October 16, 2008 - DataCore Software announced that its SANmelody software is providing peace of mind to Covenant House Toronto in the event that its IT systems undergo an unforeseen calamity.
DataCore partner Interware Systems deployed DataCore’s SANmelody to deliver business continuity and disaster recovery via an affordable, yet highly available, virtual SAN solution, which provides the remote replication essential to safeguarding an organization’s data.
Covenant House Toronto is Canada’s largest youth shelter and support service.
The key business objective at Covenant House Toronto was uptime. As a 24/7 service, Covenant House Toronto’s doors are always open for homeless youth. Therefore Covenant House Toronto staff need constant access to the organization’s file servers to access information on the kids staying in the shelter. In particular, workers require continuous access to the charity’s Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge server, the fundraising application that the organization relies upon, as well as the email server.
“By implementing DataCore, we are able to have true, no single point of failure, high availability at our head office as well as full disaster recovery and business continuity because we can now replicate to our DR site in case something happens,” said Wendy Craig, IS Consultant, Covenant House Toronto. The disaster recovery portion of the implementation came to fruition by synchronizing Covenant House’s data from its main office to its disaster recovery site at a co-location facility. Covenant House Toronto’s data is transmitted to this remote site nightly.”
Prior to DataCore, Covenant House’s mission-critical servers were running on an old set of storage arrays, which were filling up. Moreover, the organization had over-allocated storage on some application servers that were being underutilized. DataCore’s thin provisioning functionality enabled Covenant House to consolidate its existing storage and thereby over-allocate on the applications side and under-allocate on the storage side.
The IT team, with DataCore, was able to increase their database sizes and have more space for backups. “Covenant House looked at solutions from DataCore’s competitors,” noted Craig. “However, DataCore fit the bill for Covenant House Toronto because of ease-of-use, simplicity and price point. Just as importantly, we were not being locked into any hardware that we couldn’t move way from - if for some reason this was a path that we might ultimately choose not to take. DataCore saved us from hardware vendor lock-in.”
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