St. Marien Amberg Hospital Goes Green and Virtual with VMware and DataCore SANmelody

Virtualization Reduces Energy Consumption by 50 Percent
MUNICH, Germany--(Business Wire)--
DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization
SAN software, has today announced that St. Marien Amberg Hospital, a
German teaching hospital, has implemented SANmelody as the reliable
storage foundation that supports its information systems and PACS
(Picture Archiving and Communication System) project running on a
VMware environment. The virtual infrastructure not only offers high
availability, better performance and lower management costs, but also
halves the electricity and cooling costs by using less hardware to do
more work. "By using a combination of DataCore storage and VMware
server virtualization, we have laid the foundation for an IT
environment of the future," said Dr Dietmar Braeuer, head of
information technology at St. Marien Amberg Hospital. "More
flexibility, more functionality and performance, less hardware."

St. Marien Amberg Hospital is a large community and teaching
hospital in Amberg, Germany. A 12-person IT team administrates
approximately 650 workstations used by 1,300 members of staff. The
hospital operates around-the-clock, so constant access to patient data
must be guaranteed - with archiving periods lasting up to 30 years.
The increasing digitalization of patient and administrative data puts
tremendous pressure on managing data. With tight public sector
budgets, this posed a real challenge.

To increase flexibility and to optimize the utilization of
resources, the hospital decided to use virtual servers running under
VMware for the PACS project. For shared storage, St. Marien Amberg
Hospital evaluated and selected DataCore's SANmelody. The DataCore
storage servers supply 35 virtual machines with the PACS archive, a
backup server, various file and database servers for the management
information system (MIS) and several web applications with
high-availability storage capacity. DataCore's Thin Provisioning is
used for the dynamic and automatic allocation of virtual disks,
meaning that up to 95 percent of the existing storage capacity can be
used before additional disk drives have to be allocated - resulting in
less hardware required, reduced maintenance and lowered energy
consumption. The bottom-line: costs dropped by 50% in the computer
center.

SANmelody was installed on two standard servers on the site. These
servers are located in separate fire compartments within the computer
center and have been equipped for high performance with QuadCore Xeon
5400 CPUs and a 16 GB cache. By using its own performance acceleration
caching algorithms, DataCore's SANmelody speeds up read and write
access times, providing a maximum performance of well over 200,000 I/O
operations per second, per server. The two separate servers as well as
dual switches and FC paths ensure redundancy, not only for the data
but also for data routing. The SANmelody storage servers form an
active/active high-availability pair for fail-safe data protection
across the SAN. To further maximize resource savings, SANmelody was,
from the very beginning, also used to structure the data archives into
various storage pools with different service levels.

"SANmelody is a flexible, highly functional and fail-safe storage
system that completely fulfills our expectations and optimally
supplements the VMware virtualization with regard to storage,"
explained Braeuer. "SANmelody is now an important and integral
component of our server and storage unit consolidation program. We
have increased both availability and performance and are able to make
server platforms, including their storage, available more quickly.
Future storage space extensions will simply involve buying inexpensive
disk shelves."

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.

DataCore Software
Press Contact (Europe)
Sharon Munday, Account Director, KPR Global
Office: +44 (0) 1189 745418
smunday@kprglobal.com
or
Corporate Contacts (US)
DataCore Software
Bettye Grant, 954-377-6000
publicrelations@datacore.com
or
Red Nine PR
Stuart Smith, 336-896-1874
ssmith@redninePR.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008