American Health Network: Fail-safe Tested DataCore supports Citrix environment

http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/business/datacore-american-health-network
“We were intrigued by the ability to apply virtualization to our storage and the possibility of getting high-end data protection for the disk farms behind our Citrix infrastructure, without incurring the high costs generally associated with such functions or sacrificing security. If DataCore can save us $100,000 to $200,000 during this modernization, then we have really struck gold,” comments Stuart Donnelson, data centre server manager, American Health Network.

System Already Fail-safe Tested
DataCore proved particularly vital to AHN’s operations recently when system administrators noticed that AHN lost a major component of their storage infrastructure due to a firmware problems, yet the DataCore software automatically and non-disruptively failed over to its high-availability partner and kept the storage access 'live' to application servers. In fact according to Donnelson, “Not a single user or individual even noticed this failure – except for the few, select people in IT who were previously set up to monitor systems and receive such notices. “It was then that we said – this DataCore product is really pretty darn great.”

Right now, American Health Network has 1,400 users connected to 55 XenApp servers. They expect to grow to 100 servers by the time they get to the next version of their medical records software.

“Importantly, when it comes to XenServer, the core technologies that you are dependent on is the storage and the network,” summarized Donnelson. “Without those two things being very dynamic and flexible, you are essentially back to ground zero.”

Donnelson is quick to point out that DataCore has provided American Health Network with a stable and robust environment: “We have been nothing but pleased with DataCore. The DataCore software is rock-solid. We really haven’t had to do anything to it. And to me every time I don’t have to worry about a platform or a piece of technology, I sleep a little better every night.”