DataCore Software today announced that South Florida-based All Medical Personnel has realized results beyond initial expectations from their decision to adopt DataCore's SANmelody software to solve the company's storage-related problems. With SANmelody, the IT team at All Medical is now optimizing disk space utilization, accelerating disk I/O performance, and eliminating business disruptions and administrative overhead when allocating, migrating and upgrading disks. The simplicity of managing virtual storage and the automated provisioning of disk space have considerably reduced administrator burdens and have greatly sped up the response time to change requests by significantly shortening the time to add disk space, restore failed servers or disks and task new ones. Above all, the DataCore virtualization software has enabled a new level of fault tolerance for All Medical Personnel applications and systems - resulting in a major advance in keeping their business up and running, regardless of the disruptive impacts from the weather or other natural disasters.

It was clear to the IT staff at All Medical that it needed a new solution for disaster recovery and greater flexibility to handle growth. Therefore, they decided to deploy a virtual environment in order to have data managed in co-locations. "If the corporate office went down, while the rest of the offices throughout the country were functional they were crippled in some applications. So we chose to move everything to a secure data center that would not be affected by natural disaster or a scenario such as a power outage, etc.," said Karen Swanson, IT Director, All Medical Personnel. "DataCore now safeguards our data and makes storage management simple."

With its corporate headquarters in Ft. Lauderdale, All Medical Personnel is a nationwide staffing company that has offices throughout the country; however, all of the company's data is managed at the corporate headquarters using a Citrix environment. In terms of data management and availability, the company's biggest challenge came during the hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 when it, like most companies in the area, got slammed by hurricanes.

Total Enterprise Virtualization - Citrix Desktops, VMware VMs, DataCore Storage

All Medical knew that virtualization would provide a new level of flexibility for them in terms of servers (VMware) and access (Citrix), but how could they do the same thing for storage especially when they needed to further safeguard their data? Moreover, they wanted to improve their storage utilization across all their systems, simplify administration and add disaster recovery capabilities within a limited budget. SANmelody was the solution. It became the backbone storage infrastructure that enabled the system administrators at All Medical Personnel to easily maintain their storage area network (SAN). SANmelody was purchased to support the company's decision to modernize and protect their critical applications.

"We work closely with our clients to understand their business needs and match them to the right technology," explained James Price, Chief Executive Officer, Fairway Consulting Group, Inc. "Working with Karen at All Medical Personnel, we recommended DataCore Software's SANmelody product as a best fit solution. All Medical was in a unique position of re-architecting their infrastructure and SANmelody offered them the best price/performance combination and an extensible storage platform to match their VMware-based virtual infrastructure. DataCore's SANmelody virtual storage, coupled with VMware virtual machines and Citrix application virtualization, gives All Medical Personnel not just a virtual infrastructure but a utility-based enterprise in which storage, servers and applications are delivered to their business where they are needed in real-time."

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