DataCore Software announced new, affordable, remote site Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) solutions under its Virtual Infrastructure Foundation class of products. The new offering includes state-of-the-art thin, provisioning to automate and optimize the use of storage capacity, SANmotion to simplify data migration, storage performance acceleration software and a full range of auto-failover, au DataCore Software announced new, affordable, remote site Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) solutions under its Virtual Infrastructure Foundation class of products.The new offering includes state-of-the-art thin, provisioning to automate and optimize the use of storage capacity, SANmotion to simplify data migration, storage performance acceleration software and a full range of auto-failover, auto-recovery, and advanced IP SAN mirroring data protection services that, as the company describes it, “surpass the functionality found in today’s limited storage arrays and pricey disaster recovery systems”. The Virtual Infrastructure DR and BC packages are each priced at under $10,000, which includes a full year of customer support and the software needed to manage and protect two separately located SANmelody virtual storage servers, each capable of supporting up to 3 terabyte (TB) storage pools. The packages provide: Proven enterprise-class virtualization and storage management – employs the same underlying software, automation and virtualization technologies that are proven and in use by thousands of DataCore users in small, mid-size and large corporations worldwide. True Auto-failover and auto-recovery business continuity – automatically monitors the data storage pool and I/O accesses and on failure in the system it transparently and automatically goes into failover mode and recovery, with no impact to production systems and no requirement for software to reside on application servers. Supports LAN or IP SAN based high-speed synchronous mirroring and failover. Remote Site Disaster recovery – automatically protects critical data and storage pools using long distance asynchronous IP mirroring over LAN/WAN infrastructures. Performance acceleration – includes sophisticated cache management software designed to significantly speed up storage and I/O intensive workloads. Simple SANmotion data migration services – a powerful set of Windows data migration capabilities, which enables users to move and to migrate live data disks over a SAN. This advanced feature facilitates virtual server deployments and allows Windows disk data to be accessed, re-purposed or moved rapidly from one system to another across the IP SAN, using Ethernet connections. State-of-the-art Thin-provisioning – automates storage administration and capacity provisioning and management across many systems and enables significant cost savings through its ability to optimize the disk space being served to many servers across the SAN. Previously this type of capability only existed in the realm of the highest-end data center systems selling for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Flexible open system interoperability and hardware independence – automates storage management and auto-protects multiple terabytes of data serving multiple application servers (e.g. VMware, Windows, Netware, Linux, Solaris, AIX, UNIX, etc.) over LAN, SAN or WAN networks. The solutions support either low-cost iSCSI or optional FC connectivity, or a mix of both. The software is hardware independent and runs on low-cost Intel/AMD platforms – enabling users to lower costs, optimize their hardware purchase decisions, maximize the use of existing investments, control their choice of platforms and storage and add a new level of flexibility to their storage infrastructure. The new DataCore solutions fill the large void in the market that exists for reasonably priced DR and BC solutions. The high-end enterprise-class storage arrays that can support true failover and the multi-site SAN based disaster recovery systems (e.g. IBM) are typically proprietary, complex and cost many tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. “When we looked at the marketplace we found a real gap that needed to be filled,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO, DataCore Software. “The total cost of a working system, the high cost of entry and the lack of flexibility and software utility are the real barriers in the SMB space. Small to mid-size businesses can’t afford to deploy a SAN to manage storage and then pay the additional cost to also do business continuity and disaster recovery. They need a solution that does both and does it at the right price.” Software Development