Software-defined Storage is a ‘Must Have’ for a Software-defined Data Center; Movement Driven by Need to Optimize Tier 1 Business Applications

I expect a lot of buzz at VMworld and afterwards around ‘Software-defined Data Centers’ and it makes me chuckle to think of all the different ways we have found to state the obvious ‘Software is what matters.’  The software model and business applications have redefined the foundation of architectures from being ‘static’ to ‘dynamic’; software is the basis for agility, user interactions and for building a long-term architecture that adapts to change. Yes, hardware continues to innovate rapidly but it is software that defines an infrastructure’s flexibility to evolve, to enhance productivity and to optimally align resources and services to meet the dynamic needs of application use cases.

As I blogged earlier this year: Software will take center stage for storage, empowering users to a new level of hardware interchangeability and commodity-based "buying power."

Clearly, this new found positioning and characterization in the virtualization industry around ‘software-defined’ is much more than just new buzz words.  It is a continuation on the trend to capture a few hard hitting words to frame the mindset evolution from hardware-centric to software-centric that is happening in the real world.  As users have to deal with the new dynamics and faster pace of business they can no longer be trapped within yesterday’s more rigid and hardwired architecture models. Infrastructure is constructed on three pillars – computing, networking and storage – and in each area hardware decisions are taking a back seat to a world dictated by software and driven by applications.  See today’s DataCore announcement at VMworld 2012: DataCore Storage Hypervisor Makes Mission-Critical and I/O Intensive Tier 1 Business Applications Run Up to 5X Faster Virtualized

The terminology and marketing hype has clearly evolved over the years from a conversation about software code, to emulators, to supervisors, to virtualization, to hypervisors, to management platforms, to private cloud infrastructures and now to ‘Software-defined.’ VMware certainly has been on the forefront of this journey and their CTO Steve Herrod has been blogging away on advancing the software-defined data center. Most recently when VMware purchased Nicira the tag line of the day became software-defined networking for the software-defined data center. And today, at VMworld, there will be a lot of announcements around this theme; frankly, I can’t wait to see all the news buzz and the articles that will result. I see this new conversation as a positive driver of momentum for true virtual infrastructure software suppliers, like VMware and DataCore Software, but more importantly, the real value is that the talk leads to a compelling value proposition for end customers in terms of flexibility and risk mitigation in how they build, purchase, upgrade and scale their infrastructures for the long-term.

This trend to software-centric thinking is inevitable and it is the foundation and the basic premise that led to the formation of DataCore Software, so we see this ‘new conversation’ and mindset as vindication that our vision on redefining storage as software was ahead of its time. We have never wavered on this direction. Therefore, we certainly support ‘software-defined storage’ becoming a meaningful new mantra for how the industry redefines infrastructures and advances the state of storage within a ‘software-defined data center.’

Software-defined means ‘Future-proof’ adaptability and Hardware Interchangeability
The whole concept of software-defined datacenters is based on how we view and manage holistically all of the different resources – Computing, Networking and Storage - and how we make them equally accessible to a lot of different application types. Hardware interchangeability is fundamental at each level; it becomes a ‘must have’ in order to gain flexibility, improve productivity, and optimize cost savings on an on-going basis. Likewise, software-defined architectures can absorb new innovations without complete redesigns, in effect allowing infrastructures to adapt and become ‘future-proofed’ to device changes that ‘come and go’ as new generations and models come along. This is the compelling value proposition that DataCore delivers with its software-based storage hypervisor.

Software-defined Storage and Tier 1 Applications
It is smart software that abstracts and transforms the many different device types (servers, switches, disk arrays, etc.) into pools of resources which can be provisioned and mapped to application systems as needed. Automation and management tools make it easier to achieve much greater levels of productivity and all this is thanks to software innovations that have redefined the infrastructure level.

Infrastructure is simply a means to an end. It's the way that you run applications that ultimately matters. The idea of the software-defined datacenter is to optimize that application experience. DataCore understands that in the end, it is all about how the software makes business applications more productive. To learn more, please see how DataCore’s storage hypervisor Optimizes Your Application-centric Storage

Also announced today at VMworld 2012: DataCore Storage Hypervisor Makes Mission-Critical and I/O Intensive Tier 1 Business Applications Run Up to 5X Faster Virtualized

SANsymphony™-V 9.0, the newest release of its flagship product, boosts the speed, throughput and availability of virtualized, I/O intensive tier 1 applications like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange. Customers report up to 5x faster response time performance and achieve better than 99.999% uptime after virtualizing their existing storage with SANsymphony-V.

"DataCore fundamentally changes the economics of performance, cost-effectively enabling application owners to virtualize their tier 1 applications as they transform into private clouds and software-defined data centers. The DataCore storage hypervisor works hand in hand with VMware to intelligently and economically harness the full power of server caches, solid state disks (SSDs) and existing storage assets so that application owners no longer need to 'rip and replace' storage infrastructures and pay much higher costs to meet their performance and uptime objectives."

If you are attending VMworld this week, please stop by DataCore’s booth 2307 to learn more or please visit our web site at www.datacore.com

VMworld 2012: DataCore Software Certified VMware Ready; VAAI, SRM, vCenter Plug-ins Further Integrates Storage Hypervisor with VMware Cloud Infrastructures and Software-defined Datacentres

SANsymphony-V Certified VMware Ready™


Today at VMworld® 2012, DataCore Software announced that SANsymphony™-V is now certified as VMware Ready™ and easily integrates with VMware’s portfolio of solutions, allowing data center and private cloud operators to gain the most from their virtual infrastructure investments. At VMworld 2012, DataCore will showcase SANsymphony™-V 9.0 “The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud,” which offers customers many far-reaching innovations essential to managing enterprise-wide storage and to quickly deploying agile, scalable cloud storage infrastructures. Attendees are invited to stop by booth #2307 to learn how customers are using VMware and DataCore to optimize their Tier One application workloads and to take advantage of DataCore’s offer for free not-for-resale (NFR) software to qualified VMware certified experts and professionals.

“Our partnership with DataCore helps customers virtualize and optimize their storage infrastructure so it delivers the performance, scalability, flexibility and redundancy required to support their server and desktop virtualization initiatives,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. “This capability enables enterprises to realize the full benefits of their private cloud deployments.”DataCore’s SANsymphony-V is VMware Ready and offers seamless integration with:

VMware vSphere® 5

VMware vSphere® Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)

VMware vCenter™ Server

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™ (SRM)

DataCore Software is a longstanding member of VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner Program. Thousands of VMware vSphere and SANsymphony-V users are already realizing dynamic, virtualized and private cloud environments powered by the hardware of their choice. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V 9.0 offers VMware software users enhanced flexibility and powerful automation benefits, delivering exceptional value to their private cloud and data center environments. As enterprises and data center operators continue to upgrade and modernize their infrastructure, they will require such solutions to maximize ROI. Advanced features of the DataCore Storage Hypervisor include automated tiering, thin provisioning and high availability, enabling administrators to gain full value and more effective usage of their costly solid state drive (SSD) deployments.

Empowering VMware SRM and VAAI Benefits Across Heterogeneous Storage Arrays
VMware VAAI storage-based hardware acceleration lowers CPU and memory consumption, enables faster deployment, supports VMware vMotion® for storage tasks and disk creation, as well as higher VM consolidation ratios; however, these capabilities only work with VAAI-compliant storage arrays. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V extends VAAI hardware acceleration benefits across heterogeneous storage arrays, regardless of whether those arrays have native VAAI support or the VMFS volumes span the same brand of array enclosure.

The Storage Hypervisor sits in front of all types of storage vendor arrays and devices, presenting DataCore-powered virtual disks/LUNs to VMware vSphere. The software masks the physical characteristics of the underlying storage devices. Bottom-line, it does not matter which physical storage array is sitting on the back-end.

The DataCore storage hypervisor empowers VMware administrators to:

Replicate LUNs or motion virtual disks across different storage arrays

Facilitate the implementation of powerful capabilities like VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM) on top of those virtualized and replicated disks

Enable VAAI operations across platforms

Simplify migrations and VMware Storage vMotion

Free up the VMkernel for other activities by offloading work to the storage hypervisor

VMware vCenter™ Server Plug-In Makes it Easy for VMware vSphere Admins to Eliminate Storage Issues
DataCore has made available a VMware vCenter Server plug-in that integrates enterprise-wide storage hypervisor management with VMware vCenter Server to empower VMware administrators with the ability to easily manage virtual machines (VMs) and storage from a single console. Enterprises can now control and schedule key SANsymphony-V storage virtualization services, taking snapshots and tasks directly from their VMware vCenter Server Management Platform. The DataCore VMware vCenter Server management plug-in software is available immediately for download to all SANsymphony-V customers.

For more information, please download the DataCore vCenter Plug-in datasheet. Link: http://pages.datacore.com/SANsymphony-VforVMwarevCenter.html

DataCore SANsymphony-V: “The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud”
“The march to the cloud continues as enterprises, data centers and service providers increasingly explore the business and technical benefits of fully virtualized environments,” commented Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development, DataCore Software. “Storage is often the overlooked component as organizations move to virtualize servers, desktops and top tier application delivery and take full advantage of their private clouds. Not addressing this component can result in performance bottlenecks and deployment hurdles, and will not make the best use of upgrade investments. DataCore’s Storage Hypervisor is empowering administrators to avoid these pitfalls when migrating to the cloud.”

Visit the Booth and Test Drive the Storage HypervisorAt VMworld 2012
DataCore will provide access to free test drives to any interested attendees and offer free license keys of its SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor to VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX), VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) and VMware Certified Instructors (VCI). The NFR license keys – available for non-production uses such as course development, training, lab testing and demonstration purposes – are intended to support virtualization consultants, instructors and architects involved in efforts aimed at managing and fully leveraging storage assets.

VMworld 2012: DataCore Storage Hypervisor Makes Mission-Critical Tier 1 Business Applications Run Up to 5X Faster Virtualized

Enterprise Strategy Group Lab Validation report confirmed benchmark tests with Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange workloads improved workload performance by nearly 5x. As a proof point for performance and cost efficiency, the SANsymphony-V empowered systems were able to support more than 1,500 users as compared to only 322 users on the non-virtualized physical servers.

Today at VMware's VMworld 2012, DataCore Software showcased how SANsymphony™-V 9.0, the newest release of its flagship product, boosts the speed, throughput and availability of virtualized, I/O intensive tier 1 applications like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange. Customers report 2x to 5x faster performance and achieve better than 99.999% uptime after virtualizing their existing storage with SANsymphony-V.

"DataCore fundamentally changes the economics of performance, cost-effectively enabling application owners to virtualize their tier 1 applications as they transform into private clouds," said George Teixeira, CEO and President of DataCore Software. "The DataCore storage hypervisor works hand in hand with VMware to intelligently and economically harness the full power of server caches, solid state disks (SSDs) and existing storage assets so that application owners no longer need to 'rip and replace' storage infrastructures and pay much higher costs to meet their performance and uptime objectives."

Eliminating the I/O Bottlenecks in Virtualized Data Centers
Performance decreases and downtime caused by I/O bottlenecks are the number one reason why enterprises are holding back from virtualizing their I/O intensive tier 1 applications. SANsymphony-V overcomes this by using device-independent adaptive caching and performance boosting techniques to absorb wildly variable workloads so that applications run faster virtualized.

"DataCore's impact on performance was dramatic in every metric we measured. Even more impressive is how SANsymphony-V simplifies management and how easily it can make data center storage more resilient. With a single mouse click disk capacity is served and all the normal error-prone steps to configure, tune and set best paths for high availability get done auto-magically," said Tony Palmer, senior engineer and analyst with ESG Lab. For more on Palmer's observations, watch: http://storagetv.org/datacore/testvideo.php?vidkey=222.

In the ESG Lab Validation report, the benchmark tests confirmed that Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange workloads were able to improve their performance by nearly 5x. As a proof point for performance and cost efficiency, the SANsymphony-V empowered systems were able to support more than 1,500 users as compared to only 322 users on the non-virtualized physical servers.

Harnessing Flash Storage Cost Effectively for Even Greater Application PerformanceTo further increase tier 1 application responsiveness, companies often spend excessively on flash memory-based SSDs. SANsymphony-V's auto-tiering feature optimizes the use of these premium-priced resources alongside more modestly priced, higher capacity disk drives. SANsymphony-V constantly monitors I/O behavior and intelligently auto-selects between server memory caches, flash storage and traditional disk resources in real-time to ensure that the most suitable class or tier of storage device is assigned to each workload based on priorities and urgency. The result is unmatched tier 1 application performance and cost efficiency.

Ensuring Fast and Always Available Applications Without a Major Storage Investment
Once I/O intensive tier 1 applications are virtualized, SANsymphony-V ensures high availability, eliminating single points of failure and disruption through application-transparent physical separation stretched across rooms or off-site with full auto-recovery capabilities for the highest levels of business continuity. SANsymphony-V effectively virtualizes whatever storage is on a user's floor, whether direct-attached or SAN-connected, to achieve the robust and responsive shared storage environment necessary to support highly dynamic virtual IT environments.

Customers Around the World Are Increasing the Performance, Improving the Availability and Reducing the Storage Costs of Their Virtualized Tier 1 Applications
"Since we started using DataCore on the storage side to virtualize our tier 1 applications, we got back on track with our virtualization project," said Pablo Palma, information technology manager at The MLS™, a US real estate advertising and marketing service company. "Before that, I/O bottlenecks and the pesky outages were hitting us at every turn, especially with web servers, file servers and SQL Server. Now we can handle about 300% more transactions than before -- all on the same hardware. Moreover our disk pool is completely redundant, giving us the opportunity to upgrade and expand without taking users down."

"We have virtualized Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint on all of our DataCore/VMware projects and consistently the performance of these applications has been outstanding," said Jim Krantz, president of Krantz Secure Technologies, a full service professional IT services company based in the US. "The performance has been so good that we have not even considered expanding the amount of cache we use, though we could do this easily and inexpensively. Of course DataCore's automated High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions are equally as important for these critical applications. The technology is awesome."

"SAP was the critical element in the project because the SAP system places the highest load and the greatest demand on both performance and on the need for availability," said Jurgen Bechtel, CIO of MENNEKES, a global leader in the manufacturing of electrical products with headquarters in Germany. "The result was very positive -- SAP runs on DataCore, with more performance than on our previous storage systems. The DataCore solution simply proved itself."

"We've been able to support far more virtual machines and far more I/O requests than the IT team had originally expected. Performance has been nothing short of phenomenal," said Craig Beetlestone, lead systems engineer at Ports of Auckland, New Zealand's leading 24x7, 365-day-a-year port company. "With SANsymphony, we have seen the benefits first-hand of improved uptime and being able to do operational maintenance without affecting the business. Lastly, we have peace of mind. We know we don't have to throw away any functionality intelligence because we get to keep using SANsymphony software even as the hardware underneath changes."

For more on virtualizing and running I/O intensive tier 1 applications, go to: http://www.datacore.com/Solutions/Applications.aspx.

Taking Storage Hypervisors to the Next Level

  

 One of the most valuable things newcomers bring to a corporate team is a fresh perspective. This is especially true when he or she fills a newly-created position, as is the case with Steve Houck, DataCore’s new Chief Operating Officer, who’s tasked with organizing and driving our rapid growth to maintain our leadership in storage virtualization.

Steve’s previous roles included vice president of worldwide channels for VMware, along with various global sales leadership posts at EMC Corporation. Steve has also held executive posts for global field sales and go-to-market strategy development at start-up ventures focused on cloud computing and flash storage, with the most recent executive role at Astute Networks, an innovative SSD technology company.

This week we’d like to share with you a brief conversation with Steve, illuminating the high points of his perspective on the storage virtualization market, DataCore, and SANsymphony-V R9. Q. What brought you to DataCore?
“The opportunity really stood out for me, given my experience at EMC and VMware, and later two startups in the data center/cloud space. Its pretty clear that we’re going through the biggest IT transformation of our lifetime, and we’ve reached an inflection point. When customers start virtualizing their tier-one business applications and production environments, they find that that their storage architectures were too complicated to sustain that effort. As a result, over the past 24 months or so, the market has moved steadily into DataCore’s sweet spot.


Q. Why now? DataCore’s been in business for 14 years. What changed to make storage hypervisors a sweet spot?
“Again, complexity. Until server virtualization took off, the pain just wasn’t intense enough to force customers to fundamentally re-evaluate their storage architecture. For years, the biggest discussion was about which storage vendor to commit to. But things are moving so fast now that customers don’t want to tie themselves to one vendor anymore. No matter how broad their vision, you’re going to run off the edge at some point, and that kills the agility that’s the whole point of virtualization and cloud computing.”


Q. What do you see as DataCore’s fundamental advantages?
“Technology goes without saying: that’s the foundation of the performance gains, increased agility, and lower costs that SANsymphony-V delivers. Maturity, too. There’s over ten years of code behind this, and thousands of customers—that’s why I call DataCore a 14-year-old startup. But above all, the real barrier to entry is that DataCore is an agnostic pure storage play: we’re not a part of anyone’s virtualization stack but we play well with all of them. That puts the customer and our partners in the driver’s seat.”


Q. What will your primary focus at DataCore be?
“On a high level, building relationships with strategic partners, with channel partners, and with customers. Our recent SANsymphony-V release takes our storage hypervisor technology to the enterprise level with increased scalability and integration with major system monitoring tools. Likewise, I want to take the DataCore ecosystem to the next level with volume resellers, system integrators, cloud providers, solid state disk (SSD) vendors and appliance system builders selling SANsymphony-V, to give customers more choice and the ability to do projects they just couldn’t afford or manage before.


“Our channel partners will be a big part of this. Integrators who grabbed the brass ring back when server virtualization started to take off—I saw this at VMware—were able to break away from the pack and establish themselves as major players, leapfrogging their competition in the process.


“I see the same opportunity for the DataCore channel. SANsymphony-V enables them to build the best, most scalable, most efficient storage architectures for their customers by leveraging all of their storage expertise and vendor relationships. We add value to their entire portfolio, and a lot of my focus will be on demonstrating that with actual customer engagements to build our channel.”

For more about Steve Houck and his new role at DataCore, click here: DataCore Software Appoints Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Industry Veteran Steve Houck to Newly Created Chief Operating Officer Role.

DataCore Software Storage Hypervisor Energizes Reseller Channel; SANsymphony-V 9.0 Garners Significant Praise from Partner Community

Channel Partners Find the SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor Essential for

Solving Customers’ Most Pressing Data Storage Challenges

DataCore Software announced that resellers are supporting the new release of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V 9.0 storage hypervisor to address the top storage challenges their customers are facing, including: budgetary constraints, systems performance, application uptime and the need for flexibility and freedom of choice. DataCore reseller partners serve as trusted IT solutions and services providers, solving significant storage and business challenges for their customers.

“The trend to virtualize storage-intensive, tier 1 applications like databases and mail systems has really pushed the limits of performance and business continuity for many storage architectures,” explained Jason Cherveny, president and CEO, Sanity Solutions, a DataCore reseller partner. “DataCore makes it practical to help clients meet their demanding application needs and not have to rip and replace everything to do it.”

Moreover, according to Barry Martin, partner and chief technical architect of The Mirazon Group, another IT solutions provider and DataCore partner, “Chief among the obstacles our customers are facing is flexibility of storage. The challenges we hear range from affordability of technology to overcoming performance roadblocks to ensuring non-stop business operations and uptime through high availability. Most organizations have multiple concerns and every customer comes to us with a different perspective on what is most important to them.”

A large hospital that recently engaged Mirazon was a perfect example of the wide variety of problems that organizations face with their storage environments. Chiefly, they needed to replicate data to a disaster recovery (DR) site and required a solution that would ease the migration to their next storage array of choice.

“SANsymphony-V is the ideal, flexible software platform for building completely virtualized infrastructures,” continued Martin. “In fact, we run our business on a SAN powered by DataCore SANsymphony-V. I can tell you from our own internal use of the product, and as a small business, that it has provided us with a very robust SAN at a very affordable price, one that is built to our precise needs and specifications. This is exactly why we deploy the DataCore storage hypervisor for our customers. As with us, it gives them the ability to have both choice and control of their storage.”

Freedom of Choice and More: Performance and Uptime

“SANsymphony-V 9.0 is the latest version of an intelligent virtualization solution from an experienced, independent software provider with no bias for specific hardware manufacturers,” stated Jim Steinlage, president and CEO at Choice Solutions, a DataCore reseller partner.

Resellers also emphasize the performance enhancements that SANsymphony-V 9.0 delivers.

“DataCore’s storage hypervisor improves performance and protects the investments of any legacy equipment our customers already own as well as equipment they purchase in the future,” explained Martin. “SANsymphony-V 9.0 simply makes any storage faster, while delivering maximum ROI.”

Resellers agree that SANsymphony-V 9.0 solves perhaps the most pressing of all IT challenges – uptime. With synchronously mirrored copies each running the storage hypervisor, customers can perform maintenance of their SAN, even in the middle of the day, without disruption to end users. It also allows customers to eliminate storage downtime, which is paramount for avoiding performance issues with all other aspects of their virtualized infrastructure, including servers, desktops and tier 1 applications. This uptime is not just critical to resellers meeting the maintenance needs of their customers, but also for building out or replacing backend disks and storage arrays.

“If a storage array is front-ended by DataCore, we can literally expire those disks, add new storage and bring that into the pool with zero downtime,” noted Martin.

Resellers Praise Enhancements to SANsymphony-V

“DataCore is ‘on the move,’” added Martin. “They have demonstrated very well over the past year and a half that they are taking SANsymphony-V to the enterprise after experiencing tremendous success in the SMB space. What we are seeing in SANsymphony-V 9.0, and what we have been exposed to in terms of features beyond release 9.0, removes all barriers to selling the product to any organization – small or large. From a business standpoint, it’s a great time to partner with DataCore Software.”

DataCore development is primarily driven by direct partner and customer feedback. According to resellers, the following enhancements to SANsymphony-V 9.0 are proving particularly effective, listed in order of significance: 

·         Auto-tiering and Heat Map Fine Tuning for optimal performance and SSD utilization

·         Integration with major system monitoring tools (i.e., Microsoft, VMware, Hitachi and SNMP)

·         Scalability and High-Availability: N+1 grid, scale up and out

·         Multi-site replication and recovery: many-to-one, one-to-many, DR readiness test mode

“We love working with DataCore and providing solutions to our customers based on the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor,” concluded Cherveny. "DataCore enables us to solve tough problems, perform non-disruptive migrations and cost-effectively insert new technologies like flash storage into customers’ existing infrastructures.”

Derby Supply Chain Solutions Achieves Business Continuity Objectives with DataCore Software’s Storage Hypervisor

"The biggest benefit that we have experienced with SANsymphony-V is business continuity that has enabled our organization to consolidate and virtualize the bulk of our server infrastructure," stated Joshua Taylor, senior systems administrator at Derby Supply Chain Solutions. "Prior to embracing DataCore's storage hypervisor-based solution for storage virtualization, our server infrastructure was on aging hardware and was therefore very unreliable. Our users have definitely experienced much better uptime and continuity than what they had experienced previously without DataCore."

Beyond the high availability, Derby also reports that it has attained a new level of investment protection and greater utilization of their storage resources – all because they chose to virtualize their storage the right way, with DataCore’s device independent software-based storage hypervisor SANsymphony-V.

Derby Supply Chain Solutions delivers supply chain solutions for assembly, packaging, warehousing and distribution to companies of all sizes, including global enterprises like Whirlpool, GE, Volvo, Mack, Godiva, and more. Derby is a complete third party logistics solution, providing its customers with the ability to streamline their assembly, packaging, warehousing and distribution processes. Derby works collaboratively with its customers to develop innovative, effective and scalable solutions. The company offers physical warehousing and logistics services as well as software solutions that enable customers to view and in some cases, control how their products move through the supply chain.

According to Taylor, a "day in the life" prior to DataCore was one that included far too many disparate systems, with data strewn onto almost every device possible. There was no easy-to-use backup solution, and trying to manage storage was "a nightmare." Taylor said the IT system’s lack of redundancy caused "almost daily" problems at the company, particularly with the aging hardware that was in place at the time.

“Derby Supply Chain Solutions looked at other options from EMC and Dell before choosing DataCore,” commented Taylor. “However, after researching SANsymphony-V and seeing the cost-to-performance benefits and the total cost of ownership compared to those other solutions, we knew that DataCore was the best option.”

The Mirazon Group, an IT solutions provider and prolific DataCore partner, understood Derby Supply Chain Solutions’ IT objectives. They implemented DataCore’s storage hypervisor technology at Derby – ensuring that the overall project was a success and transforming the existing network into the virtualized infrastructure that Derby needed.

Seamless business continuity with DataCore storage virtualization 
With DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor, Taylor said that end users at Derby Supply Chain Solutions have experienced a much higher level of uptime and continuity than was previously available. Because a number of the servers at Derby are legacy servers, Taylor and team are in the process of phasing these out in favor of newer systems. In order to do so, they have deployed virtual machines to seamlessly move systems off legacy servers, without interruption. The three main VMware ESX hosts that currently support 36 VMs are running on Dell™ PowerEdge™ R805 Servers.

The power of software: SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor is defined by freedom, flexibility and ease of use 
In addition to overall reliability, Taylor praised DataCore’s storage hypervisor for having the benefits associated with software-as-infrastructure, particularly ease of implementation and use. "I have seen first-hand the software advantage that DataCore brings to its users. While perhaps not self-evident until you have the storage virtualization software deployed, it is very similar to what you get through server virtualization software by way of freedom and flexibility. Moreover, in terms of storage management interfaces and management tools I have dealt with in the past, DataCore's software-based approach to storage virtualization through its storage hypervisor is easier to implement and manage than anything I have been exposed to before. Other interfaces for storage appliances can be clumsy and non-intuitive. The interface from DataCore makes storage management much, much easier."

For this and other testimonials of DataCore’s industry-leading storage hypervisor, please visit:Customer Snapshot: Derby Supply Chain Solutions.
Full link: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/Derby-Supply-Chain-Solutions.aspx 

DataCore Software Storage Hypervisor Boosts Performance and Resiliency of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 for Enterprises

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=20845

An Ideal Platform for SQL Server 2012
DataCore’s SANsymphony-V abstracts and presents disk storage from different devices to applications as a shared pool of resources. With an ability to process multiple database requests in tandem, the system can absorb random I/O spikes. Built-in adaptive caching fully leverages available memory to boost I/O performance of both read and write traffic. Database administrators (DBAs) have the option of using flash memory/SSDs, high-speed arrays, capacity disks or even cloud storage, all of which can be managed and auto-tiered efficiently by the storage hypervisor. Automated tiering also ensures highly active data files don’t compete with inactive blocks of data for I/O cycles. Additionally, transaction logs and other active data can remain on Tier 1, while backups and other inactive read-only data move to lower tiers.

DataCore also empowers high performance flash and SSD-based storage systems from alliance partners Fusion-IO, Texas Memory Systems, Violin, Savage IO, X-IO Technologies and other SSD vendors to deliver the very best price/performance to meet the needs of demanding SQL application workloads.

For SQL database protection, DBAs can schedule ongoing space-efficient snapshots with application-aware recovery points, or utilize DataCore’s CDP feature to capture and log all changes and allow recovery back to any point in time versus to a specific snapshot image.

Channelnomics: DataCore Joins VirtualSharp for Disaster Recovery

http://channelnomics.com/2012/08/01/datacore-joins-virtualsharp-disaster-recovery/

Backing up is more than good practice, it’s a mission-criticla function.
DataCore Software Corp. and VirtualSharp Software Corp. have taken that ethos to heart, teaming up to release a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution that promises to be “the next step” in the field. The duo is so confident, it calls the solution “disaster recovery assurance” and promises downtime will become a thing of the past.

DataCore and VirtualSharp have more than BDR on the brain: The team is also streamlining the process. According to Gartner Inc., this is a key concern among businesses because the implementation and planning of “IT disaster recovery management [is a] pain point for many of Gartner’s [own] clients.” It certainly paints a picture of case-positive for the duo’s new solution – and with the increasing pressure to meet compliance, privacy, continuity and security demands, making BDR easy isn’t a frivolous activity.

True “disaster recovery assurance” is achieved by blending each company’s key technologies, which were already complementary to start.

DataCore’s claim to fame is its virtualized storage hypervisor built into the SANsymphony-V software. It allows for heterogeneous, scalable and cloud-inclusive backup, with mirroring capabilities, frequent snapshots, multiple-site backup replication and regular verification of data integrity within the backup. In the event of a backup site failure, the SANsymphony-V will instantly re-sync across disaster recovery sites as soon as the problem site becomes available.

VirtualSharp lends its ReliableDR, which boasts “guaranteed push-button failover and failback across clouds.” Leveraging SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor, ReliableDR works without hampering the recovery environment by creating “application and service-aware snapshots at a DR site that are guaranteed to work” as soon as a user flicks the switch. That instant-on backup capability allows this backup team to boast both disaster recovery assurance and the ability to meet strict recovery-point and time-based objectives, should a company require it.
Together, the solution has been dubbed SANsymphony-V plus ReliableDR. To get your hands on it, head over to either DataCore’s or VirtualSharp’s partner portal. Both companies are channel-friendly and feature a host of alliance partners, including VMware Inc., Citrix Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Worth noting: DataCore and VirtualSharp’s BDR approach is a software-only solution, making it flexible and uniquely tuned for the needs of cloud and virtualization...

DataCore Storage Hypervisor Is Integrated and Optimized for Microsoft System Center 2012; Simplifies Storage Management for Private Clouds

System Center Alliance Partnership Enables Administrators to Deploy Smarter Private Clouds that Benefit from Richer Features, Including the Ability to Manage Itself

 
“Microsoft continues to partner with the world’s leading solution providers to bring companies the IT tools they need for achieving business goals,” said Andrew Conway, director of System Center product management at Microsoft. “DataCore’s SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor is a great complement to System Center. Together, they are helping businesses create, manage and monitor dynamic private cloud environments and reap the full benefits of their virtualization initiatives.”

DataCore Software, the storage hypervisor leader, premier provider of storage virtualization software and a Microsoft System Center Alliance partner, today announced that the company’s SANsymphony™-V Storage Hypervisor is optimized to work with Microsoft System Center 2012, allowing enterprises and data center operators to realize a new level of performance, manageability and ease-of-use from their private cloud deployments.

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor allows Microsoft System Center 2012 users to gain the benefits of high availability and resiliency, disaster recovery, storage optimization and automated tiering, and capacity on-demand all through an intuitive and simplistic storage management interface. Together with Microsoft System Center 2012, IT administrators enjoy a high-performance private cloud environment requiring minimal management and time resources. End users are able to request resources, including storage provisioning with minimal IT involvement, creating an automated, self-service environment that can manage itself, including self-repair. This leaves administrators with more time to devote to their core functions versus managing the tedious complexities of their network infrastructure.
Read more at http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2012/08/07/datacore-software-sansymphony-v-storage-hypervisor-optimized-microsoft-system-center-2012#Y9OCtWAOLomeF1dB.99

Other Microsoft related News:

DataCore Software Storage Hypervisor Boosts Performance and Resiliency of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 for Enterprises

An Ideal Platform for SQL Server 2012:
DataCore’s SANsymphony-V abstracts and presents disk storage from different devices to applications as a shared pool of resources. With an ability to process multiple database requests in tandem, the system can absorb random I/O spikes. Built-in adaptive caching fully leverages available memory to boost I/O performance of both read and write traffic. Database administrators (DBAs) have the option of using flash memory/SSDs, high-speed arrays, capacity disks or even cloud storage, all of which can be managed and auto-tiered efficiently by the storage hypervisor. Automated tiering also ensures highly active data files don’t compete with inactive blocks of data for I/O cycles. Additionally, transaction logs and other active data can remain on Tier 1, while backups and other inactive read-only data move to lower tiers.

DataCore also empowers high performance flash and SSD-based storage systems from alliance partners Fusion-IO, Texas Memory Systems, Violin, Savage IO, X-IO Technologies and other SSD vendors to deliver the very best price/performance to meet the needs of demanding SQL application workloads.

For SQL database protection, DBAs can schedule ongoing space-efficient snapshots with application-aware recovery points, or utilize DataCore’s CDP feature to capture and log all changes and allow recovery back to any point in time versus to a specific snapshot image.

Spalding University Reduces the Cost of Storage and Realizes True High Availability with DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

Ezra Krumhansl, director of information technology at Spalding University, was looking to increase storage capacity in response to the university’s exponentially increasing amounts of data and to also address a critical flaw in their SAN (storage area network): lack of redundancy/single point of failure. The university was growing quickly and its infrastructure needed to be updated to support this growth.

“We needed to perform significant upgrades to our storage environment and infrastructure so that it could support our growing school,” commented Krumhansl. “In addressing our needs, including introducing redundancy, we weighed many options from the likes of HP and Dell to potentially replace our legacy IBM SAN. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor gave us the flexibility we required to perform a robust upgrade and accomplish all of our goals, without breaking the bank. Being an institution of higher education, we always need to do more with less, so that Spalding can keep tuitions costs affordable to the communities we serve.”
Preparing for the Exam
During the initial selection process, Spalding University considered solutions by HP’s LeftHand and Dell’s EqualLogic to potentially replace their existing IBM fiber channel SAN. A major point of concern was to avoid two things: vendor lock-in and having to perform a very costly rip-and-replace hardware upgrade in just a few years. Krumhansl determined that Spalding University’s IBM SAN did need to be upgraded from its four terabyte (TB) capacity. It was also a single point of failure and did not have any redundancy built in.

Krumhansl wanted failover capability – both for the purposes of disaster recovery/business continuity and for reasons concerning systems maintenance. Bottom-line: Spalding needed non-stop business operations and high-availability, both for the planned and for the unplanned.

Spalding weighed its options of upgrading to a newer IBM fiber channel SAN, or selecting either LeftHand or EqualLogic. The upfront costs with IBM hardware and SANsymphony-V proved lower, as were the long-term/lifetime costs of support, renewals, etc. The real differentiator for Spalding University was having a software solution that was device independent, making hardware merely a commodity.

Storage Hypervisor Makes the Grade
Spalding University ultimately decided to stay with IBM, purchasing IBM 3650 servers, each running DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor. Krumhansl was able to accomplish his goals of virtualizing Spalding’s infrastructure and increasing storage capacity and redundancy. Spalding relied on The Mirazon Group to put storage virtualization software from DataCore at the heart of its IT infrastructure. The Mirazon Group serves as a trusted IT advisor to Spalding University as well as to approximately 50 other DataCore Software customers.

Spalding’s storage infrastructure is now virtualized and supports 22 TBs of data. It is running 30 virtual machines on 15 physical servers. In addition to DataCore for storage, Krumhansl uses VMware for both server and desktop virtualization.

A co-location facility (called “Peak 10”), located just a mile and a half from the university hosts both the primary and secondary mirrored systems – thereby providing the high-availability required by Spalding. The university is connected to this co-location facility through fiber channel connectivity.

“The biggest benefit we have realized with the DataCore storage hypervisor is replication – meaning synchronous, real-time mirroring and the virtualization of the backend storage environment. The data protection features definitely hit home. We don’t worry about losing a hard drive or data because there is redundancy built in, in so far as our having two nodes and even having redundancy within them,” explained Krumhansl.
Krumhansl continues, “The device independence also enables us to install, mix and match any server combination we choose, allowing us to leverage, where needed, the best features that each brand has to offer. The bottom line is that we have the freedom and flexibility to make investments that best suit our needs, both at the time and into the future. Regardless of whether we need an expensive, high performance server for frequently used resources, a cheaper, lower performing one or if we just want to repurpose and extend the viability of existing hardware, we know the storage hypervisor can manage them all.”

 The full case study may be found here: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/Spalding-University.aspx

DataCore Software Launches Migration Suite for Data Center Relocations, VM Moves, System Refreshes and Storage Migrations

Disk Migration Suite Enables Non-stop Business Operations During Data Center Relocations, VM Moves, System Refreshes and Storage Migrations

SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite Keeps Critical Users and Applications Up-and-Running; Empowers Professional Service Providers to Simplify, Fast-track and Cost-Effectively Tackle Customer Projects

DataCore Softwaret announced the SANsymphony™-V Disk Migration Suite, now available for DataCore authorized and trained solution providers to deliver a range of non-disruptive migration services to meet end-user client needs. The SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite minimizes the time and cost associated with storage-related disruption and downtime, providing non-stop business operations to keep critical users and applications running undisturbed during maintenance, migration, system moves or whatever data storage upheaval is occurring behind-the-scenes.

“In customer meetings, I am often met with skepticism that there is no way to do an easy migration without a lot of disruption. After they see the power of DataCore storage virtualization software in action, their jaws literally drop because they cannot believe that it can be that simple to migrate their storage and VMs,” said Barry Martin, partner and chief technical architect at The Mirazon Group, a DataCore solution and professional services provider.

The suite combines SANsymphony-V software licenses and access to DataCore’s call support center for a trained solution and services provider to implement and complete a specific customer migration project. Additionally, rather than having to purchase the SANsymphony-V software outright, migration services providers can take advantage of the powerful migration features under a 30 day license model, enabling them to cost-effectively get difficult customer migration and data center relocation projects completed within more limited budgets.

The SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite significantly reduces the hours, effort and downtime required to migrate disk contents and VMs between storage devices and systems. It is most often used during a hardware refresh to help replace older storage arrays with newer devices. The Suite generally is configured to run on separate servers inserted between the hosts and the storage systems. After the simple set up, non-disruptive migrations are simple to perform.

“DataCore’s SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite turns what has been a very problematic and time consuming hardware refresh task into something quick, reliable and simple. The software passes-through access to the original disks, while copying their contents to the new storage equipment in the background,” explained Augie Gonzalez begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, director of product marketing, DataCore Software. “After the new device is fully synchronized it can be reconnected directly to the hosts, leaving the older device to be used in another capacity or decommissioned.”

Cost-Effective Storage Migration for Real-World Needs
Recently, the SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite facilitated the non-disruptive move of a complete data center for DataCore customer Homecare Homebase™. The Mirazon Group was responsible for the migration and Brent Earls, senior systems engineer at the IT solution provider and consultancy, lauded the role the technology played during this process, noting: “We were able to move Homecare Homebase from one data center to another data center using the DataCore SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite. There were 200+ virtual machines (VMs) that were moved with no downtime whatsoever.”

According to Earls, DataCore’s software provided a high availability stretch site mirroring capability and other features that kept the customer’s environment up and “hot” during the whole migration, even though all of the VMs that were migrated were customer-facing.

“These migration capabilities are a godsend to IT services and solution providers, as well as to IT administrators who are responsible for the uptime of their organizations and need help to complete such projects,” added Earls. “The SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite delivers the right tools to keeps users and applications running undisturbed while necessary refresh maintenance, migrations or relocations are occurring behind the scenes.”

Licensing, Pricing and Availability
The SANsymphony™-V Disk Migration Suite is now generally available from DataCore-authorized partners located around the world. Please contact your local DataCore representative to locate a partner or for additional details and information.

For more information, please download the datasheet (PDF) at: http://s.datacore.com/MigrationSuite