Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

NEWMONT AUSTRALIA STRIKES GOLD WITH DataCore SANsymphony

DataCore Software, a leading provider of enterprise-class, open storage networking software, announced the addition of Newmont Australia, the country's largest gold producer, to its list of Global 2000 accounts. Newmont implemented DataCore SANsymphony software with the help of DataCore's SANvantage partner, Volante Systems. Newmont Australia now manages four terabytes of IBM FAStT700 disks in a demanding SAP/Oracle environment with improved disk utilization rates reaching 77 percent, saving the IT staff time, resources and budget. Newmont Australia selected SANsymphony software to consolidate its storage management and automate storage allocation through the use of Network Managed Volumes (NMVs). This innovative feature reduces labor-intensive storage administration, extends the use of current storage assets and creates a cost-effective disaster recovery solution.

"The value for us comes not only from SANsymphony's NMVs, but the ability to enhance our Oracle and SAP storage requirements through centralizing the SAN management, accelerating performance and maximizing our existing resources," said Paul O'Leary, group specialist system integration with Newmont Australia. "We have been able to standardize on SANsymphony and use our current hardware to dramatically lower our total cost of ownership."

The NMV feature in SANsymphony software auto-provisions storage capacity and properly allocates resources -- without downtime -- for Newmont Australia. This concept moves volume management largely out of each client's operating system and consolidates it as a network-wide automated facility. SANsymphony assigns arbitrarily large virtual disks to hosts and automatically apportions physical space in smaller increments only as needed. The benefits to this approach include 'just enough and just-in-time' dynamic capacity allocation from network storage pools, disk space requirements collapsed to a minimum, fully utilized capacity without over-provisioning, and no downtime or administrator intervention required to resize or repartition host disks.

DataCore's SANvantage partner in Australia, Volante Systems, was instrumental in implementing and supporting SANsymphony at Newmont Australia. Volante has a long-term relationship with Newmont Australia, knew its requirements, and researched the best options in the storage market before making the appropriate recommendations to Newmont Australia about moving forward with DataCore's SANsymphony product.

"Volante specializes in solutions that fuse software applications, IT infrastructure, communications, storage, security, business processes and organizational structure to create a high-performance business model that gets customers working smoothly. The proposed SAN solution for Newmont Australia needed to be highly flexible to adapt to multiple changes without impacting normal business operations," said Neil Donnellan, solutions consultant with Volante. "With this in mind, after assessing the situation with the customer, our choice for Newmont Australia's storage management requirements was SANsymphony from DataCore. After discussing the benefits with Newmont Australia, they agreed that SANsymphony was the way for them to go."

DataCore's Asynchronous IP Mirroring (AIM) capability and Volante's implementation will allow Newmont Australia to extend the value, security and availability of its storage resources, by mirroring key data to a remote site over existing Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructure for cost-effective disaster recovery.

"SANsymphony software represents the next generation of comprehensive storage management products that provide enterprises like Newmont Australia with high-performance network storage pooling and affordable remote data replication," said Peter Thompson, managing director of Asia Pacific for DataCore. "This results in an improved and cost-effective strategy to manage and protect growing storage demands."

Newmont Australia is the local business unit of the world's premier gold producer, Newmont Mining Corporation, based in Denver. The company operates significant assets and operations on five continents including the United States, Peru, Australia and Indonesia.