SAN Virtualization: Germany's ‘LifeService' Emergency Call System Is Always Online With DataCore's Failsafe SAN Virtualization Solution
DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, and its German partner, SHE IT, have implemented a failsafe SAN solution based on its SANmelody software at Björn Steiger Foundation. The foundation's "LifeService" enables the emergency services to quickly identify and locate mobile phone signal locations in an emergency. Behind the scenes, keeping the system up and guaranteeing the highest availability of lifesaving data, the Foundation relies on DataCore's suite of automated technologies for data mirroring, thin provisioning and failover protection.
"For this project we were looking for a fault tolerant storage solution that we could totally rely on," said Andreas Fendl, IT consultant at Björn Steiger Foundation. "We needed high availability throughout our design and it starts with Internet access and ends with the backend; therefore a reliable and failsafe SAN solution was critical as the backbone of our system. We operate in cases of emergency – so uptime for us is a matter of life and death."
Due to the lack of IT personnel on the ground combined with the need to adhere to pre-set Service Level Agreements, Björn Steiger Foundation decided to outsource its entire storage environment. Within three weeks, the "LifeService" call system service infrastructure, including the SANmelody powered virtual SAN, was up and running with the system installed at a separate remote data center for disaster recovery (DR) purposes.
The SANmelody servers are providing highly available storage capacity to Windows and Red Hat Linux enterprise clusters, to SQL databases, and to many specialized applications like an online registration program. DataCore's technology, which includes automated thin provisioning, disk-to-disk snapshots for fast backups, and automated failover and recovery, assures reliability and maximizes uptime with a minimum of management. In addition, in order to ensure data protection, all data is automatically mirrored. Since the start of the service, LifeService remains 100% online without any failures.
"We planned out the complete project in minute detail and checked out many other virtualization solutions in the marketplace," said Manolito Leyeza, technical project leader of the "LifeService" project at SHE IT. "SANmelody won the project because it's a well-engineered and established product, it is easy to administer and ultimately the solution delivered the best price-performance."
On May 3rd 1969, 8-year-old Björn Steiger was killed in a tragic car accident, due to the fact that it took emergency services and their ambulance over an hour to locate and arrive on the scene. To help correct this major flaw in the emergency system, his parents established the Björn Steiger Foundation to improve emergency services' response times for injury victims across the region.
About Björn Steiger Foundation
Björn Steiger Foundation was established in 1969 as a non profit organization to develop the German Emergency system. For 37 years, the Foundation has supported and developed many initiatives to improve the German emergency services, including help for the German-wide emergency telephone code 110/112, emergency phones, voice radio in ambulances and other search and rescue operations. To specifically support the German emergency medical services, the Björn Steiger Foundation Service GmbH was founded in 2005 as a service society for the foundation. The society develops solutions for a world-wide mobile communication in case of emergency, like the automatic location positioning of mobile phones via GPS technology.
About SHE IT AG
SHE AG is one of the leading providers of IT security concepts in Germany. For 20years SHE AG concepts, delivers and implements fulfillment IT-Security solutions. 85 employees are working currently for SHE AG based in Ludwigshafen am Rhein and its branch office in Cologne. SHE provides a wide range of security services, service support and delivery services 24/7/365. To realize security solutions, SHE works together with well-known manufactures like Aladdin, Check Point, IronPort, ISS, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualys, RSA, Visonys, VMware and Vordel.
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization 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's disk server software easily adds capacity expansion and centralized storage management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, VMware, MacOS, and NetWare systems. 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.
SOURCE: DataCore Software