Helixstorm Wins 2011 Computerworld Honors Award For High Availability Storage Design
Los Angeles – June 1st, 2011 – Helixstorm has been recognized by The Computerworld Honors Program as a 2011 Laureate for its design and implementation on a High Availability Storage project. Helixstorm will be honored on June 20th, 2011 at the 23rd Annual Laureates Medal Ceremony & Gala Awards Evening at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington D.C.
Selected from more than 1,000 entries, Helixstorm’s High Availability project for American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP). ASHP has implemented this new stretch cluster and stretch high-availability (HA) storage configuration based on DataCore storage virtualization software and VMware server virtualization software to ensure uptime and business continuity. This new, stretch, dual-node configuration spans two floors and serves as an industrial-strength production system with fault-tolerance.
“We designed and implemented a true highly available SAN solution,” states Eric Henry, CTO and co-founder, Helixstorm, Inc. “It’s a shared nothing environment, which means the disks do not share a backplane with the controllers like traditional arrays. We have eliminated all single points of failure between the application servers and the storage controllers along with increasing the data resiliency by ‘stretching’ the SAN between two floors via redundant fiber synchronous mirror bus.”
The goal is to transition all of ASHP’s data onto the newly configured, fault-tolerant, virtualized environment. “I am now a believer in the software-based approach to high-availability and storage virtualization,” states Jack Spencer, vice president of operations and CIO at American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. “It was not intuitive until I actually saw it. But now that I have, I am no longer skeptical. Going forward, I will put the bulk of all the money earmarked for network storage into expanding the DataCore configuration as well as building in remote disaster recovery.”
As an Honors winner, the High Availability case study will become part of the Honors International Program Archive, which is available to researchers, students and scholars through cwhonors.org and through digital records housed in national archives in over 350 universities, museums and research institutions worldwide. The Computerworld Honors awards will be presented at the Annual Laureates Medal Ceremony & Gala Awards on June 20, 2011 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.
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About the Computerworld Honors Program
Founded by International Data Group (IDG) in 1988, The Computerworld Honors Program is governed by the not-for-profit Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation. Computerworld Honors is the longest running global program to honor individuals and organizations that use information technology to promote positive social, economic and educational change. Additional information about the program and a Global Archive of past Laureate case studies and oral histories of Leadership Award recipients can be found at the Computerworld Honors website (http://events.computerworld.com/Honors2011).
About Computerworld
Computerworld is the leading source of technology news and information for IT influencers worldwide, providing peer perspective, IT leadership and business results. Computerworld’s award-winning Web site (http://www.computerworld.com), bi-weekly publication, focused conference series and custom research forms the hub of the world’s largest (40+ edition) global IT media network. In the past five years alone, Computerworld has won more than 100 awards, including Magazine of the Year by American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE) awards in 2010, the 2009 Best Blog from the Neal awards, and 2006 Best Overall Web Publication from ASBPE. Computerworld leads the industry with an online audience of over 3.5 million unique, monthly visitors (comScore Media Metrix, August 2010). Computerworld is published by IDG Enterprise, a subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s leading media, events, and research company. Company information is available at www.idgenterprise.com.
About Helixstorm
Helixstorm is a nationwide, full-service, award winning IT Engineering Firm dedicated to helping our clients leverage proven technology to better align their computing environment with their business needs. With over 3500 engineers nationally, Helixstorm consulting team has 4 practice areas: Virtualization, Storage/Server, Datacenter and Managed Services. This hands-on experience allows us to recommend and implement best-of-breed solutions for our clients with confidence. Our partnerships include Hewlett Packard, DataCore Software, VMware, Dell and other leading hardware and software manufacturers. Visit www.helixstorm.com for more information.
