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Storage Virtualization Sales Messaging Playbook January 2012



Playbook Overview Provides an overview of how to use the playbook content to engage existing clients and new

customers at every phase of the buying process 5 - 6

Messaging Principles The principles that provide the foundations for success in delivering the key messages 7 - 9

Trends and Pressures The market trends and pressures for Business and Technology Executives 11 - 14

Ideal Customer Profile The Ideal Customer’s Business, Buying, and Technology characteristics 15

Key Audience Objectives and “3

Whys Talk Tracks”

For each targeted audience, unique talk tracks to guide a customer conversation are provided

that help the customer answer the question “Why do something different?” “Why do it now?”

and “Why DataCore?”

17 - 24

2 Minute Message A summary of our identity and solution capabilities in a format that can be used in positioning

and obtaining meetings with targeted customers 25 - 26

Whiteboard Overview

& Talking Points

A step-by-step guide to leading a consultative conversation and facilitating an interactive

whiteboard dialogue 27 - 47

Success Stories A summary of key reference stories to leverage in illustrating and proving our value 49 - 51

SECTION CONTENT OVERVIEW PAGE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

2


Carry this with you and review prior to meeting

with clients.

This playbook will give you all the basics you need to know:

messaging principles, solution capabilities, ideal customer

profiles, market dynamics, buyer challenges, how to conduct an

executive conversation, and how to leverage your story. The

goal is to gain Executive Sponsorship, which is the access to the

right people and resources to complete an assessment prior to

developing a Solution Recommendation.

HOW TO USE THE SALES

MESSAGING PLAYBOOK

3


PLAYBOOK FLOW

DESIRED OUTCOME: Executive Sponsorship

Access to the right people and resources to complete an assessment prior to developing a Solution Recommendation.

KNOW THE CUSTOMER • Customer Audiences

• Trends and Insights

• Business Objectives and Challenges

• Three “Why” Questions

GET THE MEETING Leverage the “2-Minute” Story

• Phone

• Email

• Elevator

LEAD THE EXECUTIVE CONVERSATION

• Face to Face Whiteboard Discovery

4


Why Do Something Different?

Why Now?

Why DataCore?

CUSTOMER BUYING

QUESTIONS

With any major technology investment, clients are asking three fundamental questions during their buying process. Your sales success is directly tied to your ability to lead the customer in answering these questions.

Focus on product capability Focus on business value

Mastery of technical and competitive details

Mastery of the customer’s business problems

Seeks to win with features and functions

Thorough industry and process knowledge leads to credible recommendation

Defaults to product demonstrations and presentations

Maps recommended solutions onto customer business problems

Urgency to close deal Urgency to deliver results

“O” FACTOR: WHAT IS OUR MINDSET?

When we interact with senior customer executives and focus solely on their business issues (O-focus), our recognition as business advisors improves dramatically.

DIAGNOSIS BEFORE PRESCRIPTION

COMMON MISTAKES • Early solution recommendation without consultation • Weak assessment of customer priorities, challenges, and opportunities • Missing connection of DataCore solution to customer business objectives • Lack of knowledge of industry and culture • Inability to speak the customer’s language

BEST PRACTICES • Discover the business and operational problems before discussing

solutions • Require interviews as part of solution development • Do periodic “check-ups” in order to adjust to changing events / scenarios

SELF Focus

OTHER Focus

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Strategic/Financial/ Business Objectives

Sense of Urgency Cost of Delay

Unique Capabilities to Meet Customer’s Objectives

5


CORPORATE

STRATEGY

MARKETING STRATEGY

BRAND MESSAGING

SALES MESSAGING

FOCUSED ON A SPECIFIC

CUSTOMER AUDIENCE Focused on their business problem / opportunity and a specific business value proposition PURPOSE: advance a sales campaign OPERATIVE WORD: “Conversations”

BROAD AS POSSIBLE Focused on establishing a corporate identity PURPOSE: defining your company OPERATIVE WORD: “Positioning”

Sales Messaging converts strategy into actual words that the

sales team will communicate to create and win new business.

SALES

MESSAGING 6


PLAYBOOK PURPOSE

Mg

m t

Sta

ff

Exe

c

s

PHASE I Why Do Something Different?

PHASE II Why Now?

PHASE III Why DataCore?

Initial Interest Project Definition Solution Decision

PHASE I Why Do Something Different?

PHASE II Why Now?

PHASE III Why Qwest?

Awareness

Investigation

Interest

Education

Strategy

Initiative

Project Recommendation

Evaluation

Decision

TIME

“HIGH” AND “EARLY”

Our probability of sales success increases when DataCore generates the customer’s

initial interest to do something different. Target high as appropriate.

HOW TO LEAD THE CUSTOMER’S BUYING PROCESS

• Engage earlier in the buying process to provide insight at “Awareness” and “Education”

• Engage higher in the organization / decision-making authority

• Solve fundamental business problems for executive-level decision makers

TARGET HIGH = CFO, CIO, VP, etc.

The purpose of the Sales Messaging Playbook is to provide you with the content and process to engage in an interactive dialogue with your specific customer audiences about the business value of implementing a DataCore solution early in the customer buying process.

7

PROCESS FOR EXECUTING AN EARLY

STAGE CONVERSATION:

TARGETING the right customer and the right

contact utilizing the “Ideal Client Profile” and the

“Primary Customer Audiences.”

SCHEDULING an initial customer conversation

utilizing the “2-Minute Message.”

PREPARING for the conversation by understanding

the “Market Trends and Pressures” driving

interest in this area and the “Business

Objectives” of the audiences you are calling on.

PLANNING a Whiteboard dialogue by utilizing the 3

Why “Talk Tracks” for the specific buyer,

practicing an engaging whiteboard approach,

and determining the desired sponsorship

request at the end of the meeting.


MAJOR TRENDS

Virtualization has matured from simple partitioning and encapsulation to leveraging the mobility of virtual machines to improve management and operations of IT environments. Virtualization 2.0 includes a host of new use cases that range from high availability and disaster recovery, to hosted clients and true utility computing. Cloud computing is "a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT enabled capabilities are delivered 'as a service' using Internet technologies.” According to Gartner, management of virtual resources and standardization are two key areas that need to be considered at the very beginning and throughout the process of moving to cloud computing.

A recent IDC study found that digital information is doubling every two years and that type of information growth is what Big Data is all about.

The information available about buying behavior across many channels constitutes real opportunities to engage potential buyers in different ways to drive revenue at every stage of the customer lifecycle and at the right time.

Big Data

Virtualization

and

Cloud

Computing

More and more organizations are finding themselves under increasing pressure to close the gap between business strategy and execution in order to sustain their competitive edge.

Not surprisingly, they are turning to IT to deliver the efficiency, insight, and flexibility they need.

Strategic IT

8


Issues /

Implications

Discovery Questions Insights/POV/Provocations

Architecture is not flexible or scalable

• Describe your overall IT infrastructure environment.

• Where could your architecture or systems be more flexible? Where have you been challenged to meet the needs of the business?

• Where do you see challenges with scaling systems and services in the future? (i.e., integrating innovations, new technologies non-disruptively)

• How will you satisfy DR/BC obligations?

• What real estate considerations are you facing?

• Main theme: Architecture enables a common way to unify diversity

• Innovating IT groups are virtualizing their storage environment in a similar manner to the way they approach virtualizing their servers.

• Enterprises that do not virtualization-enable their management tools and processes will find themselves dealing with VM sprawl and a rapid increase in storage requirements, leading to unhealthy virtualized environments. (Gartner Roadmap from Virtualization to Cloud

Computing, 3 March 2011)

Budget constraints limit investment or innovation

• How are you addressing changes in technology that are being forced on you by the business or vendors?

• What projects have you not been able to implement or fund?

• What projects are currently on the board / in process?

• What steps are you taking to control recurring maintenance expenses?

• Main theme: Investment protection and cost savings.

• Don’t “rip and replace.” Most existing assets can be leveraged with the right solution. Have you considered the possibility of repurposing equipment rather than replacing?

• Have you considered how much software investment is thrown away anytime you switch out storage equipment?

Competing business priorities

• What strategic IT initiatives are currently planned to support the business?

• How do you balance innovation with ‘keeping the lights on’?

• Setting time aside to research & develop practices?

• What artificial accounting policies are forcing your buying decisions?

• Main theme: Flexibility of architecture to rapidly and easily integrate innovations.

• Gartner warns about standing still while competitors streak by. (Apply Storage Innovations to Create a Competitive Advantage Published: 9 November 2011)

Market Trends & Issues Trend #1: Strategic IT

9


Issues / Implications Discovery Questions Insights/POV/Provocations

Define the cloud • What does the cloud mean to you?

• Are you considering a Private Cloud, Public Cloud or Hybrid Cloud?

• What benefits are you seeking in your move to the cloud?

• Gartner recommends structuring your IT practices like Cloud Service Providers even if you are running a private datacenter. Think of it as a profit center, not a cost center. (Source: Accelerate IT Transformation With Cloud

Computing Best Practices Published: 15 December 2011)

Availability , accessibility and disaster recovery of data

• How much does planned down-time cost you?

• What is the impact of unplanned down-time?

• Are service levels uniform across the business?

• Which apps or servers require the highest level of availability?

• How do you match availability requirements to users?

• System availability is often impacted by the environmentals (facility outages) more than device failure.

• System maintenance = downtime.

Performance and flexibility

• How much do your end-users depend on the performance of applications? Which applications are most critical?

• How are you matching infrastructure performance capabilities to user requirements?

• How are performance requirements changing? If requirements vary, what is the impact?

• Not all applications demand same level of performance (auto-tiering).

• Poor performance can be the equivalent to “not available” or is “not useful.”

• Use Heterogeneous storage virtualization as a bridge to the cloud. (Source: Gartner, August

12, 2011)

Moving to the cloud • Which applications are you virtualizing? Which apps are candidates for moving to a private cloud?

• Where do you anticipate challenges arising as you build out your infrastructure?

• What regulatory or legal issues impact your move to the cloud?

• Virtualization is the first step in the move to the cloud.

• Many customers are looking to the cloud to relieve datacenter constraints.

Market Trends & Issues Trend #2: Virtualization and Cloud Computing

10


Issues / Implications Discovery Questions Insights/POV/Provocations

Increasing capacity and flexibility of your infrastructure

• What is driving Big Data in your business? What business value do you hope to gain from leveraging Big Data?

• What are the implications of Big Data on your infrastructure today or in the near future?

• What attribute will you optimize? (Capacity, Performance, Availability)

• How do you handle new technologies?

• A nominal big data environment will end up storing many times as much information as you would find in your average enterprise.

• IDC and industry analysts estimate that storage utilization is approximately 40-50%.

• Gartner suggests using at least 3 different classes (or tiers) of storage to match data value with the cost to store it. (How Much and What Type of Disk Storage Do IT

Departments Need? Publication Date: 27 September 2011 ID Number: G00218931)

Increased importance on governance, risk, and compliance

• Where is Big Data creating challenges for governance or compliance in your business? How are you addressing these?

• What risk mitigation strategies do you have in place to protect your data and applications?

• Data “outlives” the hardware lifecycle (compliance requirements, lifecycle of hardware not in sync with data, data migration, etc.).

• Data should move effortlessly between hardware platforms.

• Critical data should have redundant copies online.

Increased demand for system performance

• Where are your biggest bottlenecks for making Big Data available to end users?

• How do you define performance?

• How is Big Data driving increased uptime / performance requirements?

• Poor performance can be the equivalent to “not available.”

• Only 20% of the total cost of storage is hardware.

Security / Availability • What value do you place on accessibility? What is the implication to your business if your data is not accessible?

• Most customers forget to include planned downtime in this discussion.

Market Trends & Issues Trend #3: Big Data

11


Business Characteristics • Increased cost pressures driving need to optimize return on investments

• Very extraordinary High Availability / Disaster Recovery requirements

• Within a vertical where we have strong references or value proposition (healthcare, manufacturing, financial services)

• Company requires performance but cannot afford premium arrays or SSDs throughout

• Initial purchase can lead to more purchases (of larger company)

• Generally upper SMB – Mid-Enterprise range (depending on region)

• Storage is core to the business (hosting service provider)

• AVOID: • High performance computing (research firms, etc.) • Very large accounts (hard to retain due to our scale) • Very small accounts (hard to support because we ignore them)

Buying Characteristics • Existing relationship with strong DataCore partner (reseller or distributor)

• Existing initiative around improving TCO or reducing costs

• Affinity for greater hardware vendor choices

• Partner is trusted advisor with client

• Virtualization project as a key initiative

• Storage refresh planned

• Budget constrained/low for segment

• Have a resident technology expert who is a DataCore fan or champion

• Technical CIO

• High cost of storage maintenance

• Capable of investing 40k-100k for productivity software

• AVOID: • Very conservative CIOs • Feature-focused (buying particular FEATURE vs. buying into the overall value prop)

Technology Characteristics • Just stepping into virtualization

• Multiple storage arrays

• Demand for High Availability

• Diverse, multi-platform storage / HW environment

• Live migration of virtual machines

• Dynamic resource scheduling

• VMware HA and/or failover

• Windows -centric or multi-OS environment

• Mid-size IT org

• Offsite DR (Backup) requirement

• Two or more datacenters

• Solid-state disks

• Mixed physical and virtual servers

• SAN experience and/or problems (aging SAN, SAN/NAS challenges)

• Rely on local disks (internal server drives) (no SAN) yet

• AVOID:

• Mainframe environment

• Anti-windows culture

IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE

Although no buyer will have all of these

characteristics, the Ideal Customer Profile makes

clear the types of buyers who are most likely to

adopt our solutions.

12


Business

Executive

Technology

Executive

Technology

Guru/Specialist

CUSTOMER

AUDIENCES

This messaging has been developed and organized around three priority customer

audiences. The objective is to create compelling “talk tracks” that illustrate how the

customer can use DataCore’s capabilities to solve their business problems and achieve

their goals. The selling team will combine their knowledge of the individual customer with

their personal selling experience to develop a conversation strategy. Customer messaging

should be tailored and adopted for buyer-specific customer conversations.

Titles: • Virtual Leader • IT Manager • Systems Engineer • Solution Architect

Titles: • CEO, COO, CFO • Business Owner • General Manager • Business Unit Leader Desired Impression: “DataCore will enable a more reliable business platform to manage our storage assets.”

Titles: • CIO • CTO • VP/Director of IT

Desired Impression: “DataCore delivers the storage infrastructure flexibility we need to meet business demands.”

Desired Impression: “DataCore delivers the most value from their flexible storage architecture.”

13


1 2 1 2 3 Increase

Organizational Performance, Productivity

& ROI

Drive Innovation

Across Business

Create Sustainable Competitive Advantage

BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

Enabling Top Business Priorities

Reducing Cost of Technology Investments

Improving Scalability,

Reliability, & Performance

BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

Ease of Integration & Maintenance

System Performance & Reliability

BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

Inflexible infrastructure

Ability to take advantage of innovation

Growing demand for IT services & capacity

Capturing, promoting, & replicating best practices across enterprise

Focused on bottom line & need to cut cost

Existing infrastructure & systems don’t support innovation

Transition to a virtualized environment

Making sound financial decisions, providing alternatives

Shifting funding from cost cutting projects to more innovative top-line growth opportunities

Creating a culture of continuous innovation and improvement

Speed & ability to make change happen

1 2 3

BUSINESS EXECUTIVE TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE TECHNOLOGY GURU

CHALLENGES

Optimizing infrastructure for needed/accelerated ROI

Increasing demand & more device diversity

Rebuying/throw-away technology

Legacy infrastructure investment protection

Downtime & outages

Slow application performance

Range of high-availability, business continuity

Managing diverse devices & vendors

Managing storage expansion

Optimally provisioning capacity

Multiple hardware & software vendors

Optimal tiering of data by price & capacity

Integration & migration of new technology with infrastructure

Maintaining systems with minimal impact to business

Cost & infrastructure requirements to deliver high availability

Continuous availability & disaster recovery

Virtualization initiatives driving need for increased performance

Big Data/Information management

14


CHALLENGES QUESTIONS TO ASK

Focused on bottom line and need to cut cost

• What is your target objective for cost reduction in current year?

• What are a few of the ways you are looking to reduce costs?

• How aggressively are you moving to change your cost structure?

• How aggressively are you managing your maintenance renewals?

• What would it look like to have a stronger negotiating weapon to use with your storage manufacturers?

Capturing, promoting and replicating best practices across the enterprise

• What organizational limitations are reducing your ability to respond to the pace of change?

• How has mobility and collaboration changed the way your employees work?

• If you could redeploy your resources where would be the emphasis?

Making sound financial decisions, providing flexibility and alternatives

• Have you ever felt limited in your decision based on the technology you are using in your company?

• Do you see Cloud computing / Virtualization as a cost savings to your business model?


Transition to a virtualized environment

• What areas have been stressed due to your transition to virtualization?

• Are your end-users experiencing performance issues in your transition to a virtualized environment?

• What unsuspected cost expenditures have you incurred in your transition?

Creating a culture of continuous innovation and improvement

• Do you have plans in place to develop a culture of competency and best practice around ‘big data’, virtualization, and DR/business continuity?

Speed and ability to make change happen

• How is your IT infrastructure inhibiting your ability to meet client demands/competitive threats?


Existing infrastructure and systems do not support innovation (lack of flexibility, being held back, existing infrastructure won't support new problems)

• Which industry dynamics are impacting you today, and how are you addressing them?

• Which emerging/potential industry trends could impact your business and how will it impact your computing capabilities?

Shifting funding from cost cutting projects to more innovative top line growth opportunities

• What percentage of budget for IT operations is focused on existing tools and headcount vs. development of new tools and technology?

• How do you fund major technology infrastructure upgrades?

• Do you consider IT as a competitive tool?

OBJECTIVE 1: Increase Organizational Performance, Productivity, and ROI/TCO

OBJECTIVE 3: Create Sustainable Competitive Advantage

OBJECTIVE 2: Drive Innovation Across Business to Positively Impact Market Position

WHY DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT?

Business

Executive

Titles: • CEO, COO, CFO • Business Owner • General Manager • Business Unit Leader

Desired Impression: “DataCore will enable a more reliable business platform and delivers a compelling ROI.”

15



Inflexible infrastructure/

equipment problems

• What priority is given precedent in the face of complex and expensive maintenance and storage issues - performance or cost?

• How quickly can you retool to meet changing priorities? Within a quarter or project?

• How can you reassign resources to meet unexpected demands? New apps?

• Any urgent regulatory / policy driven requirements influencing near-term technology choices/acquisitions?

Growing demand for IT services and capacity

• On a scale of 1-10, what is your current storage utilization?

• What are your plans for addressing storage constraints today and in the future?

Optimizing existing infrastructure for needed and accelerated ROI

• How do you achieve your current ROI models with the current explosion of Big Data?

• How do you architect for peak performance?

Ability to take advantage of innovation (pace of change of business priorities)

• How quickly do you jump on new technology?

• What are you peers in related companies doing that you would like to emulate? Which are good benchmark examples?

• Have you singled out any initiatives that are expected to yield competitive advantage?


Increasing demand and more device diversity

• Where has your IT infrastructure faced challenges due to rising or fluctuating costs?

• How much of your operating costs are attributed to data storage or managing information?

• How well do your ROI models hold up with increasing costs of storage?

• Can you accommodate different classes of gear to match value of what you are processing? Premium, midrange, low cost?

Legacy infrastructure investment protection

• How do you determine and prioritize storage needs and investments?

• What constrains the choices you make in technology investment? (compatibility, vendor trust?)

• How much of your IT costs are attributed to long term maintenance vs. using it towards new acquisitions?

• OS dependencies/ specialty equipment – are they difficult to replace?

• Managing at app level / device level vs. system-wide?

Downtime and outages • What facility outages have you experienced in the past? What are current risk areas?

• How have these outages impacted your cost structure?

Rebuying/throw-away technology

• How much of your investment is discarded with hardware refresh?

• How frequently do your turnover equipment / useful life?

• What drives you to replace current gear?

• How do you license your storage functionality?

OBJECTIVE 1: Enabling Top Business Priorities

OBJECTIVE 2: Reducing Cost of Technology Investments


Technology

Executive


Desired Impression: “DataCore delivers the flexibility we need to meet business demands.”

16



Slow application performance

• What plans do you have in place to optimize performance in light of new storage demands?

• Have you identified the bottlenecks? Or anticipated shortcomings?

• How is your infrastructure designed for peak loads? Does this cause poor utilization elsewhere?

Managing diverse devices and vendors

• How satisfied are you with your plans to optimize the existing storage infrastructure?

• How do you make those choices?

• How do you assign resources to requirements?

• How dynamic are those reassignments?

Managing storage expansion • What physical or technical impediments exist that might prevent capacity expansion to meet business needs?

• How wide is your assortment of purpose-built equipment?

• How much does storage acquisition and integration add to the time it takes to bring a new application to production if only 20% of cost is associated with HW?

• What if you could react to changing performance requirements quicker or even on the fly?

Range of high-availability, business continuity and disaster recovery options (one-size doesn’t fit all)

• Do you have an SLA for full site failure/recovery? Has it ever been validated?

• What other datacenters / branch offices are available, or in consideration?

• How has extended trouble resolution and system downtime impacted your business?

• How much downtime has occurred from maintenance and disaster recovery?

Optimally provisioning capacity

• Describe your challenges in provisioning capacity today.

• How do you optimally provision capacity to meet demand?

OBJECTIVE 3: Improving Scalability/Availability/Performance


Technology

Executive


Desired Impression: “DataCore delivers the flexibility we need to meet business demands.”

17



Multiple hardware and software vendors

• Where have multiple vendors caused integration challenges?

• What is your plan to manage multiple devices and vendors? Have you considered virtualization for your storage?

• Does downtime due to migration impact production? Would you like to migrate data at 10:00AM on a Tuesday?

• Please describe your current environment.

Integration and migration of new technology with existing infrastructure.

• What new technologies are you considering?

• What’s the impact of these new technologies on your business?

• What challenges have you faced integrating these new technologies?

• What prevents you from integrating a particular technology?

Maintaining systems with minimal impact to the business

• Describe your maintenance process for key hardware and storage?

• Where has planned downtime for maintenance caused challenges with the business?

Optimal tiering of data by price and capacity

• How do you integrate new storage device into your environment?

• How do you ensure the right storage is available for the right work load?

• How are you optimizing your storage resources to fibre channel?


Cost and infrastructure requirements to deliver high availability

• How do you define high availability?

• Which business functions require high availability solutions? What would be the impact of unexpected downtime, do bad things happen?

• Has unexpected downtime or failures caused issues with the business, please explain?

• What is your biggest concern relative to availability?

Virtualization initiatives driving need for increased performance

• What application performance issues exist today?

• How do you optimize storage for your application work loads?

• Have new initiatives driven an increase in performance requirements?

• Where does data storage create a bottleneck for you today?

Big Data/Information Management

• What business functions are driving the largest data management challenges today? How are you addressing those challenges?

• What are your plans to scale data storage with the growth of the business?

Continuous availability and disaster recovery

• How do you define High Availability? Disaster Recovery?

• What are your Disaster Recovery plans? What are challenges?

OBJECTIVE 1: Ease of Integration and Maintenance

OBJECTIVE 2: System Performance and Reliability


Technology

Guru

Titles: • Virtualization Leader • IT Manager • Systems Engineer • Solution Architect

Desired Impression: “DataCore outperforms the competition and is easy to manage.”

18


External events that occur independent of client actions and that drive business

decisions.

COMPELLING EVENTS • New competitors or increasing competitive threats

• Change in compliance/regulatory requirements

• Mergers and acquisitions / business expansion (new facilities) / smaller facilities

• Recent natural disasters, system failures, or downtime event

• Seasonal disaster risks (winter storms, summer hurricanes)

• New budget allocation or expiration (use it or lose it)

• Operating cost reduction mandate

• CapEx / Asset spend reduction mandate

• Government stimulus

• Large maintenance & support renewals deadline

• Current lease expirations

• Match to support payment/maintenance cycle

• New IT strategic initiative

• Standardize systems/platforms across business units

• Systems in need of upgrading / retirement to support business needs

• Losses in market being traced to IT systems

• Disaster recovery initiative

• Storage a key enabler of strategic initiatives (mobility, virtualization, cloud)

• Major expansion / need to expand

• DataCenter move / consolidation

• New application / line of business roll out

• New clients / tenants (in hosting service providers)

• Desire to introduce new best practices and innovation

• Attainment of personal MBOs / objectives / bonus payout

• First to market

• Relationship with Partner that promotes DataCore

• IT guru is leaving the company – need to address issues before gone

FINANCIAL STRATEGIC PERSONAL

WHY NOW?

Internal client-specific motivations driving a sense of urgency

$

19


WHY DataCore? Key Differentiators Customer Proof Points

Where we function (outside the box) • Storage hypervisor – an architecture for managing and

optimizing storage assets

• Investment protection; no need to ‘rip and replace’

• Vendor independence / flexibility of choice

• Portable software layer not constricted by a box

• Open / non-proprietary

• Intelligent sizing to requirements

• Ports of Auckland: end-to-end virtualization, business continuity and seamless maintenance, better performance and utilization

• Community Hospital: migrated from IBM x3/ to Hitachi… without down-time

• OFD - Regional Tax Office of Rheinlandpfalz: Management and remote control of their storage, efficient storage usability

Span of coverage (universal applicability) • Hardware interchangeability – to avoid ‘rip and replace’ and

enable future proofing

• Universal auto-tiering and management of storage resources

• Physical, Virtual, Cloud

• Generation to generation within same vendor

• Flexible, scalable platform / future proof

• Kingston City Council: enhanced productivity & reduced risk, capacity management and the power of independence

• Continuum Healthcare: high availability – Datacenter, NY/NJ

• Goethe University Frankfurt: capacity management and seamless maintenance; Implementation over time, both in breadth and scope

Uniformity (simplified management) • Architecture: Common management, intelligence and

optimization across incompatible and diverse devices

• You can add intelligence to any disk and manage it all from single interface without the need to learn it again

• An abstraction layer, universal, scalable, simplicity

• Common set of services through a common interface

• Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu: high performance, business continuity and availability

• Department of energy: storage consolidation, physical to virtual conversion of servers

• Niedax: high availability and energy efficiency, storage performance optimization, and automatic capacity allocation intelligence

20


The “2-Minute Story” is a framework, approach and repository of content to be used for sales

situations where you engage in conversation with a customer for a brief period of time and

must quickly explain what we do, how we do it, and what results our customer will receive.

• We are always finding ourselves facing unexpected opportunities to make a persuasive,

personal connection with customer executives (i.e. elevator, parking lot, company lunch

room, etc.).

• Initial impressions can make a lasting impact on customer executives. Do not waste your

opportunity by not being prepared.

• In order to maximize these critical selling opportunities, top-performing sales professionals

memorize (master) a repeatable way to introduce themselves to a customer.

How? in phone conversations, trade shows, individual face-to-face conversations, group presentation introductions, e-mails

When? every time we have a quick opportunity to introduce DataCore

Why? to create interest in conducting a face-to-face customer conversation

What is a 2 Minute Story?

When is it used?

TWO-MINUTE STORY

21


TWO-MINUTE STORY

Who We Are…

• We are an industry leading software company specializing in storage virtualization

• We develop and deploy storage hypervisor software used in enterprise datacenters

Why We Are Different…

• Our delivery mechanism is purely through a software architecture, not tied to specific hardware – we perform “outside the box”

• We have universal applicability – any technology, any device, any connectivity

• We bring simplified management and uniformity to your storage infrastructure

How We Do It…

• We use software to add a layer of intelligence between storage and workload

• We use automation and common interfaces to optimize storage provisioning and protect data

• We automate the tiering of data to optimize performance and capacity utilization

• We pool and aggregate any disk from any vendor and provide a common interface

Client Results… • Eliminated down-time

• Reduced CapEx and OpEx

• Increased asset utilization

• Increased performance and flexibility

• Greater freedom of choice

The 2-minute message is used to obtain an

executive’s commitment to a 30 minute meeting.

What We Do…

• We ultimately enable IT to be more responsive to business needs

• We optimize existing investments and new storage infrastructures, even in an environment with diverse, interchangeable hardware

• We generate more value from existing IT assets than when used in isolation

• We dramatically improve performance flexibility, availability, functionality, and utilization of storage infrastructures

22


WB

A whiteboard creates a creative atmosphere that enables an informal,

conceptual conversation with a customer.

It is a process, not a pitch. It is a dialogue, not a monologue.

WHITEBOARD It creates a visual framework for connecting the customer’s challenges and our vision by using a graphical approach to share our unique, DataCore point of view.

The process of drawing the framework further engages the customer and establishes a common space for lively discussion, engagement, and meeting of the minds.

Why Do Something Different?

Why Now?

Why DataCore?

Why Sponsorship?

12

6

9 3

12

6

9 3

12

6

9 3

12

6

9 3

1. Introduce the purpose of the meeting with a bold value proposition / provocation

2. Confirm specific business objectives and priorities

3. Establish the ‘Current State’ and why their current approach will not produce the desired result

4. Confirm the Urgency to Do Something Now

5. Introduce the DataCore approach for creating the ‘Desired State’

6. Illustrate DataCore’s experience working with similar clients and their results

7. Recommend next steps and explain sponsorship role

23


Generate Insights Establish Course of Conversation Establish Next Steps Build Your Plan

Foundation for a successful meeting

Pre-meeting preparation

Establish context

Build rapport

Initiate dialogue Ask for permission to use Whiteboard

Draw the Whiteboard Framework

Dialogue about Whiteboard in customer’s context

Discussion of path forward

Establish clear next steps

Understand:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Business strategy initiatives

High-level issues / trends

Current operational capabilities & approach

Initial reasons for Why Do Something Different, Why Now?

Executive Team backgrounds

Establish:

Desired outcomes

Team composition

Meeting plan

Make introductions

Express thanks

Make personal connection

Recognize existing relationships if applicable

Confirm goals

Customer’s expected value from meeting

Be genuine

Relax!

Focus on priorities

Ask business /issues related questions

Listen to customer

Demonstrate cust. Knowledge

Make a claim – “I think we can help…”

Propose thoughts

“Help you get more from investment in…”

“How to solve problem / issue”

Look for opportunity to ask permission to draw Whiteboard framework

“I’d love to show you some ideas that might help… may I?”

“I have a picture in mind that might help. Is that ok?”

“Do you mind if I draw a few things to help the discussion?”

“I find pictures sometimes add to these discussions. “Do you mind if I draw?”

Follow customer lead if they do not give you permission

Draw initial framework

Briefly describe each element as you draw

Leave all drawings on board – do not erase unless out of space

Ask questions about customer’s approach to solving issues

Summarize what you hear to confirm understanding

Reference other customer situations for credibility

Don’t worry about a “messy” Whiteboard

Propose next steps:

Further discovery

Workshop

Demonstration

Software trial

Explain benefits to customer situation

Ask for sponsorship

Confirm next steps

Establish understanding for a return meeting

Propose Next Steps

Wrap-up Discuss Engage Permission Build Rapport

Prepare Whiteboard Framework

This allows the Whiteboard to happen

WHAT TO DO

HOW TO DO IT

CONVERSATION PROCESS WB 24


Business Whiteboard

25


Confirm specific business objectives and priorities

Establish the Current State and its challenges

Discuss the costs of delay (strategic, financial and personal) of the Current State approach

Introduce the DataCore approach for creating the Desired State

Recommend Next Steps and Sponsorship Requirements

Illustrate the Value that DataCore customers have achieved and/or can expect

1 2 3 4

5 6

7

Introduce the purpose of the meeting with a provocation

BUILDING THE

WHITEBOARD

26


WHAT TO DRAW

TRANSITION PREPARATION

TALKING POINTS

STEP 1: Introduce the Purpose

Open the meeting with standard meeting best practices:

• Confirm the availability of time

• Review meeting purpose and agenda

• Ask if there are any additional expectations

Introduce the meeting value proposition as we discussed leading up to this meeting:

Today’s infrastructure (specifically the storage infrastructure) is not optimally designed to meet the needs of the business.

• We want to talk to you about:

• Increasing the flexibility and scalability of your storage related infrastructure

• Delivering more performance, innovation, and value to the business

• And doing that while driving costs out and reducing overall operating costs

Conduct research prior to the meeting:

• Review their website, 10K, External/Industry Analysis, etc.

– What are their Competitive Pressures? Infrastructure? Current IT initiatives?

• What are the buyer’s objectives, challenges, urgencies?

• Validate with Partners that have insight into the customer

Before we dive into the details, let us make sure I am in

alignment with your strategic priorities. Would it be okay if

I use your whiteboard to capture some of these ideas?

27


WHAT TO DRAW

TRANSITION QUESTIONS TO ASK

TALKING POINTS

STEP 2: Confirm Business Objectives

• As we begin I’d like to confirm my understanding of your priorities. As I engage with other Executives, I am typically hearing these objectives…

1. Improve management of assets

2. Improve performance of IT systems

3. Improve scalability of the infrastructure

4. Reduce overall operating costs and do more with less

(Customize the objectives based on pre-meeting research)

• Does this align with your objectives?

• What additions or changes would you make?

• How would you prioritize them?

Let’s look further into your current state and some of the

challenges you face in trying to achieve these objectives.

28


WHAT TO DRAW


TALKING POINTS

STEP 3: Establish the Current State

Given these dynamics – help me understand your degree of

urgency to address these issues?

• When we think about a storage infrastructure to support the strategic needs of the business, we think about key factors, such as, cost, people, performance, utilization, and availability.

• But, what we find in most cases, is that the current infrastructure architecture does not provide the flexibility, scalability, or features required by the business.

• In fact, we tend to see • Costs continuing to rise • Complexity creating increased effort and

inefficiencies • Service levels not being met • Subpar utilization • And limited availability

• And when a new business need comes along, the architecture isn’t flexible to support that need without adding additional assets at a cost, further contributing to these issues.

• Does this sound like your environment?

• Where do you have assets dedicated to certain workloads?

• Are you struggling with unmet business needs? Or are you challenged to deliver on new initiatives?

29


WHAT TO DRAW


TALKING POINTS

STEP 4: Discuss the Cost of Delay

• As we speak with other customers they are describing their urgency to make changes sooner vs. later. We hear such things as:

• Change needed to support high priority business initiatives

• Cost reduction mandates

• Need for improved performance or high availability

(Confirm and prioritize their urgency and/or specific initiatives then add to it based on the customer)

• Based on what you’ve said, your urgency on these issues seem quite high. On a 1-10 scale, what would you say ?

• What changes would be most important to you?

We want to partner with you to optimize your underlying

storage infrastructure so you can address your business

needs while also improving your operating costs.

30


WHAT TO DRAW

TRANSITION

TALKING POINTS

STEP 5: Introduce the Desired State

At this point, it probably makes sense to talk about some of

our recent experience with other customers.

• Our unique software architecture allows you to immediately transform your storage infrastructure into a more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure for the business.

• With our storage solution, we can work across any device from any vendor, and essentially pool these resources together to support workloads in the most optimal manner.

• This has substantial impact to the business:

• We commonly see costs drop by 60% or greater

• The management of your assets is improved requiring less work and effort

• Performance goes up by 3 times or more

• You’re able to maximize utilization of current assets

• And availability of resources is unlimited with true ‘high availability’

• Some of the DataCore drivers that make this happen include…

• (Write a couple bullets for each key key element as shown in the whiteboard picture)

31


WHAT TO DRAW


TALKING POINTS

STEP 6: Illustrate DataCore Value

• Over the past 10 years, we’ve delivered significant business value to customers by transforming their storage infrastructure through virtualization software.

• Let me tell you about a couple that were in a similar situation as yourself.

• Tell a customer story in this flow:

• Customer Challenges/Objectives

• Solution Approach

• Customer Results

• What differentiates us in our approach and delivers significant business value to our clients is:

• Our storage hypervisor software solution

• Our hardware interchangeability – no need to ‘rip and replace’

• And our universal auto-tiering across ALL devices to maximize performance and capacity

(Write key words down on the whiteboard as you summarize)

• What similarities stand out to you based on these client stories?

• What metrics would be important for you if you were to make this type of change?

Based on our discussion to this point, it seems like we

should discuss next steps.

32


WHAT TO DRAW


TALKING POINTS

STEP 7: Confirm Next Steps

• Let me recommend the following next steps:

• An assessment to understand more details about your current situation.

• Sponsorship: for this to be effective, you will need to sponsor our assessment and review meeting.

• Review meeting with you and key stakeholders where we can communicate our findings and recommendations.

• How do these next steps sound?

• What concerns or questions do you have?

• Who are the key stakeholders we want to include?

• When can we schedule a review meeting?

Given what we have discussed, can I suggest that we look at

our calendars and determine tentative dates for the

assessment and review meeting?

33


Technical WHITEBOARD

34


Confirm specific business objectives and priorities

Establish the Current State and its challenges

Discuss the costs of delay (strategic, financial and personal) of the Current State approach

Introduce the DataCore approach for creating the Desired State

Recommend Next Steps and Sponsorship Requirements

Illustrate the Value that DataCore customers have achieved and/or can expect

1 2 3 4

5 6

7

Introduce the purpose of the meeting with a provocation

BUILDING THE

WHITEBOARD

35


WHAT TO DRAW

TRANSITION PREPARATION

TALKING POINTS

STEP 1: Introduce the Purpose

Open the meeting with standard meeting best practices:

• Confirm the availability of time

• Review meeting purpose & agenda

• Ask if there are any additional expectations

Introduce the meeting value proposition as we discussed leading up to this meeting:

Today’s infrastructure (and specifically the storage infrastructure) is not optimally designed to meet the needs of the business.

• We want to talk to you about:

• Increasing the flexibility and scalability of your storage related infrastructure

• Delivering more performance, innovation, and value to the business

• And doing that while driving costs out and reducing overall operating costs

Conduct research prior to the meeting:

• Review their website, 10K, External/Industry Analysis, etc.

– What are their Competitive Pressures? Infrastructure? Current IT initiatives?

• What are the buyer’s objectives, challenges, urgencies?

• Validate with Partners that have insight into the customer.

Before we dive into the details, let us make sure I am in

alignment with your strategic priorities. Would it be okay if

I use your whiteboard to capture some of these ideas?

36


WHAT TO DRAW


TALKING POINTS

STEP 2: Confirm Business Objectives

• As we begin I’d like to confirm my understanding of your priorities. As I engage with other Executives I am typically hearing these objectives…

1. Improve management of assets

2. Improve performance of IT systems

3. Improve scalability of the infrastructure

4. Reduce overall operating costs and do more with less

(Customize the objectives based on pre-meeting research)

• Does this align with your objectives?

• What additions or changes would you make?

• How would you prioritize them?

Lets look further into your Current State and some of the

challenges you face in trying to achieve these objectives.

37


WHAT TO DRAW


TALKING POINTS

STEP 3: Establish the Current State

Given these dynamics – help me understand your degree of

urgency to address these issues?

• We tend to see IT infrastructures designed or deployed in a siloed approach, resulting in dedicated storage assets supporting different types of work loads.

• For example, • You may have one asset (or group of assets)

supporting your primary servers • Another storage asset supporting mobile devices or

virtualized applications • And, another set of assets supporting your

corporate LAN (desktops and laptops) • And most of the time, companies will find some of these

assets maxed out on capacity, while others have spare capacity. But, the problem is that spare capacity can’t currently be used for other workloads.

• This results in • Idle assets • Higher costs • Poor performance

• And when a new business need comes along, the architecture is not flexible to support that need without adding additional assets at a cost.

• Does this sound like your environment?

• Where do you have assets dedicated to certain workloads?

• Are you struggling with unmet business needs? Or are you challenged to deliver on new initiatives?

38


WHAT TO DRAW


TALKING POINTS

STEP 4: Discuss the Cost of Delay

• As we speak with other customers, they are describing their urgency to make changes sooner vs. later. We hear such things as:

• High priority business initiatives

• Cost reduction mandates

• Need for improved performance or high availability

(Confirm and prioritize their urgency and/or specific initiatives, add to it based on customer)

• Based on what you have said, your urgency on these issues seem quite high. On a 1-10 scale, what would you say ?

• What changes would be most important to you?

We want to partner with you to optimize your underlying

storage infrastructure so you can address your business

needs while also improving your operating costs.

39


WHAT TO DRAW

TRANSITION

TALKING POINTS

STEP 5: Introduce the Desired State

At this point, it probably makes sense to talk about some of

our recent experience with other customers.

• Our unique software solution allows you to break down these storage silos and create a more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure for the business.

• With our storage solution, we can work across any device from any vendor, and essentially pool these resources together to support workloads in the most optimal manner.

• This shared storage becomes available to all workloads.

• The software automatically matches the right asset with the right demand – for example, high performance apps will use the highest performance storage assets

• Unused or idle capacities will now become available, delaying the need to purchase more storage

• And our true high availability solution will eliminate both planned and unplanned downtime

• And when a new business need comes along, that workload can easily be added to the mix, often times without adding additional capacity.

• This solution delivers compelling value to the business:

• Higher utilization of existing assets

• Increased performance from your assets

• A flexible architecture that can deliver more innovation to the business (more easily address initiatives like virtualization or move to the cloud)

40


WHAT TO DRAW


TALKING POINTS

STEP 6: Illustrate DataCore Value

• Over the past 10 years, we’ve delivered significant business value to customers by transforming their storage infrastructure through virtualization software.

• Let me tell you about a couple that were in a similar situation as yourself…

• Tell a customer story in this flow:

• Customer Challenges/Objectives

• Solution Approach

• Customer Results

• What differentiates us in our approach and delivered significant business value to our clients is:

• Our storage hypervisor software solution

• Our hardware interchangeability – no need to ‘rip and replace’

• And our universal auto-tiering across ALL devices to maximize performance and capacity

(Write key words down on the Whiteboard as you summarize)

• What similarities stand out to you based on these client stories?

• What metrics would be important for you if you were to make this type of change?

Based on our discussion up to this point, it seems like

we should discuss next steps.

41


WHAT TO DRAW


TALKING POINTS

STEP 7: Confirm Next Steps

• Let me recommend the following next steps:

• An assessment to understand more details about your current situation

• Sponsorship: For this to be effective, you will need to sponsor our assessment and review meeting

• Review Meeting with you and key stakeholders where we can communicate our findings and recommendations

• How do these next steps sound?

• What concerns or questions do you have?

• Who are the key stakeholders we want to include?

• When can we schedule a review meeting?

Given what we have discussed, can I suggest that we look at

our calendars and determine tentative dates for the

assessment and review meeting?

42


CUSTOMER CHALLENGE: Downtime is an unnecessary distraction, and had an unacceptable impact on port operations, therefore, needed to be eliminated. 95% of its server’s infrastructure is virtualized and an aging SAN infrastructure, couldn’t keep up with the demands of a highly-virtualized environment.

DATACORE SOLUTION: • DataCore SANsymphony: geographically

separated between buildings on campus • Servers : pair of IBM x3650 • 14 x ESX hosts • 95 percent of its server infrastructure is

virtualized • Storage: Xiotech Storage Blades with 52TB

CUSTOMER RESULTS: Performance has been nothing short of phenomenal; able to support far more virtual machines and far more I/O requests than the IT team had originally expected. Now in control of their storage future, saving more than $100,000 to go to the next generation of hardware “No-Panic” Business Continuity and Seamless Maintenance: can suffer a complete SAN array failure at one site and have the systems carry on running without any manual intervention.

43

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORIES: Where We Function

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE: Downtime not tolerable – Community Health Network (CHN) is healthcare provider and the nation’s first all digital hospital. They must have their system up and running 24/7/365. These systems include MRI, Radiology, and PACS. System outages can result in patient not receiving timely medical care. CHN doesn’t have the luxury of maintenance windows during long weekends, long weekends are often the busiest. CHN wanted to be able to manage their storage, migrate data and implement new storage without downtime. Due to high resolution x-ray, color MRI, and HIPPA regulations CHN needed be able to scale their storage capacity significantly.

DATACORE SOLUTION: • DataCore SANsymphony • Dell R910 • 500+ virtual servers (Oracle, file servers, Exchange) • Storage: HDS UPS-v 100TB mirrored between datacenters

20 miles apart.

CUSTOMER RESULTS: Community implemented SANsymphony 8 years ago. SANsymphony has enabled them to increase the availability of their IBM Shark arrays by synchronously mirroring between arrays, and subsequently between site (18 miles apart). Over the last 8 years, CHN has migrated data from IBM Shark to IBM FastT to IBM DS8100 and finally to HDS USP-V – all of these migration were done without application downtime. In addition to seamless failover and fail back, CHN realized increased performance from the SANsymphony cache and improved utilization from SANsymphony thin-Provisioning.

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE: OFD is the 2nd biggest datacenter owned by the government in Germany. The goal was to virtualize everything possible in their DataCenter. Rapid Storage deployment was a must, as well as, vendor independence. Additionally, the same solution was to be developed across different branch offices, and capable to host over 1100 VM’s based on ESX at minimum and on a limited budget. The request from management was to achieve 100% virtualization thru the DataCenter including archive possibilities.

DATACORE SOLUTION: • 4 x DataCore SANsymphony and 2x SANMelody (for

archiving)at the Primary Data Center; and 54 x SANMelody across Rheinlandpfalz (27 branch Offices)

• Servers: Dell R900 (Data Center)and Dell R710 (archive + branch offices)

• 56 x ESX hosts (Data Center) and 54 x ESX hosts (Branch office)

• 100 percent of its server infrastructure is virtualized • Storage: 80TB Dell MD 1000, 80TB Nexsan SAS Beast

CUSTOMER RESULTS: • Lightning fast Performance, 100% uptime • Centralized management and remote control of their

storage in the branch offices, very efficient storage usability

• ROI within the 2 years based on Vendor independence, and Enterprise Storage Features across different hardware

OFD Regional Tax Office of Rheinlandpfalz


CUSTOMER CHALLENGE: Continuum Health Partners consist of Beth Israel, Roosevelt and St Luke’s Hospital in New York City. Continuum, like most hospital systems, wanted to avoid downtime due to storage migrations, upgrades and hardware failures. They need to seamlessly scale storage capacity because of technology enhancements and HIPPA regulations. Continuum and plans called for significant growth by acquisition over the next few years. The acquisitions will require Continuum will need to accommodate large amounts of data and disparate.

DATACORE SOLUTION: • DataCore SANsymphony • Metro Mirror • IBM x3650 • 500+ virtual servers (Oracle, file servers, Exchange) • Storage: 2.5PB mirrored ( IBM DS4800 & DS5100,

EVA8000, and EMC CX4)

CUSTOMER RESULTS: The implementation of SANsymphony Continuum was able to increase availability by synchronously mirroring data between datacenters. This enabled them to maintain access to their data even in the event of a complete array failure. Continuum has seamlessly scaled their storage capacity to 2.5+ PB since implementing DataCore SANsymphony. SANsymphony provides a common set of services across multiple brands of storage facilitating unified management.

44

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORIES: Span of Coverage

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE: Had numerous servers with directly attached storage, making administration and sharing storage across systems was difficult at best. Some servers were fully utilized, while others had capacity that was untouched. 50+ applications in its corporate suite that underpinned the whole organization.

DATACORE SOLUTION: • DataCore SANsymphony • Servers: 3 x IBM x3650 (production HA, DR

replication) • 6 x ESX hosts • 110+ virtual servers (CRM, Microsoft SQL, file

servers, Exchange and VOIP with a plan to deploy VDI)

• § Storage: IBM DS 3524 16TB mirrored, 32TB disaster recovery

CUSTOMER RESULTS: Non-stop IT operations, a huge benefit to not have to bring systems down for maintenance. Effective capacity management and seamless maintenance. Ability to grow its implementation over time, both in breadth and scope. Huge portability advantage. When systems need to be upgraded or expanded, the investment in software is preserved. DR testing was done for the auditors and the DataCore system passed with flying colors.

Kingston

City Council

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE: Goethe University Frankfurt is one of the largest Universities in Germany. They have more than 36.000 students and is one of the biggest hospitals in Germany. Requirements included 100% uptime and geo separation, multivendor tiering, and reducing overall costs by introducing a new PACS system (picture archiving and communication system) with more than 200TB of Data.

DATACORE SOLUTION: • 2 x DataCore SANsymphony (PACS) • 2 x SANSymphony – V (Tier 2 Medical Application’s) • 2x SANMelody iSCSI based for test and development • Servers: HP Proliant 370 • 200+ Medical Application’s running on Physical and

Virtual Servers • Storage: HP - EVA8000, HP - P2000, (300TB) + HP direct

attached Storage (100TB)

CUSTOMER RESULTS: • Non-stop IT operations, a huge benefit not to have to

bring systems down to do maintenance. • Effective capacity management and seamless

maintenance. • Ability to grow its implementation over time, both in

breadth and scope. • Huge portability advantage, when systems need to be

upgraded or expanded, the investment in software is preserved.

• PACS DR Testing successfully done.

Goethe University Frankfurt

© 2012 DataCore and DSG Consulting. All Rights Reserved. 45

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORIES: Uniformity

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE: Challenging project deadlines for customer behavior modeling requiring 24x7, 365-day-a-year processing and computing control. IO bottlenecks on traditional storage and limited flexibility for best of breed technologies and industry innovations.

DATACORE SOLUTION: • DataCore SANsymphony • Servers: dual Intel Server Systems

(production HA) • 3 x Microsoft Hyper-V hosts • 20+ virtual servers (Microsoft SQL,

file servers, SPSS & Tactician Software)

• Storage: LSI controllers with 8TB and mixture of SAS and SSD automatically tiered capacity

CUSTOMER RESULTS: A huge portability advantage, free to choose physical storage on the basis of storage characteristic and leverage any technology to fulfill increasing project obligations. Unprecedented storage performance optimization and automatic capacity allocation intelligence.

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE: The Department of Energy Legacy Management (DOE LM) has a number of older storage devices (Dell / Eq 400 & 5000 and Nexsan SATABeast2) with approximately 140TB total data on them related to the Yucca Mountain project. The data on these arrays needs to be maintained. These aging arrays are going end of support in the coming months (Dell / Eq 400) or coming year (Dell / Eq 5000 & Nexsan SATABeast2). The data needs to be migrated to a new Dell / Compellent storage array. Because the DOE LM planned to redeploy the older storage systems to critical functions, they needed a tool to manage all systems.

DATACORE SOLUTION: • DataCore SANsymphony • HP DL380 G7 • 18 ESX hosts (Oracle, file servers, Exchange) • Storage: 100TB+ Dell Compellent, Nexsan, Equalogic

CUSTOMER RESULTS: DataCore’s SANsymphony-V allows for interchangeability of FC and iSCSI communication with both the back end Dell and Nexsan disk targets and the front end presentation to any Open System Host environment. DataCore SANsymphony enabled unified management for all existing (Dell / Eq & Nexsan), new (Dell / Compellent) and provided a consistent view of storage which allowed seamless adding or switching out storage. SANsymphony improved performance by using the latest server technology (HP DL380 G7), an advanced caching architecture with over 100GB of dynamic write, and read cache, as well as, the fastest I/O channels currently available (8Gb FC). SANsymphony improved DOE LM utilization of their storage with Disk Pooling, Thin Provisioning and Space Reclamation.

Department

of Energy

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE: With more than 32,000 products, the NIEDAX GROUP offers almost everything needed for the modern, forward-looking electrical installation. Having already seen the value of using VMware for servers, NIEDAX wanted to know if there was a virtualization solution that could do the same for their SAN storage. They were looking for a solution that could meet the ERP performance requirements that were critical, IO bottlenecks on traditional storage, and limited flexibility for best of breed technologies and industry innovations.

DATACORE SOLUTION:

• DataCore SANMelody • Servers: HP DL370 G6 • 3 ESX Hosts, 7 MS Hosts • 40+ virtual servers (Navision, high performance Database) • Storage: HP EVA, HP MSA, high-speed FusionIO SSDs with

NAND flash memory to boost performance and lower overall energy requirements

CUSTOMER RESULTS: • Achieved a new level of performance • High availability and energy efficiency running in

production at 100,000 IOPS and 600 MBs per second of throughput, while only consuming 15 Watts of energy versus 4000 Watts with hard disks alone

• Unprecedented storage performance optimization, and automatic capacity allocation intelligence

Storage Virtualization - Westcon-Comstormedia.gswi.westcon.com/media/Westcon New Zealand/DataCore... · Storage Virtualization ... • Missing connection of DataCore solution to customer

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