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Friday 30 October 2009

Last chance to Register for the DataCore Partner Conference 10 November 2009, The Mansion House, Wokefield Park, Reading, UK

Just 10 days to go before the Virtualisation Partner Event of the Year!

Registrations to the DataCore Partner Conference on Storage Virtualisation being held at the Mansion House, Wokefield Park Conference Centre, Reading, England on Tuesday 10 November 2009 close shortly.

Now is your last chance to register to hear the leading players in storage virtualisation talk about the latest directions of virtualisation; unravel frequently asked questions; unveil next generation roadmaps direct from the developers and receive free training to-boot. In the evening we will be hosting an informal Mexican gala dinner, which is a great networking opportunity. For a full copy of the agenda please click here:-

http://www.datacore.com/events/uk-partner-2009.asp

To register, or for more information, please email sharon.munday@datacore.com. There is a small fee (£50.00) to cover registration costs and secure intent. For those of you who wish to stay over at the hotel; DataCore have negotiated a heavily discounted room rate of £90.00 which includes breakfast. This can be made directly through the hotel by quoting the above date to Georgina Cardy. Please email GCardy@deverevenues.co.uk

I look forward to welcoming you on the day,

Many thanks

Sharon

Sharon Munday

DataCore Software Marketing

DDi: +44 (0) 1329 833304

Mob: +44 (0) 7787 566382

sharon.munday@datacore.com

Monday 26 October 2009

New DataCore SANmelody feature highlighted: Non-disruptive disk, array, or vendor substitution - Raw Disk Mirroring

DataCore Releases SANmelody 3.0
Latest update version of vendor’s data storage and disk space management platform targets small and midsized businesses
http://www.information-management.com/news/san_storage_area_network_virtualization-10016293-1.html

Non-disruptive disk, array, or vendor substitution - Raw Disk Mirroring
http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2009/10/raw-disk-mirroring-non-disruptive-disk.html With the release of SANmelody 3.0 PSP2 comes the addition of "raw disk mirroring" which I have touched on in the previous post.
I really don't think this new capability has been given enough coverage when you look at the flexibility it provides. The ability to replace "backend" raw disks without interfering with Virtual Volumes, NMV Volumes or the NMV Pool itself, all while I/O operations continue as normal is an incredible capability.Let look at a scenario: Client maintains a large VMware environment serving ~10TB of data across ~40 thin provisioned virtual volumes server from a SANmelody HA environment with "Vendor A" storage at the backend consisting of many 2Gb FC 146GB 7.5K drives... They are replicating this data to a DR site consisting of SANmelody with "vendor C" disk.Customer has decided to de-comission "vendor A" storage, in place of "vendor B" which contains new 4Gb 300GB 15K rpm drives.Solution: Utilising raw disk mirroring we are able to serve up new capacity from "vendor B" and mirror the raw disks with "vendor A" without touching any of our provisioned volumes. Once mirrors are established we can disconnect "vendor A" and continue as normal without any interuption to the business or to our DR replication solution. But I don't run SANmelody or SANsymphony?.. The 2nd piece of this puzzle is "Proxy volumes support". If you have existing vendor storage and would like the type of flexibility discussed above to migrate data, it can be done. DataCore can "pass through" all of your existing served volumes (with file systems) and mirror the data while it is serving I/O..........

Computer Technology Review:
SNW Fall 2009: DataCore enhances SANmelody storage virtualization solution

Thursday 22 October 2009

SearchStorage.UK: Storage Round-up: DataCore announces SANmelody enhancements

DataCore announces SANmelody enhancements
http://searchstorage.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid181_gci1371656,00.html
DataCore Software has announced several enhancements to its SANmelody storage virtualisation product. The new features are aimed at small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and include the ability to replace storage arrays in the background, configure network paths between storage virtualisation nodes, prioritization of resynchronisation of mirrored disks and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support. DataCore's products enable users to make storage-area networks from commodity disk capacity.

Thursday 15 October 2009

Powerful new capabilities in latest virtualisation release from DataCore Software.

Powerful new capabilities in latest virtualisation release from DataCore™ Software.
http://www.it-director.com/sme/news_release.php?rel=13724

...The new features are aimed at small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) that are eager to upgrade their disk subsystems and storage network infrastructure, but fear the broad business disruptions that such changes typically bring.
The new features, now shipping, in SANmelody 3.0 enable:

Non-disruptive Substitution - Replace storage arrays in the background.
Copies the contents of a designated storage array (or individual drive) to the unit that will replace it while applications continue to use the logical volumes. The new array (or drive) transparently takes over once it matches the contents of the original drives so that the older drives can be taken offline without impacting users.

Redundant Pathing - Configure network paths between storage virtualization nodes.
These paths may be diversely routed to ensure that if one primary network connection is broken or taken offline, synchronous mirroring between nodes will continue uninterrupted over the alternate connection.

Prioritized Recovery - Prioritize resynchronization of mirrored disks.
Ensures that the most critical, volumes are resynchronized first when a node or its storage is taken off-line during an upgrade or unplanned outage.

Group Snapshot and Clone Command - Synchronize online snapshots across inter-dependent volumes.
Coordinates multiple snapshots to occur at the same time across a group of related volumes. This ensures point-time synchronization of file systems and application data that reside on different disks. It ensures that clones created on new equipment are an exact replica of their predecessor.

Content Migration - Relocate Active Drives into Virtual Storage Pool.
Enables existing drives formatted with NTFS, Unix, Linux and other file systems to be incorporated into the SANmelody storage pool. These physical drives are first un-mounted from the application servers where they were once active, and reconnected behind a SANmelody node. The SANmelody node will then act as an intermediary between the application server and these drives. To take full advantage of SANmelody advanced virtualisation features, their contents may be copied to virtual disks using snapshots or synchronous mirroring. The relocated drives can then be wiped clean and included in the physical storage pool as additional capacity, or they may be decommissioned.

FCoE Connectivity - Access Fibre Channel storage pool via the LAN switching infrastructure.
Application servers and other storage consumers can access SANmelody nodes equipped with Fibre Channel SAN connections using their Ethernet Network Interface Cards (NICs). This capability takes advantage of the new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol and FCoE-compliant switches.

New Features: SANmelody 3.0 PSP 2 Released

New Features: SANmelody 3.0 PSP 2 Released

Good Screenshots and Highlights Overview: http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2009/10/sanmelody-30-psp-2-released.html

Wednesday 14 October 2009

SANmelody enhancements on show at Storage Expo

http://www.prosecurityzone.com/Customisation/News/IT_Security/Backup_Data_Recovery_and_Disaster_Recovery/SANmelody_enhancements_on_show_at_Storage_Expo.asp
Prioritised recovery and redundant pathing feature among the enhancement to DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualisation system being demonstrated at Storage Expo in London
DataCore Software has announced several enhancements to its SANmelody storage virtualisation solution. The new features are aimed at small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) that are eager to upgrade their disk subsystems and storage network infrastructure, but fear the broad business disruptions that such changes typically bring.

FCoE Is Ready, Is It Time to Care?

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/ipstorage/features/article.php/3841266
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) has been a much-hyped technology, but adoption rates haven't yet lived up to the propaganda.According to Seamus Crehan, an analyst at Dell'Oro Group, only about 10,000 FCoE ports shipped in 2008. While that number is predicted to reach 1 million in 2011, it will still be outgunned by Fibre Channel by a factor of 10 to one.That said, FCoE isn't a technology to ignore...

However, Alexander Nier, product manager for DataCore Software, cautions that an understanding of the underlying technology is a must or implementation headaches will crop up."Don't confuse FCoE with a freshly paved road where everything goes better just because it's new," said Nier. "FCoE is a complementary technology rather than a replacement for existing products. The main prep work is to understand if somebody may or may not benefit from using FCoE."

To his mind, if you are a happy camper today, there is probably no need to switch gear. As FCoE is still in the early stages of adoption, he wouldn't encourage anyone to switch if the technology they have in place is satisfactory. FCoE's primary intention, after all, is to consolidate back-end cabling by using the same physical media (Ethernet cable) for multiple transportation streams in parallel."If the back-end cabling of your server racks looks like a mess, and each server has a bunch of fiber optic and network cables connected to it, you're probably a good candidate," said Nier.

Tuesday 13 October 2009

Are we seeing the back of storage appliances? Nick Broadbent comments.

Extract from Networking Plus Magazine –

Are we seeing the back of storage appliances?

As virtualisation continues to filter through the networking world, Rahiel Nasir (Editor, Networking Plus) wonders if its now time to ditch the traditional SAN and NAS

The V word. In the world of Enterprise IT, it’s the one technology that could unite us all: virtualisation. And a particular area where virtualisation is beginning to loom large is in data storage. So what impact is this technology having on the market?

DataCore’s UK MD Nick Broadbent says that virtualisation has “revolutionised” the way desktops, servers and storage are implemented in the SMB sector over the past 12 months. He says that with storage virtualisation, most companies now recognise the immediate savings that can be made to the bottom line in terms of resource, carbon and energy management and capital outlay. “Existing hardware is now able to be re-purposed and re-utilised. Storage is able to be provisioned seamlessly across the network. Through software storage virtualisation users never run out of capacity, ‘find’ tasks are automated and performance is optimised.”

The entire article can be found on Page 15, Networking Plus Magazine, October Issue.

Monday 12 October 2009

Mark you calendars to see DataCore at Storage Expo - October 14-15

DataCore Storage Expo Page:

http://www.storage-expo.com/page.cfm/Action=Exhib/ExhibID=102

New SANmelody 3.0 Product Review in Network Computing

New Product Review of SANmelody 3.0 in Network Computing.

VMware, Hyper-V virtualization leave others in the dust

Interesting post:

The data derives from TechTarget's "Virtualization Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey" of 666 IT professionals that have deployed or are evaluating virtualization. Data was collected between June and September 2009.To no one's surprise, survey respondents reported using VMware Inc. over other virtualization software by a wide margin: 72.4% identified some VMware edition as their primary virtualization platform (ESX 2.x to 4.x or VMware Server), compared with 14.8% that cited a Microsoft offering (Hyper-V or Virtual Server).

Blowing away the competition But despite a fair amount of buzz, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Virtual Iron Software Inc. and open source Xen variants barely registered. Each came in at about 1% market share. OS-level and partitioning-based virtualization platforms (HP VSE, IBM mainframe partitions, Solaris Containers, and Parallels Virtuozzo) fared even worse, failing to garner a mention by even 1% of respondents.VMware is the 800-pound gorilla, and everyone wants to vote for the winner...

Read more: http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1369150,00.html#

Virtualization and “the new availability” -John Abbot -The 451 Report

Good post on availabity in the virtual world:
http://datacenterjournal.com/content/view/3254/40/
Long established techniques addressing application resilience, data availability and disaster recovery are being challenged by server virtualization technologies from companies such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. Where do we go from here?

...Who’s selling what? So who are the market players? The virtualization infrastructure vendors – VMware, Microsoft and Citrix Systems in particular – continue to build functionality to increase availability into their core products, threatening in some cases to squeeze out competition from third-party vendors. A core part of what they offer is the live migration of virtual machines, which can move workloads to a different server while they are running. This has the potential to eliminate the need for planned downtime altogether.But there is still plenty of room for other vendors to operate.

They range from storage array vendors with their own hardware-specific tools (such as EMC, Hewlett-Packard and NetApp) to software-based replication vendors (such as Double-Take Software and NeverFail).The storage vendors typically provide the best performance, but require an investment in expensive networked storage resources. Modular, iSCSI-based storage systems such as HP's LeftHand and Dell's EqualLogic are capitalizing on the new demand for availability, attracting customers that have previously been frightened away from shared storage by the complexities and expense of classic fiber channel-based storage networks. A related approach is that of the storage virtualizers, such as DataCore Software...

Wednesday 7 October 2009

ComputerWorld Test Center: SANs tuned for virtualization pack nice surprises

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138935/Test_Center_SANs_tuned_for_virtualization_pack_nice_surprises?taxonomyId=0&pageNumber=1
Virtualization is moving further into the datacenter all the time, with even critical large-scale applications like Exchange and databases now being virtualized. Whether you're using virtualization to make large applications more manageable or to consolidate many small applications, a server with lots of RAM, lots of processor cores, and lots of I/O is a good thing.

And so is a SAN packed with features that ease the management of storage for virtual machines.From a storage viewpoint, each virtual machine uses a file to simulate a physical hard disk. This file, a VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk Format) under VMware or VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) under Microsoft, can be located on a server's internal drive or on a SAN. There are several advantages to putting the file on a SAN: The file can be duplicated using the storage's snapshot function, the file can be moved easily from one hardware server to another for scalability or fault tolerance, and the storage itself can be more easily made fault tolerant.

I tested five midrange SAN systems that deliver the goods for virtual environments: the Compellent Storage Center 4.0, the Dell EqualLogic PS4000, the HP StorageWorks 2000sa G2 Modular Smart Array, the Pillar Axiom 600 from Pillar Data Systems, and a build-it-yourself pairing of the Promise vTrak E610f hardware and DataCore's SANmelody 3.0 storage software...

The prices (as tested) of these systems range widely, from less than $10,000 for the Promise Technologies and DataCore combination to $130,000 for the Pillar Data system. All the manufacturers have models ranging from inexpensive starters to very high-performance datacenter-ready systems. As you can tell from the range in price, the models I tested don't necessarily compete with each other.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138935/Test_Center_SANs_tuned_for_virtualization_pack_nice_surprises?taxonomyId=0&pageNumber=6

Tuesday 6 October 2009

VM09 -The UK's Largest Virtualization Event - DataCore Software: New solutions for storage virtualization and business continuity unveiled

Earls Court, London - October 6, 2009 - Appearing at VM09, DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualisation, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today unveiled New Business Continuity Starter SAN packages and promotions, new capabilities such as Advanced Site Recovery (ASR), a simple pre-configured Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA), Citrix® EssentialsTM StorageLinkTM adapter for Hyper-V and XenServer and support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet [FCoE].
http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/10/10/datacore-software-targets-vmware-vsphere-microsoft-hyper-v-and-citrix-customers-with-new-solutions-for-storage-virtualization-and-business-continuity.aspx

Thursday 1 October 2009

DataCore Customers in Education

DataCore Software announced new SAN software packages and promotions for academic institutes that deliver price savings of up to 50% and highlighted a host of educational institutions that have already deployed storage virtualisation using its SANmelody and SANsymphony solutions.