Serving up efficient, agile storage management

A leading food distributor to chain restaurants, hotels and industrial dining services, Pacific Star has world-class information systems and four distribution centers located in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey and Tijuana. Before deploying DataCore SANsymphony-V, the company had been seeking a solution that would help them achieve better orchestration of the storage management function across all storage resources, automate tasks for more responsive IT, and ensure the availability of data through data protection so that it was always available. Pacific Star was equally concerned about the costs and the overall effort required to comply with uptime and recovery mandates.

Since being deployed at Pacific Star, the SANsymphony-V software-defined storage platform has taken isolated storage devices and placed them under one common set of infrastructure-wide services. The DataCore software virtualizes and optimizes the use of storage resources by pooling the collective storage resources, making storage both uniform and software-defined, thereby eliminating differences and incompatibilities among manufacturers, models and generations of equipment in use. What is more, system administrators have gained visibility to overall health and behavior of storage infrastructure from a single central console.

“Because of DataCore’s software-defined storage technology, we have been able to automate frequent tasks ranging from provisioning through to data protection,” said Juan Carlos Cedillo, CIO at Pacific Star.

4X Increase in Capacity Utilization and 50% Reduction in Storage Costs
Pacific Star has realized a 4X increase in capacity utilization with SANsymphony-V. DataCore’s software-defined storage management approach has enabled the company to pool and thin provision capacity from diverse storage assets in order to eliminate stranded space and wasteful over-allocation. In addition to improved capacity utilization, Pacific Star has achieved even faster performance with DataCore as a result of its infrastructure-wide caching, which super-charges performance and enables companies like PacificStar to run applications at electronic memory speeds.

Since deploying SANsymphony-V, Pacific Star has also reduced storage costs by at least 50% by being able to avoid buying additional hardware and more disks to support its systems.

DataCore Software-Defined Storage – Delivering “Always-On” Storage at Pacific Star
Storage-related downtime has been essentially eliminated at Pacific Star thanks to SANsymphony-V. The company reports that the DataCore software protects its data and makes applications run uninterrupted because the data is mirrored in real-time between separate storage devices to maintain continuous availability despite equipment and site outages.

“In terms of reducing costs, tasks, and reducing storage-related downtime, software-defined storage from DataCore means we are able to ally business objectives with IT – and, through DataCore, we can meet those objectives,” said Cedillo.