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For additional details on DataCore, please see Company Overview

Fundamentally changing the economics of managing storage
DataCore Software fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage with innovative software that combines advanced functions and services with the agility and savings of hardware independence. The company's award-winning SANsymphony and new low-cost SANmelody disk server software products provide unprecedented purchasing flexibility and future-proofing by empowering customers to fulfill portability and price/performance requirements across a broad choice of systems and devices. Small to Medium Enterprises, Global 2000 data centers and OEM storage subsystems rely on this comprehensive product portfolio to deploy disk servers, to easily add capacity expansion and to centralize and automate storage management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, MacOS and NetWare systems. DataCore is privately held with corporate headquarters in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Focused on Storage Growth
The huge demand for increasing amounts of storage is overwhelming for both large and small companies. In the absence of an innovative, working solution, IT Directors and system administrators are tied to older storage management and control approaches that make it difficult to scale capacity without disrupting business and overburdening staff. This impedes the ability to expand business, causing shareholders and employees to pay the price. DataCore Software is dedicated to breaking through this impasse with SANsymphony™, DataCore's proven consolidated storage management and virtualization software and SANmelody disk server software.

Breakthrough Thinking
DataCore's founders knew that expecting individual storage and server suppliers to address the capacity onslaught would magnify customers' difficulties by creating a surge in vendor-specific solutions. To adequately address the explosive storage dilemma for the long-term, customers must not be forced into vendor-specific solutions. In 1998 DataCore liberated the control and management of mixed storage devices from hardware suppliers. DataCore introduced autonomous storage networking software that insulates business applications from the underlying storage dynamics and vendor nuances, while allowing customers complete choice in platforms.

The software executes on standard servers, transforming them into intelligent storage servers that collaborate to abstract the properties of disks and disk subsystems into easily-managed virtual volumes -- a technique known as storage virtualization.

Storage virtualization replaces the rigid characteristics of physical storage devices with more flexible and manageable virtual objects. To the user or application, a virtual disk appears to be an ordinary local disk. To the storage administrator, virtual disks from a centralized pool can be reassigned effortlessly without making physical modifications to the hardware or disrupting running applications.

Storage Virtualization One Better
DataCore was not merely satisfied to shield applications and administrators from the chaos of explosive growth. DataCore Software compensates for many of the inadequacies of the hardware on either side of the virtualization layer. DataCore addresses availability, performance and scalability from the perspective of a network, rather than from the previous approach which locked in customers.

DataCore's simple but powerful "Virtual Capacity" auto-provisioning capability has redefined "true" storage virtualization. This capability also known as Network Managed Volumes is also available on SANmelody™ platforms. This dramatically lowers the entry price point so that the vast majority of storage users can finally afford to experience the compelling productivity and cost savings benefits of automated "Virtual Capacity".

Breakthrough ROI and Cost Savings - Automatic "Virtual Capacity"
Divorcing capacity allocation from physical disk constraints using DataCore software returns five important cost reduction and productivity benefits:

1. Disk utilization is maximized since all free space remains in the global storage pool.

2. Applications only occupy space they are really using. This effectively stretches storage budgets by 60-70% which could more than pay for the introduction of DataCore software.

3. Critical applications run undisturbed as their capacity requirements climb. Unlike conventional approaches in which adding storage causes application downtime and user interruption.

4. IT personnel no longer spend time responding to disk re-allocation and resizing requests.

5. Capacity planners have a much better understanding of their total disk needs to properly address long-range provisioning.

"The current manual approaches for provisioning storage often require hours not seconds to create volumes and make them available to an application or an end user. Many of the newer virtualization products on the market require users to lock in to a specific hardware vendor's 'solution set' and concerns remain over whose hardware can be included in the hardware-based virtualization scheme. DataCore's approach is superior. I am hard pressed to think of any other storage software vendor who offers anything close in terms of giving users so much choice on which vendor's disks and hardware to use," says Jon William Toigo, renowned storage author, IT consumer advocate and CEO of Toigo Partners International in Tampa Bay, FL."

Simplified Consolidation and Management
Unlike other products claiming to consolidate storage management, DataCore's virtualization approach is completely independent from the storage and host supplier. All it takes is a simple drag-and-drop from a central GUI to allocate any size virtual volume from the network pool to UNIX, Windows, NetWare, Linux, or Mac OS servers. This architecture makes a Powered by DataCore™ solution easier and more cost effective to implement and scale. It also enables advanced capabilities such as network-wide caching, snapshots and remote mirroring to be affordable for the masses.