Statewide Title Company of Indianapolis recently selected DataCore Software's SANmelody solution for its storage, management and business efficiency capabilities. The county embraced storage virtualization with the company in an effort to put a SAN in place before consolidating their servers under Citrix XenServer. SANmelody now pools and virtualizes the back-end storage for the company’s dual-node XenServer configuration. Statewide Title is a subsidiary of Feiwell Hannoy, a law firm that specializes in bankruptcy, default and foreclosure processing. Statewide Title does the title processing for home sales associated with these defaulted accounts.
“The selection of DataCore was designed to pave the way for the Citrix XenServer implementation that we are now in the process of deploying,” said George Overstreet, Statewide Title's systems administrator. “For purposes of ease of management, efficiencies and centralizing storage, we went with SANmelody.”
Statewide’s virtualization initiative avoids major hardware acquisitions by using virtualization software from DataCore and Citrix to leverage existing systems. They started with a handful of isolated servers that were running out of internal disk space.
“Our objective was simple," Overstreet said. "Update the hardware and maximize what we have – so that we did not just plunk down a lot of money for new hardware. Statewide’s parent company had just gone through a major server virtualization project so we knew just what could be achieved as far as consolidation and maximizing hardware resources. The key for us was achieving this virtualization project within an environment that is highly available to minimize downtime and outages – all of those goals led us to the need for a SAN.”
DataCore SANmelody was also selected to enable Statewide Title to do disk-to-disk backups, since its NAS device had been giving the firm inconsistent results.
“We knew we needed something more reliable than the NAS device that was in place,” Overstreet added. “What we found was that DataCore was pivotal in enabling us to more easily do back-ups and for automating the routine, cumbersome and labor-intensive tasks associated with storage management.”
“DataCore is the perfect complement to server virtualization with XenServer," said Benjamin Crill, a partner at ESI Technology Advisors. "They are hardware independent, portable – and above all, ‘open’ solutions. Both DataCore and XenServer are feature rich and value-packed. DataCore’s storage virtualization solutions make storage management easy. They enable customers to maximize resources and lower costs, while delivering high availability, better utilization as well as enhanced performance and productivity.”