Video: IDC on the Importance & Business Value of the DataCore Storage Hypervisor & Auto-tiering

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJQXX5VzWOw

This video interview with IDC summarizes the benefits of a storage hypervisor and auto-tiering and the business value DataCore's SANsymphony-V delivers as a comprehensive, yet hardware-independent solution.

DataCore – Consistently Championing Storage Hypervisors ...

http://rainmakerfiles.com/2012/03/datacore-consistently-championing-storage-hypervisors/

DataCore is storage software company which has remained steadfastly focused on storage virtualisation since its inception in 1998. The main proposition is that different vendors’ storage arrays can be virtualised and managed behind commodity servers, (these days x64 servers). A couple of key reasons why customers consider this approach are the desire for a uniform management suite and acquiring features and functions that are more open than a proprietary array vendor’s solution. The array market has got plenty of competition in it, but once a customer selects a particular vendor’s storage platform it can be argued that there is an element of customer lock-in.

DataCore’s SANsymphony has by virtue been a storage hypervisor from the outset and by name some 12 months when the marketing term was fully adopted. With a mature software core, SANsymphony has evolved into embracing the key features of the array vendors and SANsymphony has also been qualified to embrace a wide variety of those very arrays. The use cases quoted range from customers acquiring commodity arrays to the more sophisticated high QOS array types. At the commodity end DataCore has the potential to add features that would otherwise be costly, while at the other, customers can apply the data management techniques which they are familiar with across their entire storage estate. Another justification for a multivendor solution lies in storage specialists’ on-going challenge of data migration. The ability to efficiently migrate data non-disruptively is not trivial.

It is interestingly the emergence and maturity of server hypervisors that is making storage hypervision more apt. We anticipate that more tools will emerge that bridge and orchestrate workloads across servers and storage. DataCore is supporting VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xenserver, and we speculate that the integration into server hypervisors will be strengthened. SANsymphony is as mentioned the core proposition of DataCore and its customer prospects choose the appropriate licensing scope in terms of nodes & capacity.

IT professionals should first of all evaluate how a unified approach to storage management can benefit them. The ability to extend different storage tiers behind a storage hypervisor has the potential to simplify storage provision & data protection, but also the performance of the entire storage pool. A larger storage tier exploiting commodity storage may also be attractive.

IT industry decision makers ought to explore how the storage hypervisor proposition is adapting itself to a world of high server virtualisation penetration. Workloads will be deployed and orchestrated differently in the years ahead and customers may well adopt some important lessons from service providers’ experiences with cost effective multi-tenancy implementations.

CeBIT 2012: DataCore Software Showcases the Storage Hypervisor and New Capabilities

http://www.prlog.org/11817047-cebit-2012-datacore-software-showcases-the-storage-hypervisor-and-new-capabilities.html

DataCore Software is demonstrating the latest innovations of its storage hypervisor SANsymphony-V at the world's largest IT event, CeBit. DataCore is being shopwcased at the CeBIT’s "Virtualization & Storage Forum" (Hall 2, Stand A40). DataCore presented its solutions for the integrated management of virtual infrastructures.

The results of a recent survey conducted by IT industry analyst firm, IDC, at the end of 2011 that storage and virtualisation are in the top investment categories. At the same time, general challenges such as Private Cloud, “Big Data,” storage cloud services and storage efficiency boost the market outlook for storage virtualisation.

At CeBIT, DataCore showcased a rapid configuration wizard which simplifies the installation and configuration of SANsymphony-V storage servers, especially for system builders, and system integration firms. In particular, DataCore solution partners and their SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) customers will benefit from a fast and seamless implementation of the DataCore solution into existing infrastructures.

At the event, DataCore also presented further product developments from collaborations with other leading virtualisation vendors. For example, with the Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer from Hitachi Data Systems the use of storage resources in a virtual infrastructure can be more effectively monitored and analysed via a single management console. Moreover, availability and performance bottlenecks can be diagnosed more quickly and effectively eliminated.

In addition, a powerful new storage management plug-in for VMware vSphere and a Monitoring pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager will be showcased to ensure a higher level and more seamless integration.

"Recent customer wins, such as Kaspersky Lab, a high availability solution which is deploying ten petabytes storage under DataCore, show that large scale storage virtualisation empowered by storage hypervisor software is becoming a standard for large enterprises,” says Stefan von Dreusche, Director Central Europe at DataCore. “With thousands of customer success stories, the time is right for this proven technology to gain momentum with the more mainstream partner and customer base".

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor centralises manages and optimises the use of heterogeneous storage devices, regardless of price, performance, model or hardware and integrates flash memory, SSDs, hard drives and cloud storage. The auto-tiering functionality automates the progression and demotion of data across different storage devices – based on performance and cost criteria. Also, by integrating a cloud array gateway, DataCore expands auto-tiering to the cloud level, so non-critical backup and archiving data can be outsourced.

Amnet Deploys DataCore's SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor to Expand Its Cloud Platform

http://it.tmcnet.com/topics/it/articles/2012/03/08/274363-amnet-deploys-datacores-sansymphony-v-storage-hypervisor-expand.htm

Amnet has used the DataCore's storage virtualization software from 2009 and has benefitted from its VMware and EMC environments and made a successful transition to cloud computing. Walsh continued, "I've never seen a product as versatile as DataCore's storage hypervisor. Performance acceleration gives us more 'bang' for our storage buck. We get a disaster-proof backup and replication system at a fraction of the cost. And, the ability to change SAN storage vendors at any time gives us the future-proofing on tech investments we need to support continued rapid growth."

...Walsh went on to say, "Today, we support thousands of users running within multiple private cloud computing grids across the country. We are 100 percent virtualized, with multiple backend storage models and varied vendor technology, all underpinned by DataCore's technology. And now, we've got a backup and replication platform that'll allow us to continue to grow, while maintaining the performance and reliability our customers expect, built at a fraction of the cost of a purpose built system. This has been a great partnership.”

Virtualization World 365: Amnet Technology Solutions enlists DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

http://virtualizationworld365.info/news_full.php?id=21597&title=Amnet-Technology-Solutions-again-enlists-DataCore-Software’s-SANsymphony-V-Storage-Hypervisor
Amnet Technology Solutions has deployed the latest version of SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor (version 8.1) to meet an increasing demand for offsite replication and disaster recovery. A cloud based IT and audio/video technology service provider (SP), Amnet enlisted DataCore’s newest technology to build a scalable, easy-to-use backup and replication platform that rivals the speed of purpose-built backup systems at a cost savings of 30 percent.

“We looked at a lot of backup appliances and found they can be very expensive, particularly when you get in the 100 terabyte range,” explained Ed Walsh, director of engineering at Amnet Technology Solutions. “DataCore’s SANsymphony-V can replicate remotely to any device. The performance acceleration it offers shrinks backup times, allowing many more jobs to be completed in a specific window. Furthermore, the cost savings - compared to the purpose-built solutions we evaluated - is phenomenal.”

Big Data Is Almost Here -- Using a Storage Hypervisor as an Agent of Change

There weren’t any telescopes on earth 65 million years ago when the six-mile-wide asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs approached. Even if there had been, there’s not much to be done about a gazillion tons of rock moving faster than a speeding bullet.

Big Data – ultra large scale data storage and analysis – is the data center equivalent of that big rock, but it’s not arriving without warning and it doesn’t have to be an extinction-level event for IT professionals. To the contrary, it offers a unique opportunity to re-architect your storage management infrastructure in a way that makes it more adaptable in every respect and more easily aligned to business needs.

As profiled in the New York Times last Sunday, Big Data is transforming business, government, and education. One researcher reported that a study of 179 large companies showed that those adopting the data-driven decision-making that Big Data makes possible “achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.”

This shows that Big Data is more than just big. It’s restless, too, best used when hot. Let it cool off and you lose the situational awareness that can lead to big-time financial rewards. It’s not just a matter of storing a gazillion bytes – you can’t possibly store it all, so your retention policies have to change, and the need to widely share it as quickly as possible means your networking strategies have to change as well.

Fortunately, there’s a fundamental storage technology that can be a big help in adapting to Big Data: the storage hypervisor. Even better, the benefits of this software layer, which insulates you from all the hardware variables that Big Data can throw your way, kick in long before Big Data arrives. A storage hypervisor is an agent of change: you get the pay-off today and a future-proof storage infrastructure.

A storage hypervisor enables you to pool resources, automatically allocate space and direct traffic to the optimal tier, cache data near applications for higher performance, and manage it all centrally.

Resource pooling has the most immediate impact, because you can aggregate all of your storage capacity, without regard for brand, model, or interface, and easily reclaim unused space. Looking forward, this capability is key to integrating on-premise storage with cloud storage – a necessity to keep from getting squashed by Big Data.

The automation offered by a storage hypervisor gives you just-in-time storage allocation for highly efficient use of disk space, and the ability to dynamically direct workloads to the right storage resource (auto-tiering), based either on access frequency or business rules, so that the hottest data gets the most attention. With auto-tiering and bridging capabilities like Cloud gateways, the right storage resource includes not only disk devices, but solid state disks or flash memory devices for performance, or Cloud storage providers for virtually unlimited capacity. This makes it easy to balance data value and the need for speed against price/capacity constraints, something that Big Data is going to make ever more necessary.

A storage hypervisor can also cache data in main memory for rapid retrieval and fast updates. This turbocharges native disk array performance, especially if it’s combined with self-tuning algorithms. The result is that even off-premises storage can look local – again, a big “win” for Big Data.

Finally, with Big Data, your storage infrastructure is only going to get bigger, so centralized management of all your storage resources is a must-have. It gives you the equivalent of a universal remote for storage, no matter what it is or where it’s located, and is key to managing the mirroring and replication needed for high-availability, disaster-proof storage.

The fallout from Big Data is going to transform business computing at every level, so if you don’t want to end up a data dinosaur, now’s the time to transform your infrastructure with a storage hypervisor. A good place to start is Jon Toigo’s Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars series, starting with Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency, which will give you a good overview of how a storage hypervisor can help you increase engineering, operational, and financial efficiency.

[Photo Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Impact_event.jpg]

DataCore Software Joins Microsoft Partner Solutions Center

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/datacore-software-joins-microsoft-partner-solutions-center-2012-02-14

DataCore Software announced that it has joined the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center (MPSC). Located on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, the MPSC facility brings together world-class technology companies dedicated to the rapid development of secure, end-to-end business solutions for enterprise customers and partners.

This membership further strengthens DataCore's relationship with Microsoft along with the company's recent joining of the Microsoft System Center Alliance and the introduction of the SANsymphony-V Monitoring Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2008 R2, which provides constant visibility into the health, performance, and availability of virtualized storage resources from within System Center.

"We welcome DataCore to the MPSC and our partner ecosystem," said David Hayes, Senior Director, Microsoft Partner Solutions Center. "As with all of our partners in the MPSC, DataCore brings a unique offering that helps address various infrastructure challenges our customers face today. With DataCore's storage hypervisor, customers can now better monitor and manage their dynamic storage environments, while allowing for increased availability, speed, and utilization."

All Virtual is Not Enough; Managing Physical, Virtual, Old and New is Real World

Yes, we think the “all or nothing” proposition offered by vendors that can’t address both the virtual and physical world is a mistake, and an expensive one at that. Virtualization and Cloud computing comes with an assumption that it is better to replace your existing investments in servers and storage and start over to meet the higher demands for performance and availability. DataCore sees this as a major obstacle and has thus designed its storage hypervisor to work across existing storage investments; it improves and supplements them with a powerful feature set. Managing both the physical and virtual and the mix of old and new platforms and device types cannot be ignored.

It is interesting to note the large number of new vendors that have jumped on the pure ‘all virtual’ model and have designed their solutions solely to address the virtual world. They do not deal with managing physical devices or support migrating from one device type to another, or support migrating back and forth between physical and virtual environments.

These virtualization-only vendors tend to speak about an IT nirvana in which everyone and everything that is connected to this world is virtual, open and simple - devoid of the messy details of the physical world. Does this sound anything like most IT shops?

Virtualization solutions must work and deliver a unified user experience across both virtual and physical environments. Solutions that can't deal with the physical device world do not work in the real world where flexibility, constant change, and migrations are the norm.

Kaspersky Labs Selects DataCore Storage Virtualization to Safeguard Ten Petabytes of Storage and Accelerate Microsoft Hyper-V

See Kaspersky Lab and DataCore Case Study:
http://www.datacore.com/Libraries/Case_Study_PDFs/Case_Study_-_Kaspersky_Lab.sflb.ashx
Kaspersky Lab, the world's largest privately-held Internet security and anti-virus company, has chosen DataCore SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor software to virtualise and protect its build-out of 10 petabytes of disk storage located in two, separate Moscow data centres.

Virtualization World Top Story: Kaspersky Lab selects DataCore Storage Hypervisor
http://virtualizationworld365.info/news_full.php?id=21064&title=Kaspersky-Lab-selects-DataCore-Storage-Hypervisor

Kaspersky Lab, has chosen DataCore SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor software. With the SANsymphony-V virtualization layer, Kaspersky Lab has unified the management of its diverse storage systems from IBM, HP and NetApp, added a new level of business continuity safeguards and delivered faster response times by accelerating the performance and flexibility of shared storage in support of its many Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines.

“It was clearly a strategic decision for us to integrate a storage virtualization platform in order for us to benefit from greater flexibility, higher levels of business continuity and unified management,” notes Alexey Ternovsky, Senior Infrastructure Technology Researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “We evaluated a number of different virtualization approaches and found that DataCore was the perfect fit to meet our demands and help us lower the rising costs for managing and extending storage in the long run. The DataCore storage hypervisor gives us the power to manage huge amounts of data and lets us build our own storage infrastructure with our choice of features and performance characteristics.”

Kaspersky Lab’s decision was primarily driven by SANsymphony-V’s ability to leverage existing storage environments and enhance their enterprise functionality by providing a higher level of availability for business continuity; by adding centralized and simplified management over all their storage assets; by increasing performance; by enabling fast remote site disaster recovery capabilities and by maximizing the utilization of their current investments. Strategically, the flexibility to expand the storage infrastructure vendor and hardware independently on an as-needed base were critical requirements.

Over the next year, the two Kaspersky locations plan to virtualize nearly ten petabytes of their data (i.e., ten thousand terabytes, or 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) spread over a mix of storage devices. This will enable the company to offer both centralized IT services for internal requests as well as new services for external customers who rely on Kaspersky Lab’s data center services and solutions. The DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor software will be installed at the two data centers and will synchronously mirror all the production data currently located on diverse storage systems each with different characteristics tied to each vendor’s hardware-based platforms.

High Performance Shared Storage for Microsoft Hyper-V
In the Kaspersky Lab environment, very high performance is critical and the performance demands will continue to grow alongside the ever expanding environment of Microsoft Hyper-V virtual servers and desktops. Ternovsky and his team identified SANsymphony-V to be the most efficient way to provide shared storage for the overall virtualized infrastructure. As the performance needs continue to grow, more memory can be added to boost cache performance and new server technology can be easily inserted without interruption to further scale performance.

SANsymphony-V helps Kaspersky Lab to expand and optimize capacity on an as-needed basis without hardware vendor lock-in or having to acquire huge amounts of unused disk resources. With lots of automated storage capabilities, such as transparent auto-failover, systems can stay up when underlying devices fail. Moreover, powerful “Quick Serve” commands automate the management of storage provisioning. In addition, auto-tiering automates the progression and demotion of data across different storage devices – based on performance and cost criteria. Bottom-line: SANsymphony-V greatly automates and simplifies the administration and storage tasks found in the huge SAN environment of Kaspersky Lab.

“The flexibility, performance and management scalability of the DataCore solution make it an effective shared storage solution for our large number of virtual machines running under Microsoft Hyper-V,” adds Ternovsky. “We now benefit from a better cost infrastructure which allows hardware interchangeability adding a new level of savings and agility to managing our systems and their cost. Our IT administrators have a lot of know-how with Microsoft Windows and virtual machines under Hyper-V, so it was important that SANsymphony-V is not only Microsoft-certified but is intuitive and familiar – with a similar look and feel and many automated features that make storage administration in such a big environment much more practical and easy.”

About Kaspersky Lab
Kaspersky Lab is the world's largest privately-held Internet security and anti-virus company. It delivers some of the world’s most immediate protection against IT security threats, including viruses, spyware, crimeware, hackers, phishing, and spam. The company is ranked among the world’s top four vendors of security solutions for endpoint users. Kaspersky Lab products provide superior detection rates and one of the industry’s fastest outbreak response times for home users, SMBs, large enterprises and the mobile computing environment. Kaspersky® technology is also used worldwide inside the products and services of the industry’s leading IT security solution providers. Learn more at www.kaspersky.com. For the latest on antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-spam and other IT security issues and trends, visit www.securelist.com.

Did Virtualization Begat a Monster?

As with all disruptive technology changes, virtualization brought tremendous productivity and cost savings gains, but its widespread adoption has also created a new challenge: managing what some have called the “Virtual Machine Sprawl Monster.” The ease of provisioning has increased dramatically the number of virtual machines deployed. As a consequence, even greater performance, availability and administrative management is required to support these sprawling virtual environments. These requirements will only grow as systems (both virtual and physical), platforms and applications continue to proliferate, as they most surely will.

Fundamentally, the main challenge facing IT managers is: “How can I manage and control all this complexity with a tighter budget and fewer skilled resources?” The answer is straight forward: with very smart software, a new mindset focused on architecture versus devices, and the alignment of people and processes to this new reality.

Is the real bottleneck for an IT manager the time required to get things done or the growing infrastructural chaos?

Both the lack of time and the complexity of managing dynamic infrastructures have made IT manager’s job more difficult. Therefore, the IT manager position must evolve from technician to architect. Too many of the current tasks that IT manager must perform or oversee are platform or vendor specific or tied to purpose-built hardware devices and, therefore, require specialized training or tools to properly use them. Also legacy systems and new models don’t work well together.

Instead of simply addressing IT as a set of discreet technologies and platforms, the IT manager must create an environment in which hardware components become pooled and interchangeable and can be managed as a whole. This higher-level viewpoint is needed to cost-effectively meet the demanding and dynamic requirements for more performance, higher availability and greater productivity. For this to succeed, smart management software that works infrastructure-wide and new levels of automation are necessities. Automation is one of the things software can do very well.

The good news is that the smart software required, such as storage hypervisors, are now available. They are easy to use, enable hardware interchangeability, automate difficult repetitive tasks and manage resources as pools.

Also, to be cost-effective today, hardware must become an interchangeable component, so that you can go to the open market and get the best price for the hardware you need. Products like VMware and Hyper-V have already had a major impact in on server hardware selection and solutions like DataCore’s storage hypervisor will do the same for storage devices.

Software is where the intelligence lies and it is the key to better management. DataCore’s storage hypervisor, for instance, offers a comprehensive architecture to control the four main challenges of storage management: meet performance needs, ensure data protection and disaster recovery, cost-effectively pool and tier storage resources and optimize the utilization of infrastructure-wide storage capacity.

How does DataCore address these needs?

The simple answer is we do this by providing an architecture to manage storage – a storage hypervisor. DataCore is smart, easy to use software that delivers powerful automation and hardware interchangeability. It embraces and controls both the virtual and physical worlds and extends the capabilities of both existing and new storage assets.

DataCore’s storage hypervisor pools, auto-tiers and virtualizes existing and new storage devices including the latest high-performance and premium priced memory-based storage technologies (Flash Memory/SSDs) and cost-effective gateways to remotely located Cloud Storage. It provides an architecture that manages the many storage price/performance trade-offs while providing a best fit of storage resources to meet the dynamic workloads and applications of the real world. From a performance standpoint, caching software and self-learning algorithms are in place to boost performance often doubling or tripling response times. Auto-failover and failback software provides the highest levels of availability and continuous access to storage. Auto-tiering manages the I/O traffic to ensure that data is in the right place (SSD, fast storage arrays, capacity storage, Cloud storage) to get the best performance at the lowest possible cost. Automated thin provisioning makes it simple and quick to service application system disk needs and fully optimize the overall utilization of storage capacity.

From a people and process standpoint, DataCore’s storage hypervisor provides a simple and common way to manage, pool, migrate and tier all storage resources. The software accelerates performance and automates many time-consuming tasks including data protection and disk space provisioning.

DataCore Software and Hitachi Team Together to Make IT Management Easier; Operations Analyzer for both physical and virtual IT assets

http://www.storagereview.com/datacore_and_hitachi_team_together_make_it_management_easier

The Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer now integrated with DataCore's storage hypervisor enables detailed monitoring of IT infrastructures including those under control of DataCore SANsymphony-V software. Enterprises will gain a holistic, single-pane view of their entire data center if a tight integration of the software is implemented, including virtualized storage resources, servers, networks and applications. This gives IT administrators the ability to easily maintain high levels of infrastructure availability, performance, as well as conducting fast problem diagnosis and resolution.

By unifying advanced services like provisioning, auto-tiering, replication and performance acceleration through a common storage virtualization layer, the DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor improves the value of diverse storage resources. Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer is an integrated availability and performance monitoring tool that can reduce complexity, streamline operations, and increase IT staff efficiency by monitoring availability and performance of heterogeneous physical and virtual server stacks, applications and network, and storage devices through a single screen.

SANsymphony-V plugs into IT Operations Analyzer through the integrated solution, regularly requesting inventory data and updates from the storage hypervisor. The single monitoring screen of IT Operations Analyzer is then populated with the latest information, keeping IT administrators up-to-date with all relevant changes in resources. It also alerts them to potential problems that require a proactive resolution.

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor overcomes many existing issues by insulating users and applications from the constant upheaval in the underlying storage devices and physical plant where they reside. IT Operations Analyzer monitors all components that make up a dynamic, virtualized data center, while maintaining an inventory and collecting vital status and alerts.

With both the SANsymphony-V and the IT Operations Analyzer, administrators are now able to monitor every device in their data center infrastructure on a single screen, enabling them to quickly identify and resolve issues before they impact productivity.

The following are a few of the key benefits offered through with the integration of SANsymphony and IT Operations Analyzer:

• Fast Problem Diagnosis & Resolution: the dashboard of IT Operations Analyzer features proactive alerting and a root cause analysis (RCA) engine, enabling IT administrators to reduce mean time of diagnosing problems by up to 90 percent, and the ability to process large numbers of event alerts in minutes.
• Isolating Bottlenecks, Elevating Performance: IT Operations Analyzer allows thresholds to be set on devices to prevent bottlenecks. Congestion points can also be isolated, such as when reduced performance in a set of servers occurs; the single-pane console might show too many competing for the same resource. Administrators can then easily fix the issue by using SANsymphony-V to redistribute tasks.
• Ease-of-Use: The integration of SANsymphony-V into IT Operations Analyzer provides visibility into storage assets that enables staff to identify issues without a high level of storage expertise and then resolve these before productivity suffers.

Enterprise Systems: From Clouds Comes Clarity in 2012

http://esj.com/articles/2012/01/16/From-Clouds-Comes-Clarity.aspx

By George Teixeira, CEO and President, DataCore Software

What can bridge the state of virtualization today and the unfettered reality we seek from the cloud? A true storage Hypervisor may hold the key.

Some people read palms or tea leaves to predict the future. I'm looking at clouds.

Clouds are what all sorts of people are talking about these days. I was at dinner the other evening and overheard a conversation at the next table between two senior citizens and what was likely a more tech savvy 20-something grandchild and his companion. When one asked the grandmother where she keeps the photographs she was showing them, she confidently answered, "They're in the cloud." Now, I'll bet she wouldn't have been comfortable entrusting her precious photos to me, to you, or to a company that might not be in business in the future. That unease would likely be exacerbated by the complexity of any assurances as to how these photos are stored, made available, or protected.

Yet, she is quite comfortable with "the cloud."

That's how powerful the cloud metaphor has become. It uses a level of abstraction (the picture of a cloud) to represent in a simple, nonthreatening, "I don't need to think about that" way the complex hardware and software components, and internal network connections, that are actually required to provide the services delivered. When people refer to cloud computing, what they are really talking about is the ability to simplify IT by abstracting the complexity of the data center from a bunch of individually managed elements into a service that is offered as part of a holistic "cloud."

This simplification through abstraction is also the cornerstone of virtualization. In fact, the clamor for the cloud is both a compliment to the attributes of virtualization and a criticism of its progress to date. Virtualization is the key to cloud computing because it is the enabling technology allowing the creation of an intelligent abstraction layer that hides the complexity of underlying hardware or software. In the call for clouds, I hear an industry being challenged: "OK, we see what is possible through virtualization, so fill in the missing pieces and deliver on the promise already."

Software is the key to making clouds work because, in the cloud, resources (e.g., server computers, network connections, and desktops) must be dynamic. Simply put, only software can take a collection of static hardware devices that are not flexible and create from them flexible resource pools that can be allocated dynamically. Hypervisor solutions, like those from VMware and Microsoft, demonstrated the benefits of working devices as software abstractions at the server level (and to a lesser degree the desktop) and the importance of interchangeable servers that now have become the norm. It really does not matter whether a Dell, HP, IBM or an Intel server is the resource involved, that is a secondary consideration subject to price or particular vendor preference. From this experience, the market has become familiar with what is possible with virtualization.

Virtualization gives us greater productivity and faster responses to changing needs because software abstracted resources are not static and can be deployed flexibly and dynamically. It also gives us better economies of scale because these resources are pooled and can be easily changed and supplemented "behind the curtain" to keep up with growing and changing user demands. Yes, with a hypervisor we have freed our servers and desktops from their physical binds.

Still, it's just a taste of freedom; a removal of the handcuffs, but not the ankle chains; merely a lengthening of the leash, because eventually you hit the end and get yanked back to reality by the confines of your storage. Even amidst the great, industry-wide, liberation-through-virtualization movement of recent years, the answer when it comes to storage, unfortunately, has been to continue building traditional physical architectures that severely limit and, in fact, contradict the virtual infrastructures they are intended to support. They propagate locked-in, vendor specific hardware "silos" instead of decoupling storage resources from physical devices with a software abstraction layer.

In my view, that is the big hole in the ground that we keep falling into while desperately scanning the skies for clouds and a user experience free from physical architecture and hardware. Just what is it that can bridge the state of virtualization today and that unfettered reality we seek from clouds?

The answer: a Storage Hypervisor. In 2012, this critical piece to the fluffy puzzle will fill that gap in virtualization's march forward, clarifying how to bring that cloud future home to our storage today.

A Storage Hypervisor enables a new level of agility and storage hardware interchangeability. It creates an abstraction layer between applications running on servers and the physical storage used for data. Virtualizing storage and incorporating intelligence for provisioning and protection at the virtualization layer makes it possible to create a new and common level of storage management that works across the spectrum of assets including server attached disks, SSDs, disk systems, and storage in the cloud. Because it abstracts physical storage into virtual pools, any storage can work with any other storage, avoiding vendor hardware lock-in ensuring maximum ROI on existing resources and greater purchasing power in the future.

What is a "true" Storage Hypervisor? It's a portable, centrally managed, software package that enhances the value of multiple and dissimilar disk storage systems. It supplements these systems' individual capabilities with extended provisioning, replication, and performance acceleration services. Its comprehensive set of storage control and monitoring functions operates as a transparent virtual layer across consolidated disk pools to improve their availability and optimize speed and utilization.

A true Storage Hypervisor also provides important advanced storage management and intelligent features. For example, a critical Storage Hypervisor feature is automated tiering. This feature migrates and optimally matches the most cost-effective or performance-oriented hardware resources to application workload needs. Through this automated management capability, less-critical and infrequently accessed data is automatically stored on lower-cost disks, while more mission-critical data is migrated to faster, higher-performance storage and solid-state disks, whether those disks are located on premises or in the cloud. This enables organizations to keep demanding workloads operating at peak speeds while taking advantage of low-priced local storage assets or pay-as-you-go cloud storage. The Storage Hypervisor management layer makes it easy to incorporate new disk devices into existing data centers, providing enterprises, and, a fast and easy on-ramp to cloud resources, among other benefits.

It's clearly time for storage to acquire these cloud-like characteristics. Clouds are, after all, supposed to be pliant and nimble -- and that is what we need our storage to be. The whole point of cloud computing is delivering cost-effective services to users. This requires the highest degree of flexibility and openness, as opposed to being boxed-in to specific hardware that cannot adapt to change over time. That's the goal and it is what is driving such an interest in clouds. Hypervisors for virtual servers and desktops have mapped the way -- illustrating how portable software solutions can virtualize away complexity, constraint, and hardware-vendor lock-in. Only a Storage Hypervisor can do likewise for storage.

That's why 2012 will be the year storage goes virtual and the market learns Storage Hypervisors are the next level in flexible storage management. Already, they are being widely deployed and are enterprise-proven. A true Storage Hypervisor turns multiple, dissimilar, and static disk storage systems into a "what I want, where I need it, when I need it, without complexity" storage infrastructure. It gives our storage today what we've been looking for in the clouds of the future: a highly scalable, flexible infrastructure with real hardware interchangeability and the next level of virtual resource management. This is what is required to create virtual data centers or so-called "private clouds" and make practical the incorporation of external cloud services.

Storage Magazine/SearchStorage.com Storage System Software: 2011 Products of the Year Finalists

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/Storage-system-software-2011-Products-of-the-Year-finalists

DataCore Software Corp. SANsymphony-V R8.0 Storage Hypervisor

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization product added automated storage tiering, enhanced continuous data production (CDP), faster asynchronous replication and an improved wizard-driven central console. The software runs on physical or virtual Windows servers and allows users to maintain, upgrade and expand their storage without disrupting applications.

Prediction #6: Storage Hypervisors will make storage virtualization and Cloud storage practical.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently authored a Market Report that I believe addresses the industry focus for the year ahead. In "The Relevance and Value of a ‘Storage Hypervisor'," it states "...buying and deploying servers is a pretty easy process, while buying and deploying storage is not. It's a mismatch of virtual capabilities on the server side and primarily physical capabilities on the storage side. Storage can be a ball and chain keeping IT shops in the 20th century instead of accommodating the 21rst century."

While enterprises strive to get all they can from their hardware investments in servers, desktops and storage devices, a major problem persists - a data storage bottleneck. Ironically, even as vendors promote and sell software-based, end-to-end virtualization and Cloud solutions, too often the reaction to handling storage is to throw another costly hunk of hardware at the problem in the form of a new storage array or device.

The time has come to resolve the storage crisis, to remove the last bastion of hardware dependency and to allow the final piece of the virtualization puzzle to fall into place. Server hypervisors like VMware and Hyper-V have gone beyond the basics of creating virtual machines and have created an entire platform and management layer to make virtualization practical for servers, desktops and Clouds.

Likewise, it's time to become familiar with a component quickly gaining traction and proving itself in the field: the storage hypervisor.

A storage hypervisor is unique in its ability to provide an architecture that manages, optimizes and spans all the different price-points and performance levels of storage. Only a storage hypervisor enables full hardware interchangeability. It provides important, advanced features such as automated tiering, which relocates disk blocks of data among pools of different storage devices (even into the Cloud) - thereby keeping demanding workloads operating cost-efficiently and at peak speeds. In this way, applications requiring speed and business-critical data protection can get what they need, while less critical, infrequently accessed data blocks gravitate towards lower-cost disks or are transparently pushed to the Cloud for "pay as you go" storage.

I think ESG's Market Report stated it well:

"The concept of a storage hypervisor is not just semantics. It is not just another way to market something that already exists or to ride the wave of a currently trendy IT term...Organizations have now experienced a good taste of the benefits of server virtualization with its hypervisor-based architecture and, in many cases, the results have been truly impressive: dramatic savings in both CAPEX and OPEX, vastly improved flexibility and mobility, faster provisioning of resources and ultimately of services delivered to the business, and advances in data protection.

"The storage hypervisor is a natural next step and it can provide a similar leap forward."

DataCore announced the world's first storage hypervisor in 2011. We built it with feedback gained in the real world over the last decade from thousands of customers. We saw this advance as a natural, but necessary, step forward for an industry that has been fixated on storage hardware solutions for far too long. 2012 will be the year that true hardware interchangeability and auto-tiering will move from "wish list" to "to do list" for many companies ready to break the grip by which storage hardware vendors have long held them.

Prediction #5: "Big Data" will get the Hype, but "Small Data" will continue to be where the action is in 2012.

Yes, Big Data is getting all the attention and yes Big Data needs "Big Storage," so every storage vendor will make it the buzz for 2012. Big Data has many definitions but what is obvious is that the growth rates and the amount of data being stored continue to grow. This Big Data requires better solutions in order for it to be cost-effectively managed. Analyst firm IDC believes the world's information is doubling every two years. By the end of 2011, according to IDC, the world will create a staggering 1.8 zettabytes of data. By 2020, the world will generate 50 times that amount of data, and IT departments will have to manage 75 times the number of "information containers" housing this data. Clearly, the largest companies managing petabytes, exabytes and beyond are the main focus of the talk, but the small and mid-size businesses that deal in terabytes of data comprise the vast majority of the real world. And it is these small-to-midsize companies that need practical data storage and management solutions TODAY. These business consumers can't afford to wait until tomorrow, nor can they afford to throw out their existing storage investments. Rather, they need solutions that build on what devices they currently have installed and make those more efficient, highly-available and easier to manage.

Software technologies, such as thin provisioning, auto-tiering, storage virtualization and storage hypervisors that empower users to easily manage all the storage assets they require - whether located on-premise, at a remote site or in the Cloud - will be key enablers in 2012. Big Data will be the buzz and will drive many new innovations. Big Data will also benefit greatly from these same software-based enablers, but the Small Data opportunity is extremely large and that is where I'm betting the real action will be in 2012.

Prediction #4: Software will take center stage for storage in 2012 empowering users to a new level of hardware interchangeability and commodity-based "buying power."

"Throw more hardware at the problem" is still the storage vendor mantra; however, the growth rate and the complexity of managing storage are changing the model. The economics of "more hardware" doesn't work. Virtualization and Clouds are all about software. With the high-growth rates in storage, virtualization and Cloud computing, it is becoming increasingly clear that a hardware-bound scale-up model of storage is impractical. The "hardware mindset" restrains efficiency and productivity, while software that enables hardware interchangeability advances these critical characteristics. The hardware model goes against the IT trends of commoditization, openness and resource pooling, which have driven the IT industry over the last decade. Software is the key to automating and to increasing management productivity, while adding the flexibility and intelligence to harness, pool and leverage the full use of hardware investments.

As the world moves to Cloud-based, to virtualization-based and to "Big Data" environments, software models that allow for hardware interchangeability, open market purchasing and better resource management for storage will be the big winners.

Prediction #3: The real world is not 100% virtual. Going virtual is a "hot topic," but the real world requires software that transcends both the virtual and physical worlds.

Even VMware, the leading virtualization company in the world, as well as the most ardent virtualization supporters in the analyst community, predict that in 2012 over 50% of x86 architecture server workloads will be virtual. Different reports point out that only 25% of small businesses have been virtualized, and others highlight the many challenges of virtualizing mission critical applications, new special purpose devices and legacy systems. The key point is that the world is not 100% virtual and the physical world cannot be ignored.

I find it interesting to note the large number of new vendors that have jumped squarely on the virtualization trend and have designed their solutions solely to address the virtual world. Most do not, therefore, deal with managing physical devices or support migrating from one device type to another, or support migrating back and forth between physical and virtual environments. Some nouveau virtual vendors go further and make simplifying assumptions akin to theoretical physicists - disregarding real world capabilities like Fibre Channel and assuming the world is tidy because all IT infrastructures operate in a virtual world using virtual IP traffic. These virtualization-only vendors tend to speak about an IT nirvana in which everyone and everything that is connected to this world is virtual, open and tidy - devoid of the messy details of the physical world. Does this sound anything like your IT shop?

Most IT organizations have, and will have for many years to come, a major share of their storage, desktops and a good portion of their server infrastructure running on physical systems or on applications that are not virtualized. This new "virtual is all you need" breed of vendors clearly does not want you to think about your existing base of systems or those strange Fibre Channel-connected, UNIX or NetWare systems running in the shadows. All the virtual upstarts have a simple solution - buy all new and go totally virtual. But this is not the real world most of us live in.

Virtualization solutions must work and deliver a unified user experience across both virtual and physical environments. Solutions that can't deal with the physical device world do not work in the real world where flexibility, constant change, and migrations are the norm. While those solutions that "do" virtual will be "hot," I predict those that can encompass the broad range of physical and virtual worlds will be even "hotter."

Prediction #2: Hybrid data storage environments will need storage virtualization and auto-tiering to combine Cloud storage with existing storage.

Cloud storage has already become a viable option for businesses that don't have the room to add storage devices or are looking for "pay-as-you-go" storage for less critical storage needs, backups and archiving. Industry analysts have already proclaimed that Cloud gateways and heterogeneous storage virtualization solutions combined with auto-tiering functionality can provide a seamless transition path to the Cloud that preserves existing storage investments.

For most companies, the notion of moving all of their data to the Cloud is inconceivable. However, continuously expanding data storage requirements are fueling a need for more capacity. One way to address this growth is to include Cloud storage in the mix. The benefits of Cloud storage are numerous. Cloud storage can provide virtually limitless access to storage capacity and obviate the need for device upgrades or equipment replacements. Cloud storage can also reduce capital expenses. Look for continued advances in auto-tiering and storage virtualization technologies to seamlessly combine hybrid Cloud and on-premise environments in a way that operates with existing applications.

Prediction #1: SSD cost trade-offs will drive software advances. Auto-tiering software that spans all storage including flash memory devices and SSDs will become a "must-have" in 2012.

The drop in cost of SSDs (solid state drives) and flash memories has already had a sizable impact on IT organizations and this will continue in 2012. The latest models of storage systems incorporate these innovations and tout high performance and high-availability, but they remain beyond an acceptable price point for most companies. In addition to price, SSDs and flash memory useful lifetimes are impacted by the amount of write traffic and need to be monitored and protected to avoid potential data loss.

However, the big driver for SSDs is the need for greater performance, but performance needs do not apply equally to all data. In fact, the majority of data, on average 90%, can reside on low-cost archives or mid-tier storage. Meanwhile, the major storage vendors continue to implore us to throw new hardware systems and more SSDs at the problem because they want to sell higher priced systems. These innovations are great, but they must be applied wisely. To get the most value out of these expensive devices, software that can protect and optimally manage the utilization of these costly resources as well as minimize write traffic is now a "must-have."

In 2012, businesses will gain a better understanding of why software is needed to expand the range of practical use cases for SSDs and to automate when, where and how best to deploy and manage these devices. Auto-tiering and storage virtualization software is critical to cost-effectively optimize the full utilization of flash memory and SSD-based technologies – as an important element within the larger spectrum of storage devices that need to be fully integrated and managed within today's dynamic storage infrastructures.

DataCore Software 2012 Predictions: Storage Hypervisors, Virtualization, SSDs, "Big Data," Clouds and Their Real World Impacts

Storage has been slow to adopt change and still remains one of the most static elements of today’s IT infrastructures. I believe this is due to a history of storage being driven from a hardware mindset. The storage industry, for the most part, has been controlled by a few major vendors who have been resistant to disruptive technologies, especially those that can impact their high profit margins. However, the time is ripe for a major shift and some disruption. An understanding of how software liberates resources from devices and a perfect storm of forces – success of server virtualization, new Cloud models, increasing data growth, greater complexity and unsustainable buying practices – are driving a mind-shift and forcing real changes to happen at a much faster pace. Therefore, it is a great time to be at the helm of a storage software company, and I am pleased to share my personal observations and 6 predictions for the New Year in a series of blog posts, the first one will directly follow this post.

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V 8.1 Chosen by Virtualization Review’s Readers as a 2012 Readers Choice Preferred Product Award Winner

http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2012/01/03/2012-buyers-guide.aspx#StorageVirt

Storage Virtualization
Based on the strength of its storage hypervisor approach, DataCore SANsymphony-V 8.1 was chosen by Virtualization Review as a 2012 Readers Choice a Preferred Product Award Winner for storage virtualization. EMC, NetApp and DataCore Software were the top 3 chosen by the readership.

DataCore Software Celebrates New Year By Offering Free Storage Hypervisor Software To Microsoft Certified And System Center Professionals

DataCore Software is welcoming the new year by offering free license keys of its SANsymphony™ -V storage hypervisor to Microsoft Certified and System Center professionals. The not-for-resale (NFR) license keys – may be leveraged for non-production uses such as course development, proof-of-concepts, training, lab testing and demonstration purposes – are intended to support virtualization consultants, instructors and architects involved in managing and optimizing storage within private clouds, virtual server and VDI deployments. DataCore is making it easy for these certified professionals to benefit directly and learn for themselves the power of this innovative technology – the storage hypervisor – and its ability to redefine storage management and efficiency.

The SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor is a portable, centrally-managed software suite capable of enhancing the combined value of multiple disk storage systems, including the many purpose-built storage appliances and solid state disks (SSD) type devices arriving to the market daily. The storage hypervisor supplements the individual capabilities of specialized equipment with a broad range of device-independent, integrated services. The SANsymphony-V software executes on physical and virtual servers or can co-reside with server hypervisors. Other major features include, but are not limited to, “Quick serve” storage provisioning, automated tiering across SSDs, disk devices and different cloud storage providers and continuous data protection (CDP).

The free NFR license keys of SANsymphony-V are available for the new year and this offer will expire on January 31, 2012. The licenses may be used for non-production purposes only and the software can be installed on both physical servers and Hyper-V virtual machines as a virtual storage appliance.

To receive a free license key, please sign up at: http://pages.datacore.com/nfr-for-experts.html.

Proof of certification as a Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA), Microsoft Certified Master (MCM), Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP), Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) or Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) is required.

Storage Strategy Magazine 2012 Predictions: DataCore Software

http://www.storage-strategy.com/2011/12/15/2012-prediction-datacore-software

...The time has come for the storage crisis to be resolved, the last bastion of hardware dependency removed, and the final piece of the virtualization puzzle to fall into place.

It’s also time for all to become familiar with a component fast gaining traction and proving itself in the field: the storage hypervisor. This technology is unique in its ability to provide an architecture that manages, optimizes and spans all the different price-points and performance levels of storage. The storage hypervisor allows hardware interchangeability. It provides important advanced features such as automated tiering that relocates disk blocks among pools of different storage devices - even in the cloud - keeping demanding workloads operating at peak speeds. In this way, applications requiring speed and business-critical data protection can get what they need, while less critical, infrequently accessed data blocks gravitate towards lower costs disks or are transparently pushed to the cloud for “pay as you go” storage.

ESG’s Peters states in the Market Report; “The concept of a storage hypervisor is not just semantics. It is not just another way to market something that already exists or to ride the wave of a currently trendy IT term.” He then goes on to make his main point on the next step forward; “Organizations have now experienced a good taste of the benefits of server virtualization with its hypervisor-based architecture and, in many cases, the results have been truly impressive: dramatic savings in both CAPEX and OPEX, vastly improved flexibility and mobility, faster provisioning of resources and ultimately of services delivered to the business, and advances in data protection.

“The storage hypervisor is a natural next step and it can provide a similar leap forward.”

2012: Virtual Storage Gets Some Love

Mark Peters, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), recently authored a Market Report which I believe addresses the industry focus for the year ahead. In The Relevance and Value of a “Storage Hypervisor,” Peters notes: “…buying and deploying servers is a pretty easy process, while buying and deploying storage is not. It’s a mismatch of virtual capabilities on the server side and primarily physical capabilities on the storage side. Storage can be a ball and chain keeping IT shops in the 20th century instead of accommodating the 21st century.”

DataCore Software Celebrates Holidays By Offering Free Storage Hypervisor To Microsoft Certified And System Center Professionals

The SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor is a portable, centrally-managed software suite capable of enhancing the combined value of multiple disk storage systems, including the many purpose-built storage appliances and solid state disks (SSD) type devices arriving to the market daily. The storage hypervisor supplements the individual capabilities of specialized equipment with a broad range of device-independent, integrated services. The SANsymphony-V software executes on physical and virtual servers or can co-reside with server hypervisors. Other major features include, but are not limited to, “Quick serve” storage provisioning, automated tiering across SSDs, disk devices and different cloud storage providers and continuous data protection (CDP).

The free NFR license keys of SANsymphony-V are available during the 2011 holiday season and this offer will expire on January 31, 2012. The licenses may be used for non-production purposes only and the software can be installed on both physical servers and Hyper-V virtual machines as a virtual storage appliance.

To receive a free license key, sign up at: http://pages.datacore.com/nfr-for-experts.html. Proof of certification as a Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA), Microsoft Certified Master (MCM), Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP), Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) or Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) is required.

DataCore Software offers free Storage Hypervisor
http://www.it-director.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=28967&ref=fd_ita_meta

DataCore Software announced that in the spirit of the holiday season it will offer free license keys of its SANsymphony™ -V storage hypervisor to Microsoft Certified and System Center professionals. The not-for-resale (NFR) license keys – may be leveraged for non-production uses such as course development, proof-of-concepts, training, lab testing and demonstration purposes – are intended to support virtualization consultants, instructors and architects involved in managing and optimizing storage within private clouds, virtual server and VDI deployments. DataCore is making it easy for these certified professionals to benefit directly and learn for themselves the power of this innovative technology – the storage hypervisor – and its ability to redefine storage management and efficiency.

To receive a free license key, please email: NFRsoftware@datacore.com or sign up at: http://pages.datacore.com/nfr-for-experts.html.

Premier Auto Insurance Company and International Law Firm Turn to DataCore Software

Direct Line, leading Car Insurance Company, achieves Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Achieved with DataCore's SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor.
http://www.it-director.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=28889

DataCore Software announced that premier German insurance company, Direct Line Versicherung AG, has implemented its business continuity and disaster recovery architecture on a storage infrastructure built on the DataCore storage hypervisor SANsymphony™-V foundation. The high-speed and highly–available synchronous mirroring functionality of the DataCore solution enables Direct Line to set up a backup and disaster recovery data centre located 40 kilometers away in order to minimise downtime and to ensure speedy recovery in case of a failure at the primary data centre. The combination of a storage hypervisor with server hypervisors provides a flexible, high-performance and fail safe IT infrastructure that virtualises storage hardware with SANsymphony-V and server hardware with VMware vSphere.

"DataCore SANsymphony-V provides Direct Line a cost-effective and efficient business continuity solution supporting high-availability and disaster recovery across multiple sites, without neglecting performance or data protection aspects. The DataCore solution is a strategic component in our daily business,” says Heiko Teichmann, managing director at IT service provider Teserco and project manager on behalf of Direct Line Versicherung.

...Thanks to its hardware independence and the efficient caching algorithms of the DataCore solution, Direct Line can not only use its existing and cost-effective HP P2000 disk subsystems, but with DataCore also remove the functional or performance limitations that would have prevented them from future use. Today, around 75 terabytes of data are now managed in the main data centre, located in Teltow and at the remote data center in Berlin, which meets the requirements set by the highest data protection category (Tier 4).

Stikeman Elliott LLP implements DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202535402580&Stikeman_Elliot_Adopts_DataCores_SANsymphonyV&slreturn=1

DataCore Software announced that Stikeman Elliott LLP, one of Canada’s leading business law firms, with offices in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver as well as London, New York and Sydney, has deployed DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor at their Montreal and Toronto hubs – eliminating the need for traditional tape backups and providing much greater business continuity through high availability (HA) and improved disaster recovery (DR).

Stikeman Elliott’s IT team has also made great use of SANsymphony-V’s automated-tiering capability – including utilizing the cloud as yet another data storage tier.

One of the things that Marco Magini, network and systems administrator for Montreal-based Stikeman Elliot LLC, worries most about where storage is concerned is downtime. At one of the largest corporate law firms in the world, it may come as a shock, but the cliché “time is money,” is no joke, said Magini.

“Although we started out looking for a solution to a backup problem, we ended up with far more,” says Magini. “We started slowly, but as we became more familiar with the intelligence and stability of the DataCore storage hypervisor, we put more and more mission-critical systems on top of it and now have almost all of our systems behind it. We have every confidence that SANsymphony-V can handle anything we give it.”

DataCore Software Announces Expansion into the Nordic Region

Read full story: http://www.virtualization.net/3210-datacore-software-announces-expansion-into-the-nordic-region/

DataCore Software announced significant investments into the Nordic region with the appointment of a new Regional Manager, Ilpo Wilkman, based out of Stockholm, Sweden. Ilpo has more than seven years experience in growing the virtualisation market and partner community, holding former positions at VMware and TechData.

Comments Wilkman, “This is a really exciting time and opportunity for DataCore Software. The team has already established a stable base from which to grow further. I join having built strong virtualization partner communities in Sweden both at VMware and at TechData – success that I intend to leverage to grow the DataCore business. End users in the region like the fact that with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V they avoid hardware vendor lock-in. My responsibilities will be to grow channel sales and increase brand presence in the region.”

In addition, DataCore is pleased to announce the appointment of another Scandinavian as the new Worldwide Alliances Director – Swedish native, Håkan Söderbom, based out of Redmond, Washington. Håkan has 13 years’ experience leading multiple alliance and partnership efforts at Microsoft Corporation, having formerly held the position of Director of Partner Business Development. Within the region, Söderbom will use his native skills and experience to boost DataCore’s marketing presence.










Adds Söderbom, “Whilst I am primarily based in Microsoft’s backyard of Redmond, Washington my local knowledge of the region and language skills will help enable me to build the DataCore presence across the Nordics – working with Alliance partners including Microsoft, VMware, Citrix and Nexsan working alongside Ilpo and the team.”

Storage Hypervisors Boost Performance without Breaking the Budget

One of the magical things about virtualization is that it’s really a kind of invisibility cloak. Each virtualization layer hides the details of those beneath it. The result is much more efficient access to lower level resources. Server virtualization has demonstrated this powerfully. Applications don’t need to know about CPU, memory, and other server details to enjoy access to the resources they need.

Unfortunately, this invisibility tends to get a bit patchy when you move down into the storage infrastructure underneath all those virtualized servers, especially when considering performance management. In theory, storage virtualization ought to be able to hide the details of media, protocols, and paths involved in managing the performance of a virtualized storage infrastructure. In reality the machinery still tends to clank away in plain sight.

The problem is not storage virtualization per se, which can boost storage performance in a number of ways. The problem is a balkanized storage infrastructure, where virtualization is supplied by hardware controllers associated with each “chunk” of storage (e.g., array). This means that the top storage virtualization layer is human: the hard-pressed IT personnel who have to make it all work together.

Many IT departments accept the devil’s bargain of vendor lock-in to try to avoid this. But even if you commit your storage fortunes to a single vendor, the pace of innovation guarantees the presence of end-of-life devices that don’t support the latest performance management features. And the expense of this approach puts it beyond the reach of most companies, who can’t afford a forklift upgrade to a single-vendor storage infrastructure and have to deal with the real-world mix of storage devices that result from keeping up with innovation and competitive pressures.

That’s why many companies are turning to storage hypervisors, which, like server hypervisors, are not tied to a particular vendor’s hardware. A storage hypervisor like DataCore’s SANsymphony-V throws the invisibility cloak over the details of all of your storage assets, from the latest high-performance SAN to SATA disks orphaned by the consolidation of a virtualization initiative. Instead of trying to match a bunch of disparate storage devices to the needs of different applications, you can combine devices with similar performance into easily provisioned and managed virtual storage pools that hide all the unnecessary details. And, since you’re not tied to a single vendor, you can look for the best deals in storage, and keep using old storage longer.

SANsymphony-V helps you boost storage performance in three ways: through caching, tiering, and path management.

Caching. SANsymphony-V can use up to a terabyte of RAM on the server that hosts it as a cache for all the storage assets it virtualizes. Advanced write-coalescing and read pre-fetching algorithms deliver significantly faster IO response: up to 10 times faster than the average 200-300 microsecond time delivered by typical high-end cached storage arrays, and orders of magnitude faster than the 6000-8000 microseconds it takes to read and write to the physical disks themselves.

SANsymphony-V also uses its cache to compensate for the widely different traffic levels and peak loads found in virtualized server environments. It smooths out traffic surges and better balances workloads so that applications and users can work more efficiently. In general, you’ll see a 2X or better improvement in the performance of the underlying storage from a storage hypervisor such as DataCore SANsymphony-V.

Tiering. You can also improve performance with data tiering. SANsymphony-V discovers all your storage assets, manages them as a common pool of storage and continually monitors their performance. The auto-tiering technology migrates the most frequently-used data—which generally needs higher performance—onto the fastest devices. Likewise, less frequently-used data typically gets demoted to higher capacity but lower-performance devices.

Auto-tiering uses tiering profiles that dictate both the initial allocation and subsequent migration dynamics. A user can go with the standard set of default profiles or can create custom profiles for specific application access patterns. However you do it, you get the performance and capacity utilization benefits of tiering from all your devices, regardless of manufacturer.

As new generations of devices appear such as Solid State Disks (SSD) and Flash memories and very large capacity disks; these faster or larger capacity devices can simply be added to the available pool of storage devices and assigned a tier. In addition, as devices age, they can be reset to a lower tier often extending their useful life. Many users are interested in deploying SSD technology to gain performance, however due to the high-cost and their limited write traffic life-cycles there is a clear need for auto-tiering and caching architectures to maximize their efficiency. DataCore’s storage hypervisor can absorb a good deal of the write traffic thereby extending the useful life of SSDs and with auto-tiering only that data that needs the benefits of the high-speed SSD tier are directed there, with the storage hypervisor in place the system self tunes and optimizes the use of all the storage devices. Customers have reported upwards of a 20% savings from device independent tiering alone and in combination with the other benefits of a storage hypervisor, savings of 60% or more are also being achieved.

Path management. Finally, SANsymphony-V also greatly reduces the complexity of path management. The software auto-discovers the connections between storage devices and the server(s) it’s running on, and then monitors queue depth to detect congestion and route I/O in a balanced way across all possible routes to the storage in a given virtual pool. There’s a lot of reporting and monitoring data available, but for the most part, once set up, you can just let it run itself and get a level of performance across disparate devices from different vendors that would otherwise take a lot of time and knowledge to get right.

If you would like an in-depth look at how a storage hypervisor can boost storage performance, be sure to check out the third of Jon Toigo’s Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars white papers: Storage in the Fast Lane—Achieving “Off-the-Charts” Performance Management.

Next time I’ll look at how a storage hypervisor boosts storage data security management.

New Videos on DataCore

Check out the full library at: http://www.youtube.com/user/DataCoreVideos

Dennis Publishing –Why I use DataCore
Video: http://snseurope.info/video/749/Dennis-Publishing---Why-I-Use-DataCore

DataCore Storage Hypervisor
Video: http://snseurope.info/video/756/Datacore-Storage-Hypervisor

New Market Report on The Relevance and Value of a “Storage Hypervisor:” Virtualized Management for More Than Just Servers

http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/10/the-relevance-and-value-of-a-%e2%80%9cstorage-hypervisor%e2%80%9d-virtualized-management-for-more-than-just-servers/

A few vendors have already begun to start thinking in these terms; there are the industry giants - IBM with SAN Volume Controller, EMC with VPLEX, HDS with its Universal Storage Platform-V - as well as some smaller software-only players such as DataCore. As the capabilities of these various approached not only expand but become known and understood better, the end-user opportunity for improving efficiency and simplifying operations is simply monumental...

Solve HDD Shortages with DataCore SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor Software

Amongst the catastrophic flooding in Thailand lie hard drive manufacturing plants that supply about 40% of the world’s hard drives and analysts are expecting an impact on supply well into 2012. This means that prices are rising, supply is falling and you are stuck buying more storage in the midst of the crisis because you can’t afford to run out of space.

But what if there was a different way?

Save Money by Saving Space

DataCore Software Storage Hypervisor enables you to maximize utilization and minimize capacity consumption. It thinly provisions capacity from the virtual storage pool to hosts only as needed. No longer do you strand capacity by pre-allocating space to applications that may never use it.

New disk shelves and disk arrays can be added to the virtual storage pool without disrupting applications or users, even in the middle of peak workloads. You won’t need to worry about backwards compatibility with your other storage devices. DataCore overcomes those differences, allowing you to mix and match different models and even different brands within the same virtual pool.

This unique capability allows you to shop around for the best value and defer purchases until you really need the capacity.

Interested in reducing costs by getting the most utilization out of your storage? Contact us now.

DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Lowers Cost of Ownership and Accelerates Performance at HARTING Technology Group

http://www.dabcc.com/channel.aspx?id=208

DataCore Software, the industry’s premier provider of storage virtualization software, announced today that HARTING Technology Group has deployed its SANsymphony storage virtualization software to realize greater cost efficiency, high-performance and a high-availability enterprise storage environment. A complete case study on the storage challenges that HARTING overcame with DataCore Software is available here: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/Harting-Technology-Group.aspx.

HARTING runs on DataCore’s SANsymphony and hardware from Hitachi. The storage solution supports the delivery of business critical applications, such as SAP, MS Exchange, as well as CAD and product lifecycle management software.

HARTING Technology Group is a large global manufacturer and services company specializing in electrical, electronic and optical connection, transmission and networking. It produces technology products and solutions for industries including high-speed rail, automotive and renewable energy such as wind. With over 3,300 employees in 36 countries relying on being able to access the company’s data at all hours of the night and day, a high performance storage environment is paramount.

The company chose a joint solution proposed by solution provider ISO Dataentechnik, which included Hitachi storage hardware and DataCore’s SANsymphony storage virtualization software. By moving from a less-flexible legacy hardware infrastructure to a cost-effective midrange hardware storage system and managing all their storage environment with a DataCore-powered virtualized SAN, HARTING was able to overcome three key challenges:

• Reduce the overall costs of storage and provide greater options and flexibility for adding storage systems in the future.
•  Improve reliability through the addition of DataCore’s high availability for critical business systems.
• Substantially increase enterprise application performance.

A Compelling Combination: High Performance and Low Cost
"Our expectations of the combination of HDS hardware and DataCore software have been exceeded,” said Rudolf Laxa, operations and data center team leader at HARTING Technology Group. “The new HDS midrange systems and the DataCore virtual storage layer have allowed us to lower costs and achieve a significant increase in fail-safety and performance. The excellent interaction between DataCore software and VMware is another reason why we are more than satisfied with the current solution."

According to Laxa, there was initial hesitation to move business-critical SAP applications to the virtualized storage environment – as it represented a significant break from HARTING’s past practices. However, examples of success with similar moves with other DataCore customers and the opportunity to significantly enhance current capabilities ultimately prevailed. Laxa continued, "The benefits of central administration finally provided the impetus for implementation -- a decision we have not had a reason to regret so far.”

In particular, HARTING credits DataCore’s SANsymphony software for an unprecedented level of performance and business agility, especially when combined with the company’s existing VMware-based server virtualization deployment throughout its data center.

"The technical capabilities of DataCore virtualized storage appealed to us almost immediately; it creates high availability, gives us independence from the hardware and makes flexible migration scenarios possible,” said Laxa “The software has proven to be a meaningful extension of our VMware environment and guarantees the highest levels of availability we require from our storage solution."

Arizona State University Selects DataCore to Manage Data Storage Growth

Ensures higher performance and availability

http://www.datamation.com/storage/managing-data-storage-growth-buyers-guide-1.html

Vincent Boragina, Manager System Administration, W. P. Carey School of Business IT Arizona State University, aimed to reach a 100% in server virtualization. Performance from IT assets was imperative. The advance in server virtualisation over the years, alongside desktop virtualization, led the school to dabble in high-end storage I/O needs with sequel databases and file servers (initially kept off the server virtualisation layer as the products were yet to mature). But when they started to virtualize these platforms, they faced a higher degree of latency. The need for I/O had advanced.

Boragina explains, “The issues with virtualization rests not so much with the storage capacity, as much as with how fast and the low latency it requires, to get the data on and off the disc. What is key, are the controllers and the fiber connectivity, etc., that run the disc, which impact the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and the latency of that disc. This is where complexity rises, as it is harder to measure latency. Performance was my key criteria.”

The school implemented DataCore’s SANsymphony-V and XIO storage, where XIO was the disk sub system and DataCore was the hypervisor for the storage and the storage I/O controllers. As a result, the school achieved a 50% reduction in latency time and a 25-30% increase in the overall I/O. With the redundancy and I/O requirements met, the school was able to virtualize any platform.

Importantly, to address issues like high performance, one need not overhaul the existing storage stack, added George Teixeira, CEO at DataCore. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor, for instance, utilizes existing storage assets to boost performance with the adaptive caching. Its auto-tiering enables optimal use of SSDs/Flash, and high-availability for business continuity. “This precludes the investments of purchasing additional IT assets and pre-mature hardware obsolescence,” says Teixeira.

Business continuity was the added benefit for the school, as it came built-in within the DataCore solution. An added effect of this implementation: speedier backup due to a faster I/O.

Storage Hypervisor Delivers Just-in-Time Capacity Management

Just-in-time (JIT) production practices, which view inventory not as an asset but a cost, have accelerated the delivery and reduced the cost of products in a wide range of industries. But perhaps the biggest benefit to the companies that adopted them was the exposure of widespread manufacturing inefficiencies that were holding them back. Without the cushion of a large inventory, every little mechanical or personnel hiccup in the assembly line had an immediate effect on output.

Virtualization technology is playing a similar role for IT, and nowhere is this more visible than in storage. Server virtualization has been incredibly successful in reducing the processor “inventory” needed to provide agile response to business demands for more and better application performance. Average processor utilization often zooms from the 10% range to 60-70% in successful implementations. But this success exposed serious storage capacity management inefficiencies.

As Jon Toigo of the Data Management Institute points out in the first of his Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars white papers, Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency, between 33 and 70 cents of every IT dollar expended goes for storage, and the TCO of storage is estimated to be as much as 5 to 8 times the cost of acquisition on an annualized basis. However, as illustrated in that paper, on average only 30% of that expenditure is actually used for working data. This isn’t due to carelessness on the part of IT managers. They are doing the same sort of thing manufacturers did before JIT: in this case using large storage inventories to compensate for inefficiencies in storage capacity management that make it impossible to provision storage as fast as they can provision virtual servers.

This is a major factor driving the adoption of storage virtualization, which can abstract storage resources into a single virtual pool to make capacity management far more efficient. (It can do the same for performance management and data protection management, as well—I’ll look at them in future posts.) I say “can” because, given the diverse storage infrastructures that are the reality for most organizations, full exploitation of the benefits of storage virtualization requires the use of a storage hypervisor. This is a portable software program, running on interchangeable servers, that virtualizes all your disk storage resources—SAN, server direct-attached storage (DAS) and even those disks orphaned by the transition to server virtualization—not just the disks controlled by the firmware within a proprietary SAN or disk storage system.

With a storage hypervisor such as DataCore’s SANsymphony-V, the storage capacity management inefficiencies exposed by server virtualization are truly a thing of the past. Rather than laboriously matching up individual storage sources with applications—and likely over-provisioning them just to be sure of having enough, you can draw on a single virtual pool of storage for just the right amount. Thin provisioning permits allocating an amount of storage to an application or end user that is far larger than the actual physical storage behind it, and then provisioning real capacity only as needed based on actual usage patterns. Auto-tiering largely automates the task of matching the right storage resource to applications based on performance level needs.

The result is true just-in-time storage: capacity when, where, and how it’s needed. And, because the capacity management capabilities reside in the storage hypervisor, not the underlying devices, they’re available for existing and future storage purchases, regardless of vendor. You can choose the storage brands and models needed to match your specific price/performance requirements, and when new features and capabilities are added to the hypervisor, they’re available to every storage device.

For more information on how a storage hypervisor can enable effective capacity management from an architectural, operational, and financial standpoint, check out Jon’s second Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars white paper: Capacity Management’s Sweet Notes – Dynamic Storage Pooling, Thin-Provisioning & More.

Next time I’ll look at how a storage hypervisor boosts storage performance management.