Translate

Tuesday 24 December 2013

Monday 23 December 2013

DataCore deployed at over 10000 customer sites and selected as Software-defined Storage Vendor in Advantage Phase of Gartner Group “IT Market Clock"

DataCore Surpasses 10,000 Customer Sites Globally As Companies Embrace Software-Defined Storage

DataCore, a leader in software-defined storage, today announced that the company experienced significant customer adoption of its ninth-generation SANsymphony-V platform in 2013. As the company surpassed 10,000 customer sites globally, new trends have materialised around the need for businesses to rethink their storage infrastructures with software architecture becoming the real blueprint for the next wave of data centres.
“The remarkable increase in infrastructure-wide deployments that DataCore experienced throughout 2013 reflects an irreversible market shift from tactical, device-centric acquisitions to strategic software-defined storage decisions. Its significance is clear when even EMC concedes the rapid commoditization of hardware is underway. Their ViPR announcement acknowledges the ‘sea change’ in customer attitudes and the fact that the traditional storage model is broken,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO at DataCore. “We are clearly in the age of software defined data centres, where virtualisation, automation and across-the-board efficiencies must be driven through software. Businesses can no longer afford yearly ‘rip-and-replace’ cycles, and require a cost-effective approach to managing storage growth that allows them to innovate while getting the most out of existing investments.”
In addition to the mass customer adoption, DataCore’s software was recently nominated as a software-defined storage vendor in Gartner’s “IT Market Clock for Storage, 2013,” published September 6, 2013. The report, by analysts Valdis Filks, Dave Russell, Arun Chandrasekan et al., identifies software-defined storage vendors in the Advantage Phase, and recognises two main benefits of software-defined storage: 
“First, in the storage domain, the notion of optimising, perhaps often lowering, storage expenses via the broad deployment of commodity components under the direction of robust, policy-managed software has great potential value. Second, in the data centre as a whole, enabling multi-tenant data and workload mobility among servers, data centres and cloud providers without disrupting application and data services, would be transformational.”
Three major themes in 2013 shaped the software-defined storage market and defined the use cases of DataCore’s new customers:
Adoption and Appropriate Use of Flash Storage in the Data Centre
As more companies rely on flash to achieve greater performance, a unique challenge is arising when it comes to re-designing storage architectures. While the rule of thumb is five percent of workloads require top tier performance, flash vendors are doing their best to convince customers to go all flash, despite the low ROI. Instead, businesses have turned to auto-tiering software to make sure applications are sharing flash and spinning disk, based on the need to optimise performance and investment. Going beyond other implementations, DataCore has redefined automation and mobility of data storage with a new policy-managed paradigm that makes auto-tiering a true ‘enterprise wide’ capability that works across multiple vendor offerings and the many levels and varied mix of flash devices and spinning disks.
The IT Manager of the world’s largest construction project, Tim Olssen, of the Femern Tunnel connecting Scandinavia to Germany, is one such intelligent flash advocate:
“What we have achieved here with DataCore storage virtualisation software sets us on the road to affordable, flexible growth with synchronous mirroring to eliminate storage related downtime. Add the blistering speed of Fusion-io acceleration and we have created a super performing, auto tiered storage network, that does as the tunnel itself will do; connects others reliably, super fast and without stoppages”, Tim Olsson, IT Manager Femern A/S Denmark.
Virtualising Storage while Accelerating Performance for Tier-One Applications
Demanding business applications like databases, ERP and mail systems create bottlenecks in any storage architecture due to their rapid activity and intensive I/O and transactional requirements. To offset this, many companies buy high-end storage systems while leaving terabytes of storage unused. Now, though, businesses are able to combine all of their available storage and virtualise it, independent of vendor – creating a single storage pool. Beyond virtualisation and pooling, DataCore customers report faster application response times and significant performance increases – accelerating I/O speeds up to five times.
One such company is Quorn Foods, part of the Marlow Foods giant, who experience significant performance increases bringing peak data mining times down from 20 minutes to 20 seconds using DataCore’s SANsymphony-V platform.
Fred Holmes is the head of IT, Quorn Foods  summarises, “Like all things in IT, dramatic improvements to the infrastructure remain invisible to the user who only notices when things go wrong. But in this instance, no one could fail to notice the dramatic leaps in performance that was now afforded. This is in no small part down to the way that DataCore’s SANsymphony-V leverages disk resources, assigning I/O tasks to very fast server RAM and CPU to accelerate throughput and to speed up response when reading and writing to disk.”
Software Management of Incompatible Storage Devices and Models
Many data centres feature a wide variety of storage arrays, devices and product models from a number of different vendors – including EMC, NetApp, IBM, Dell and HP – none of which are directly compatible. Interestingly, DataCore customers report that the issue of incompatibility generally surfaces more when dealing with different hardware models from the same vendor than between different vendors, and thus have turned to management tools that treat all hardware the same.
Take the US’s third largest independent teaching hospital, the Maimonides Medical Centre in New York, with more than 800 doctors relying on its information systems to care for patients around-the-clock.
“Over the past 12 years, our data centre has featured eight different storage arrays and various other storage devices from three different vendors,” said Gabriel Sandu, chief technology officer at Maimonides Medical Center. “By using DataCore’s SANsymphony software and currently with its latest iteration of SANsymphony-V R9, we have been able to seamlessly go from one storage array to the next with no downtime to our users. We are able to manage our SAN infrastructure without having to worry or be committed to any particular storage vendor. DataCore’s technology has also allowed us to use midrange storage arrays to get great performance – thereby not needing to go with the more expensive enterprise-class arrays from our preferred manufacturers. DataCore’s thin provisioning has also allowed us to save on storage costs as it allows us to be very efficient with our storage allocation and makes sure no storage goes unused.”

Sunday 22 December 2013

QLogic certifies adapters for software-defined storage; announces Fibre Channel Adapters and FabricCache are DataCore Ready

QLogic FlexSuite Gen 5 Fibre Channel and FabricCache Adapters certified DataCore Ready
The emerging software-defined storage space hit a new milestone after QLogic announced that it has added support for DataCore’s SANsymphony-V virtualization offering. 
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/12/18/qlogic-certifies-adapters-for-software-defined-storage/

QLogic® FlexSuite™ 2600 Series 16Gb Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapters and FabricCache™ 10000 Series server-based caching adapters are now certified as DataCore Ready, providing full interoperability with SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation solutions from DataCore Software.


DataCore SANsymphony-V is a comprehensive software-defined storage platform that solves many of the difficult storage-related challenges raised by server and desktop virtualisation in data centres and cloud environments. The software significantly improves application performance and response times, enhances data availability and protection to provide superior business continuity and maximises the utilisation of existing storage investments. QLogic FabricCache adapters and FlexSuite Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapters, combined with SANsymphony-V, allow data centres to maximise their network infrastructure for a competitive advantage.

“QLogic channel partners and end-users can now confidently deploy award-winning QLogic adapters with SANsymphony-V to optimise network performance and make the most of their IT investments,” said Joe Kimpler, director of technical alliances, QLogic Corp. “Customers can choose the best QLogic solution—FabricCache adapters for high-performance clustered caching or FlexSuite Gen 5 adapters for ultra-high performance—to best handle their data requirements.”


“DataCore has a long history of collaborating with QLogic to help solve the storage management challenges of our mutual customers,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development at DataCore Software. “QLogic high-performance Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapters and innovative, server-based caching adapters combine with SANsymphony-V to cost-effectively deliver uninterrupted data access, improve application performance and extend the life of storage investments, while providing organisations with greater peace of mind.”

Wednesday 11 December 2013

DataCore Software Defined Storage and Fusion-io Reduce Costs and Accelerate ERP, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint Applications

BUHLMANN GRUPPE, a leader in steel piping and fittings, headquartered in Bremen, Germany has implemented a storage management and virtual SAN infrastructure based on DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software. SANsymphony-V manages and optimizes the use of both the conventional spinning disks (i.e. “SAS” drives) and the newly integrated flash memory-based Fusion-io ioDrives through DataCore’s automatic tiering and caching technology. With the new DataCore solution in place, the physical servers, the VMware virtual servers and most importantly the critical applications needed to run the business – including Navision ERP software, Microsoft Exchange, SQL and SharePoint – are now failsafe and run faster.

DataCore and Fusion-io = Turbo Acceleration for Tier 1 applications
After successfully testing the implementation, the migration of the physical and virtual servers onto the DataCore powered SAN was carried out. A number of physical servers, the Microsoft SQL and Exchange system and other file servers now access the high performance DataCore storage environment. In addition, DataCore now manages, protects and boost the performance for storage serving 70 virtual machines under VMware vSphere that host business critical applications – including the ERP system from Navision, Easy Archive, Easy xBase, Microsoft SharePoint and BA software.

"The response times of our mission-critical Tier 1 applications have improved significantly; performance has been doubled by the use of DataCore and Fusion-io," says Mr. Niebur. "The hardware vendor independence provides storage purchasing flexibility. Other benefits include the higher utilization of disk space, the performance of flash based hardware, as well as faster response times to meet business needs that we experience today – and in the future – combined they save us time and money. Even with these new purchases involved, we have realized saving of 50 percent in costs – compared to a traditional SAN solution."

Read the full Case Study:
http://www.datacore.com/Libraries/Case_Study_PDFs/Case_Study_-_Buhlmann_Gruppe_US.sflb.ashx

Wednesday 4 December 2013

A Defining Moment for the Software-Defined Data Center

Article from: http://elettronica-plus.it/a-defining-moment-for-the-software-defined-data-center/

George Teixeira
For some time, enterprise IT heads heard the phrase, “get virtualized or get left behind”, and after kicking the tires, the benefits couldn’t be denied and the rush was on. Now, there’s a push to create software-defined data centers. However, there is some trepidation whether these ground-breaking, more flexible environments can adequately handle the performance and availability requirements of business-critical applications, especially when it comes to the storage part of the equation.

While decision-makers had good reason for concern, they now have an even better reason to celebrate as new storage virtualization platforms have proven to overcome these I/O obstacles.

Just as server hypervisors provided a virtual operating platform, a parallel approach to storage is quickly transforming the economics of virtualization for organizations of all sizes by offering the speed, scalability and continuous availability needed for realizing the full benefits of software-defined data centers. Particular additional benefits being widely reported include:
  • Elimination of storage-related I/O bottlenecks in virtualized data centers
  • Harnessing flash storage resources effectively for even greater application performance
  • Ensuring fast and always available applications without a major storage investment
Performance slowdowns caused by I/O bottlenecks and downtime attributed to storage-related outages are two of the foremost reasons why enterprises have held back from virtualizing their tier-1 applications, like SQL Server, Oracle, SAP and Exchange. This fact comes across clearly in the recent Third Annual State of Virtualization Survey conducted by my company.

In the survey, findings showed 42 percent of respondents noted performance degradation or inability to meet performance expectations as an obstacle preventing them from virtualizing more of their workloads. Yet, effective storage virtualization platforms are now successfully overcoming these issues by using device-independent adaptive caching and performance boosting techniques to absorb wildly variable workloads, enabling applications to run faster virtualized.

To further increase tier-1 application responsiveness, companies often spend excessively on flash memory-based solid state disks (SSDs). The survey also reveals that 44 percent of respondents found disproportionate storage-related costs were an obstacle to virtualization. Again, effective storage virtualization platforms are now providing a solution with such features as auto-tiering, which optimize the use of these premium-priced resources alongside more modestly priced, higher capacity disk drives.

Such an intelligent software platform constantly monitors I/O behavior and can intelligently auto-select between server memory caches, flash storage and traditional disk resources in real-time to ensure the most suitable class or tier of storage device is assigned to each workload based on priorities and urgency. As a result, a software defined data center can now deliver unmatched tier-1 application performance with optimum cost efficiency and maximum return on existing storage investments.

Once I/O intensive tier-1 applications are virtualized, the storage virtualization platform ensures high availability. It eliminates 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. The right platform can effectively virtualize whatever storage is on a user’s floor, whether direct-attached or SAN-connected, to achieve a robust and responsive shared storage environment necessary to support highly dynamic virtual IT environments.

Yes, the storage virtualization platform is a defining moment for the software defined data center. The performance, speed and high availability needed for mission-critical databases and applications in a virtualized environment has been realized. Barriers have been removed and there’s a clear and supported path for realizing greater cost efficiency.

Still, selecting the right platform is critical to a data center. Technology that is full-featured and has been proven “in the field” is essential. Also, it’s important to go with an independent, pure software virtualization solution in order to avoid hardware lock-in, and to take advantage of the future storage developments that undoubtedly will come.

Thursday 28 November 2013

ChannelWeb.UK on DataCore Software Announces Launch of EMEA Professional Services Group

Vendor drives channel demand for a value-added services and consultancy arm to deliver best-of-breed Storage Virtualisation consultancy and resources.

DataCore Software has announced the establishment of an EMEA Professional Services Group to provide partners with access to specialist consulting, migration and troubleshooting resources which are targeted to support its base of channel partners with on-tap certificated expertise in hardware, software, storage and virtualisation platforms used in larger scale and enterprise projects.

“We listened to our partners when they requested help to meet the high demand for Datacore related engagements due to the extensive growth of our user base within Europe; we should establish a vendor-led Professional Services group to assist them with fulfillment. The consultants within this group represent some of the most experienced SAN engineers in the industry today and can provide partners with valuable additional resource, when and where required, simply by plugging into our portfolio of customisable end-to-end services.” noted Glenn Bullingham, the new Director of Professional Services, EMEA at DataCore.  Formerly of its Systems Engineering Group, Glenn brings with him over 10 years’ of experience delivering bespoke DataCore solutions and service engagements within the reseller and end user channel.

Professional Services will be made available via DataCore’s established two-tier channel network.  A range of packaged service offerings carrying pre-defined scope and statements of work will be available directly from the published products and services catalog whilst bespoke consultancy services for specific and advanced projects can be delivered upon request. All DataCore consultants within the Professional Services division have a minimum of five years’ experience executing DataCore storage virtualisation solutions and hold leading industry accreditations.  Service types offered within the Professional Services portfolio will include:-
·         Health-checking and remote assessments
·         Migration services
·         Advanced Design and Integration
·         Performance analysis and optimization
·         Advanced upgrades
·         VMware integration advice

A programme of partner webinars detailing the services offered within the Professional Services portfolio will run throughout Q4, 2013.  To register your initial interest, click here.

“The timing is perfect to launch our new services group as we actively want to support our ongoing 50% growth rate in the Enterprise sector. Whether required to fulfill fixed price statement of works or for assisting large-scale enterprise projects, the DataCore consultants carry the highest levels of accreditation and experience across all storage and virtualisation solutions.” said Christian Hagen, Vice President EMEA.

ChannelWeb Coverage: 

DataCore insists new services arm will not pinch VAR sales

Storage vendor DataCore has insisted its newly launched EMEA Professional Services Group (PSG) will not cannibalise resellers' business.The new division aims to sell specialist consulting and troubleshooting services to customers via resellers – specifically those with limited DataCore resources or expertise. The vendor insisted it would not take the services offerings to customers direct and that the PSG's establishment was based on strong channel demand, which had built up over three years.

The offering will include health-checking assessment technology as well as migration services, performance analysis and VMware integration advice.
The PSG will be headed up by Glen Bullingham, the firm's newly appointed director of professional services, who said that his firm has no desire to steal the lunch of its partners.
"Our strategy is not to take the channel's bread and butter direct," he said. "It won't be sold direct to end users, only through the channel.

"We have made an aggressive push in partner recruitment which has given us excellent touch with new customer opportunities. Some of those [new resellers] have limited resources and our objective is... to focus on enablement."

More: http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2309367/datacore-insists-new-services-arm-will-not-pinch-var-sales

Wednesday 27 November 2013

Software Defined Storage a fancy way to say virtualization, says DataCore Software chairman

Ziya AralExecutive Editor Ellen Obrien of SearchStorage interviews DataCore Software Corp. chairman and founder Ziya Aral on software-defined storage (SDS) and how customers get into trouble, and why distinguishing between SDS and virtualization isn't so easy.
I want to get started by talking about software-defined storage. Everyone seems to have a play here. How do you define it?
Ziya Aral: Each time this subject comes up, there is a slight redefinition of the term. But software-defined storage is a continuation of what used to be called storage virtualization. Storage virtualization [by] itself lacks server virtualization. A virtual machine is one of these concepts that basically argues for creating a software emulation layer. It's an approach to breaking hardware away from software. Now, there are a million good reasons to do that. Just thinking about the question for 5 minutes gets you there. Hardware and software live different lives with different expertise.
Hardware is redefined every 18 months. Software sometimes has a half-life of 10, 15, 20 years. It makes absolute sense to architect software and hardware differently and to have a software layer that is defined in a perfect world, in a perfect universe. [In that layer], storage is perfect. There's an absolutely infinite amount of space. It has all of the positive characteristics that you want for it. It has high availability, data has integrity, [and] it can move around at will. And then there's hardware. Hardware has the real limitations that physics impose. And you would like those two broken apart from each other.
Can you explain to us how software-defined storage is different from standard virtualization?
Aral: No. I can't.
Do you believe it's one and the same?
Aral: I think that it is essentially one and the same. Now, there are always detail differences, but it's like asking the question, 'How is the cloud different from storage service providers [SSPs] of 10 years ago?' Now, conceptually many of the cloud vendors have gone for direct repetition of what the SSP guys used to say. The technology has changed; commercially it's more practical. There are elements to the story that reflect the current thinking on many things. But in essence, the idea is the same. Software-defined storage is similar.
We're still doing emulation. And frankly, emulation is a bad word in our industry because emulation equals 'slow.' It's getting one thing to do what another thing is supposed to be doing. The other thing is several times more complicated. But frankly, emulation is the beginning of storage virtualization, of server virtualization. When the power of the underlying technology, the hardware technology, reaches a certain critical mass, then the software is able to really begin to abstract in a fundamental way from those hardware limitations. And that's the real basis of software-defined storage.
How do you stand out in such a competitive market right now? What's your pitch to customers?
Aral: Typically, their problem is they've got a bunch of controllers from this vendor, a bunch of controllers from this vendor, and they don't work together. So, when these fail, these don't take over. These aren't fast enough. So, we find ourselves selling after the fact in most cases.
Now, that's not always true. DataCore Software's getting to be a reasonably sized company. Today, in many cases, we sell at the architectural level. [However], the bulk of our business still continues to be making up for the damage done previously. In those cases, we're covering disaster recovery where none exists. For example, a customer must have immediate availability of data at all times. OK, terrific, that's great. It's a requirement of many businesses. It is absolutely universal.
They bought a box. The box has two power supplies, two power cords, two sets of logic and one piece of software driving all of it. The box fails. All right, let's think about this. [They say,] 'We should have another box. Better still, another box hooked up to another power grid somewhere. This would be great. It'd be terrific 30 miles across town.' [The vendor says,] 'We don't do that.' [They say,] 'You don't do that? OK. How do I do that then?' Answer: DataCore.
[They might say,] 'But, but, but EMC does that. They do that with two boxes of their own. But we have an old box and the new EMC box. Now do I do that?' [We say,] 'Well, you don't.'
That's what we do most of the time. It is a key piece of storage architecture, but eventually software defines storage, eliminates storage as such. It reduces storage devices to peripherals.
Now, EMC builds and sells more of those devices than anyone else around. Why would they talk about software-defined storage? In fact, why would any of the larger hardware vendors talk about it? Well, they're not stupid people. They're smart people, and they understand the science. They talk about it in anticipation of an evolving architecture that leads to many opportunities.
But, I am sad to say, 15 years into it, we're still the radical. This is crazy. This is so obviously true. Yet, we're still the radical.
Where do you see it 15 years from now?
Aral: Storage operating systems will, I believe, take the place of large, high-end storage controllers today. That is, you will build your application infrastructure around them. They will be one logically combined, logically integrated entity. But the entity itself will be a ball that moves. You put it on that platform. You put it over here. You put it in Phoenix. You move it to Tokyo. You outsource by taking that whole ball and putting it out on the cloud. You pull it back in because those damn cloud providers, they're charging me too much and they don't give me the response I want.
This whole thing will be essentially nothing other than the reflection of the business process or the application architecture guy's vision of how he wants this thing to work. It will be a figment of the mind. The fact that it lives on computers -- and where those computers live -- will be an afterthought. It'll be an afterthought for a different guy, like the networking guy that you have that's basically responsible for the wires.
Will that significantly change the role of the storage manager, storage admin?
Aral: Forgive me. Those are our customers, and I love those people. But their role is changing already. That was the most rapidly growing section of the IT industry for a while. It sure isn't today. Those guys are drowning. They're drowning. And they're going to up their game and lower their tolerance of this and that box.
We have a T-shirt at DataCore. It's an internal-use T-shirt. It says 'Hardware Sucks.' This is a new introduction of an old T-shirt. What it means is not that hardware sucks. Hardware is terrific. It does all this stuff. But when you're chained to it, man, it hurts. It hurts. You've got to free yourself of that.

Tuesday 26 November 2013

DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V Software Defined Storage Platform Receives 2013 SVC Award for the Storage Project of the Year with Quorn Foods installation

Leading UK End User testimonial Award recognises the significant performance improvements in critical apps and intelligent auto-tiering for Quorn Food’s data set.

DataCore Software was notified that it had won a prestigious 2013 SVC (Storage, Virtualisation & Cloud) Project Awards for the Storage Project of the Year category for the installation at Quorn Foods (part of the Marlow Foods Group).  The Awards, organised by leading media house, Angel Business Communications (titles include Data Centre Solutions, Virutalization World and Storage Networking Solutions), aims to showcase the Best of British IT Storage customer endorsements, and culminated in a Central London prestigious awards ceremony.

Sharon Munday, DataCore Marketing Manager and author of the Quorn Food testimonial commented. “We are genuinely thrilled to receive this award as it is all about recognizing enduring business benefits to the customer. The Quorn Foods installation showcases how best to utilise the power of a software defined storage layer, not only to shore up the virtualised estate, but also to provide underlying tools to the business to increase competitive edge. In the case of Quorn, deploying DataCore’s SANsymphony-V solution led to a decrease in ERP data mining times at critical month end, from 20 minutes to a blistering 20 seconds. That’s an eye -opening achievement that enticed the   independent panel of judges.”

Simon Birbeck, from IT partner Waterstons, elaborated further:- “What we achieved here was the transitioning of Quorn Foods from a greenfield virtualisation site with lots of legacy hardware of varying age and efficiency, to an efficient install that now boasts intelligent auto-tiering and cascading of data depending on importance to the business. Quorn Foods has come to rely on the advice and installation from Waterstons with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V sitting at the heart of this optimised success.”

DataCore’s Kevin Davids, Hayley Furner and Emily Darling were on-stage to collect the Award at the glittering ceremony.

Franziska Priebe, Marketing Manager of award organisers Angel Business Communications, says “This year we have had not only a significant increase in the overall number of nominations but also in the total votes received. The SVC  Awards recognise the users, manufacturers and suppliers operating in the cloud, virtualization and storage sectors and are voted for by the readers of our wide range of print and online publications. All finalists did well in making the shortlist but Quorn Foods (Marlow Foods) supported by DataCore Software was the clear winner in its category ‘Private Sector Storage Project of the Year’.”

Monday 25 November 2013

DataCore Extends Storage Reach to the Server with new Software-defined Storage Platform release

As the line between storage attached to a server and a network continues to blur, IT organizations are looking for a way to manage both resources in tandem.

To address that specific issue, DataCore has released an upgrade to its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software that extends the reach of its storage management capabilities beyond storage on the network to include magnetic and Flash storage that are attached directly to a server.

According to Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing for DataCore, as commodity-based storage gets deployed on servers and attached to the network, IT organizations want to be able to manage the resources as one logical pool of resources. Gonzalez says SANsymphony-V R 9.0.4 extends the reach of DataCore’s approach to software-defined storage (SDS) at a time when IT organizations are plugging more storage directly into servers to optimize the performance of mission-critical applications.

At the same time, the capacity growth demands are creating requirements for pools of storage that can logically scale out over time using commodity-based storage attached to the network. Rather than treating both of those instances as separate instances of storage, Gonzalez says SANsymphony is now optimized to handle a full spectrum of storage deployment scenarios.

Performance close to application servers and shared capacity and services in the SAN

Other new features in SANsymphony-V include support for up to 16 storage nodes, synchronous mirroring between storage nodes, the ability to more easily move data between diverse virtual machine environments, and a service that makes it easier to reclaim unused storage space.

With the advent of storage virtualization coupled with the rise of SDS, the storage landscape is rapidly transforming. Driving that transition, says Gonzalez, is a desire to replace expensive storage systems based on proprietary controllers with industry-standard systems based on x86 server architectures. As that trend continues to gain momentum, Gonzalez says it’s only a matter of time before storage is seen as a challenge to be solved more by software than with the underlying hardware used to physically store the data.

Based on: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/it-unmasked/datacore-extends-storage-reach-to-the-server.html

Thursday 21 November 2013

2013 Storage Product of the Year Award Winner: The DataCore SANsymphony- V R9 Storage Virtualization Platform

DataCore Software, the leader in software-defined storage architecture and premier provider of storage virtualization software, has won the UK's top storage awards – “The Storage Product of the Year Award” - at the prestigious 2013 Storage Awards sponsored by Storage Magazin and Network Computing.

The Storage Awards were established in 2004 to recognize best-in-breed, easy to use solutions that make the working lives of storage and virtualization managers easier and more effective.


Storries 2013

Tuesday 19 November 2013

DataCore Software Announces Launch of EMEA Professional Services Group

Vendor drives channel demand for a value-added services and consultancy arm

 DataCore Software has announced the establishment of an EMEA Professional Services Group to provide partners with access to specialist consulting, migration and troubleshooting resources which are targeted to support its base of channel partners with on-tap certificated expertise in hardware, software, storage and virtualisation platforms used in larger scale and enterprise projects.

“We listened to our partners when they requested help to meet the high demand for Datacore related engagements due to the extensive growth of our user base within Europe; we should establish a vendor-led Professional Services group to assist them with fulfillment. The consultants within this group represent some of the most experienced SAN engineers in the industry today and can provide partners with valuable additional resource, when and where required, simply by plugging into our portfolio of customisable end-to-end services.” noted Glenn Bullingham, the new Director of Professional Services, EMEA at DataCore.  Formerly of its Systems Engineering Group, Glenn brings with him over 10 years’ of experience delivering bespoke DataCore solutions and service engagements within the reseller and end user channel.
Professional Services will be made available via DataCore’s established two-tier channel network.  A range of packaged service offerings carrying pre-defined scope and statements of work will be available directly from the published products and services catalog whilst bespoke consultancy services for specific and advanced projects can be delivered upon request. All DataCore consultants within the Professional Services division have a minimum of five years’ experience executing DataCore storage virtualisation solutions and hold leading industry accreditations.  Service types offered within the Professional Services portfolio will include:-
  • Health-checking and remote assessments
  • Migration services
  • Advanced Design and Integration
  • Performance analysis and optimization
  • Advanced upgrades
  • VMware integration advice
A programme of partner webinars detailing the services offered within the Professional Services portfolio will run throughout Q4, 2013.  To register your initial interest, click here.
“The timing is perfect to launch our new services group as we actively want to support our ongoing 50% growth rate in the Enterprise sector. Whether required to fulfill fixed price statement of works or for assisting large-scale enterprise projects, the DataCore consultants carry the highest levels of accreditation and experience across all storage and virtualisation solutions.” said Christian Hagen, Vice President EMEA.

Why DataCore? 36 Great Reasons to Stop Fighting Storage Hardware plus Why Software-defined Storage Frees You From Hardware Lock-in!

See our Information Site on Software Defined Storage and Storage Virtualization:
http://www.datacore.com/International/Country/UK/stop-fighting-your-storage-hardware.aspx

Why DataCore? Whitepaper: 36 Reasons & Benefits
Videos: View educational video series on storage virtualization and software defined storage.
Click below:
http://www.datacore.com/International/Country/UK/Video-Series.aspx



DataCore Keeps Your Systems Up and Continuously Available.
Stop Fighting Your Storage HardwareHow much business will you lose when your systems are down? How will you protect your
business critical applications from storage-related outages?
Running out and buying costly new storage is one answer, but not the best one. DataCore safeguards your data, enables continuous availability for storage across metro-wide distances and allows easy system replication to remote sites for rapid disaster recovery. What’s more, SANsymphony-V dramatically speeds up performance and allows you to reclaim the full use of your existing storage space. With DataCore’s storage virtualization software, you can enjoy centralized and uniform administration across all your storage investments, more uptime, and best of all, huge cost savings.

Monday 18 November 2013

DataCore Software's take on software-defined storage and storage virtualisation

   
Ziya Aral

View the 5 minute Video


Somehow, it's become a question everyone is looking to answer -- and answer in a way that separates them from all the other people trying to succeed in the same space: What is software-defined storage? Depending on whom you ask, software-defined storage (SDS) is either a meaningless buzz phrase, a new spin on virtualization, or a truly revolutionary way of thinking about the connection between -- and necessary separation of -- hardware and software. In this SearchVirtualStorage.com video, DataCore Software Chairman Ziya Aral offers his take on SDS, and his perspective on how the technology has evolved.


"Each time this subject comes up, there is a slight redefinition of the term, but software-defined storage is a continuation of what used to be called storage virtualization,"

Aral said. It's an approach, simply put, "to breaking hardware away from software." This year, major storage players such as EMC made a play in the SDS market. EMC disclosed its plans for ViPR in May and began shipping it in August. The vendor acknowledged that defining the term was not simple, and executives agreed the term was overused.

Many industry analysts agree with Aral's point, that software-defined storage is already living up to the hype and it's because storage and server systems are looking more and more similar to each other. For companies like DataCore, the SDS craze is an opportunity to point out that major vendors are trying to fix a "broken storage model," and that DataCore believes the company's SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software, with no hardware or application-programming-interface restrictions, set the standard for SDS many years ago.

You can also read Aral's thoughts on the SSD market and SDS -- and how one will impact the other.

Saturday 16 November 2013

DataCore's new software defined storage platform release adds scale to SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software

SearchVirtualStorage: http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240208065/DataCore-adds-scale-to-SANsymphony-V-storage-virtualization-software

DataCore Software Corp. upgraded its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software, doubling its scalability and adding self-healing and high-availability features to the platform, which the vendor bills as a more mature and complete alternative to EMC Corp.'s ViPR.

SANsymphony-V brings storage features such as caching, thin provisioning, auto tiering, replication, mirroring and snapshots across different types of storage hardware. It treats storage across hardware platforms as one pool. DataCore began calling its software a storage hypervisor and then software-defined storage long before EMC introduced its ViPR platform earlier this year.

The biggest change with SANsymphony-V 9.0.4 is it scales to 16 nodes instead of the previous eight-node limit. That could bring DataCore into more enterprise implementations.

"Historically, the knock on DataCore has been that it only scales to a point, so this is a big deal," said Jim Bagley, senior analyst at Austin, Texas-based SSG-NOW.

The self-healing capability uses synchronous mirroring of data between nodes to detect nodes that have failed or that have been taken out of service. SANsymphony-V then migrates data on those nodes to other hardware without disrupting applications. Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing at DataCore, said this feature was added mostly for solid-state drives "that have a higher propensity to flake out on you" than RAID-protected hard disk drives.

The new version can also move virtual disks non-disruptively between storage pools. This allows virtual volumes from a test/development pool to be relocated to a production pool without disrupting access to applications. SANsymphony-V's remote replication now will automatically sync the data on two sites if they get out of sync, and its audit logs will record time stamps of each administrative action that can help troubleshoot problems on the SAN.

According to Gonzalez, what has changed the most is awareness of SANsymphony-V. He said DataCore's message was often lost in the wilderness until EMC decided to push software-defined storage and the idea of storage management that works across varied hardware platforms.

"ViPR has put a whole different perspective on what we do and the kinds of people interested in what we do," Gonzalez said. "Our value proposition from the beginning was to provide a uniform platform to control storage devices. That was a hard value to push when storage hardware guys were saying, 'Do this as a hardware function; the function exists just for this device and each device brings its own piece of intelligence.'"

Gonzalez said DataCore has seen a spike in customer interest since EMC began talking about ViPR in May. He said ViPR represents a flip-flop for EMC, which used to position storage as hardware-centric and siloed. "Now they say, 'Why not just plug in this uniform software and plug in the right hardware for the job?'" he said.

DataCore has been saying that for years and has been selling to EMC customers, as well as customers of other large storage vendors. Gonzalez said SANsymphony-V is used mostly by companies that are heavily virtualized and run more than one type of storage hardware.

With ViPR on the market, EMC becomes a competitor to DataCore while also helping to highlight SANsymphony-V's value.

"All the buzz about the advantages of software-defined storage and the goodness that it brings helps DataCore," SSG-NOW's Bagley said. "The primary difference is EMC is all about pushing its own hardware, and DataCore is device-agnostic."

Tuesday 29 October 2013

DataCore chairman on Software-defined storage and SSD performance

DataCore Software Chairman Ziya Aral, a founder of the company specializing in storage virtualization software, defines software-defined storage in its simplest terms, as a way of breaking the hardware layer from the software. Aral claims his company has been doing this for years, long before software-defined storage became such a widely used phrase.
In this interview with SearchSolidStateStorage, Aral describes why this approach is a good fit for solid-state drives (SSDs) and how it can help SSD performance.
You have called SSDs a revolutionary, yet complicated, technology. Why is it so important, and why is it so complicated?
Ziya Aral: SSD is important because it is fast. For most of our time in this industry, storage has meant disks. Disks are mechanical and, as a result, they're slow. There's an entire complicated fabric for making them fast -- caching and all kinds of lore that we apply to the devices. All of a sudden, here come SSDs, and they're transparent. A customer can simply stick one in a box -- and all of a sudden, it's faster. You boot Windows. You boot Linux. It happens in seconds. Whoa! This is great. Fast storage is very important.
Storage is the black sheep of the computer family. It's always the one lagging behind, because it's fundamentally mechanical. It's the one that slows down applications. Once upon a time, a third of all applications were storage-bound. Now it's probably 95%. Everything else got faster. We didn't.
The result is that any innovation that speeds up mass storage is wonderful, and SSDs speed up mass storage in a practical, commercially viable way. That's the good news. The bad news is they don't work like disk drives. They are complicated.
So if you want to read from an SSD, that's wonderful, but if you try to write to an SSD, it's not as fast. Worse, SSDs don't like being written to. I'm sorry to all my friends in the industry, but they don't. You know it. I know it. They burn out, and they burn out pretty quickly by disk standards.
So now, here's the complexity. SSDs aren't perfect for everything. They're still expensive -- to carry the bulk of your storage. You've still got to think about what you want to do with them in a larger architecture.
Now there are people in the industry, we try to partner with those people, people like Fusion-io, who I think are brilliant. They focus SSDs in a specific application, databases in this case, and they moderate SSDs with two technologies that actually make SSDs perform. One is software. They run caching software in front of their SSD. Second is DRAM. DRAM has a great advantage in that it doesn't care how many times you write to it...
...And how big of an impact will software-defined storage have on the SSD market and the performance of solid-state drives?
Aral: Huge. It's huge because it's hard enough to make disk drives work [laughs] and keep the application going, and the whole server virtualization market seems to have gotten stuck on tier-one applications and on virtual desktops.
So along comes this great storage technology. It supplements the conventional disk drive industry in a profound way. Integrated with DRAM, it seems to be able to work, but all of it defeats the schemes that we have been working on for years and years and years.
For example, to get the proper advantage of SSDs, you want the SSD to be local to the application. Most SSDs work that way. Now people are trying to build hybrid arrays and arrays of SSDs. That really sort of loses the advantage.
There's a physics to going over a wire … a lot of the advantage of the SSD disappears in that process. So now we are talking about moving a lot of the software infrastructure into the server and into the network. Well, why [move it] into the network? Because you don't want SSDs written to.
You want the longest delays possible, but long write delays mean that the data has to be in at least two locations, which means that the data has to go over a wire. Two ends of the cycle -- direct reads and asynchronous writes -- are happening at two different locations, and the software is infinitely portable. The software that glues those two phases together has to sit on both sides of the wire.

Monday 28 October 2013

The Register on DataCore: "Whoo-whoo. What's that sound? It's the DataCore Express passing '10k' Customer Sites"

That's 10,000 customer sites using DataCore Storage Virtualization Software...

Storage-area-network (SAN) software supplier DataCore has, we're told, notched up 10,000 customer sites. DataCore is based in Florida and ships SANsymphony and allied SAN software products that turn standalone and clustered X86 servers and their storage into SANs.

The latest, ninth, version of SANsymphony has increased the cluster node count from 8 to 16, effectively doubling the SAN size. CEO George Teixeira said the plan is to increase it stepwise to 128. Version nine also has a next-generation replication service with faster initialisation of its engine, supports Microsoft's ODX and VAAI, and provides logging and configuration alerts.

Teixeira says DataCore has been about software-defined storage for a long, long time. EMC's ViPR is no real advance on that front, merely being an API translator, and looking like the latest version of Invista to him. In effect, he asserts, EMC is saying to its customers that they should keep on buying separate storage devices and now there's an API translator sitting on top of them.

He decries the notion that array hardware suppliers such as NetApp can do software-defined storage: "Are you kidding me? SANsymphony is portable and general."

Teixeira told us: "We're seeing a lot more sales and interest in DataCore products after EMC's ViPR launch and we're now in more than 10,000 customer sites." That's after fifteen years of being in business.

Thursday 24 October 2013

Best of VMworld Europe 2013 User Awards: Massive Fehmarnbelt 18KM Tunnel project powered by DataCore Storage Virtualization

Judges' comments: “A huge project which couldn’t go unrecognised for how it has assured its own future growth and success. The project’s end result will be one hell of a case study.”

Five European IT projects either won or received honorable mention in the Best of VMworld Europe 2013 user awards, held at last week’s VMworld Europe 2013 event in Barcelona.

The judges of the fourth annual Best of VMworld Europe awards assessed the entries and selected the recipients based on overall innovation, systems performance improvement, cost reduction, easing the management burden, new use in the marketplace and improved efficiencies and business processes.

Fehmarnbelt Tunnel & DataCore Storage Virtualization Software
 
The organization overseeing construction of the 18km Over $8 billion Fehmarnbelt tunnel between Denmark and Germany has deployed DataCore storage virtualization software and it has cut disk storage costs by around 75%.

Danish state-owned Femern’s IT systems will have up to 150 engineering staff, as well as numerous consultants and contractors working to access CAD drawings, specifications and workflow systems for the project, which will be running on VMware and DataCore based systems.

“Our users were experiencing slow response times and a performance lag from their Microsoft SQL & Exchange applications running on VMware.  Today, and in the future, with DataCore, the applications appear robust, instantaneous and seamless.”  - Tim Olsson,  IT Manager at Femern A/S

The massive 18km underwater tunnel is due for completion in 2021.

The IT team adopted DataCore’s SANsymphony-V caching, auto-tiering and Fusion-io flash memory to speed up access to data and critical applications.

As a result it has ensured high speeds for its critical Microsoft SQL database and mail applications and safeguarded the project’s future growth flexibility to handle increased traffic and avoid hardware supplier lock-in with software-defined storage.

For more information, please read the full case study: Fehmarnbelt Tunnel & DataCore Software

Tuesday 15 October 2013

VMworld Europe 2013: DataCore Previews Latest SANsymphony-V Software-Defined Storage Platform Release Optimized for VMware® Infrastructures and Larger Scale Virtualization Deployments

At VMworld Europe, DataCore's long term customer SES Engineering, the worlds largest satellite company, presents the strategic advantages of a DataCore SANsymphony-V Software-defined Storage Platform
DataCore at vmworld
VMworld Sponsor DataCore showcases thousands of real-world customer successes, updates storage and VDI solutions and previews latest enhancements at VMworld Europe 2013, Stand S112

DataCore Software, the leader in software-defined storage architecture and premier provider of storage virtualization software, today provided a sneak-preview of its latest enhancements to the SANsymphony™-V storage virtualization software at VMworld 2013 (Oct. 15-17, Fira Barcelona, Stand S112). The company also is featuring its recently released DataCore VDS – Virtual Desktop Server, an affordable and high-speed VDI software solution. Visit Stand S112 to learn more about the new SANsymphony-V release, available on November 4, 2013. It will provide much greater scalability, faster next-generation replication services for disaster recovery, automatic self-healing storage capabilities, expanded platform integration with VMware VAAI space reclamation services and an updated vCenter™ plug-in. In addition, the new release of SANsymphony-V supports infrastructure-wide performance tiering and acceleration services that extend across scale-out grids of flash, SSDs and spinning disks from any vendor to accelerate Tier-1 applications and virtualization workloads.

DataCore and VMware Customers Speak Out on Software-defined Storage in a Virtual World
DataCore customer SES Engineering, the world-leading satellite operator and satellite communications company, will be available at the DataCore stand and will be featured in the Solutions Exchange Theatre on Oct. 15th at 4:40 p.m. SES Engineering will share its experience with DataCore storage virtualization software and explain why they see a software-defined architecture as the only logical solution to gain the flexibility and adaptability needed to address their growth and constantly changing needs.

VMware Users “Stop Fighting Your Storage Hardware”
DataCore Software recently launched a European-wide education and information campaign to spread the word to VMware users on the benefits of storage virtualization and software-defined storage architectures. Information resources including informative webcasts, links to video series on storage virtualization, white papers, “How To” guides and regional case studies are now available on DataCore’s “Stop Fighting Your Storage Hardware” site. The site showcases how real-world customers have achieved a software-defined data center that can maximize business productivity and capitalize on their current hardware investments.

Thousands of data centers around the globe deploy DataCore to cost-effectively meet the high-performance and high-availability storage requirements of their physical and virtual servers. "By making use of the DataCore solution within the virtual infrastructure created by VMware vSphere and VDI, we can not only ensure that we meet these corporate requirements, but also guarantee optimal cost-efficiency as a result of the hardware independence of the solution. This affects both the direct investment and the indirect and long-term cost of refreshes, expansions and added hardware acquisitions. We have thus created the technical basis for our external IT services, and within this framework we are creating the most flexible and varied range of cloud services possible," states Dr. Karl Manfredi CEO at Brennercom, a leading ICT company.

DataCore SANsymphony-V is Optimized for VMware Virtual Infrastructure Deployments
DataCore SANsymphony-V delivers a simple and scalable high-availability solution to meet vSphere™ shared storage requirements. The hardware-agnostic storage virtualization software abstracts and pools internal and external disks along with flash/SSDs to yield lightning-fast response, non-stop access and optimal use of capacity. Notable features include enhanced support for fast in-memory optimizations using DRAM caching and auto-tiering flash technologies, metro-wide failsafe synchronous mirroring and enhanced higher speed replication and new services for disaster recovery and remote site recovery. An updated plug-in for VMware vCenter allows users to non-disruptively provision, share, clone, replicate and expand virtual disks among physical servers and virtual machines. SANsymphony-V is the ideal software-defined storage platform to meet the demanding availability and performance needs required by VMware Virtual Infrastructures.

New SANsymphony-V Features Preview
The SANsymphony-V release available on November 4, 2013 will include: 
  • Twice the scaling with support for up to 16 federated nodes
    – Scales performance and HA; federated nodes can span Metro-wide distances
  • Next generation remote replication services
    – Speeds up performance for disaster recovery
  • New self-healing storage services
    – Reduces business downtime from hardware failures
  • New failsafe non-disruptive data mobility services between storage pools
    – Increases overall resiliency
  • New Hypervisor integration services
    – Offloads hosts to accelerate performance and data mobility operations (VAAI, ODX)
  • New space reclamation services
    – Enables IT organizations to reclaim unused capacity they already own
  • New change-control management and audit trail logs
    – Helps prevent avoidable errors and simplifies troubleshooting 
“The growing momentum for software-defined storage has encouraged VMware customers to consider storage virtualization software solutions that address performance and availability concerns. But while hypervisor-based and device-dependent storage virtualization solve some problems, agnostic software-only storage virtualization like DataCore SANsymphony-V have been proven to deliver  the highest value by working across any physical or virtual server and any collection of spinning disks and flash technology storage devices. We are pleased to showcase our customer proven value proposition and our SANsymphony-V software-defined storage platform at VMworld Europe 2013,” says Christian Hagen, vice president EMEA at DataCore Software.

DataCore VDS 2.0 – The VDI Solution
Visit the DataCore stand (S112) to find out more about the recently announced DataCore VDS 2.0 software.

"DataCore VDS overcomes the VDI adoption issues and addresses the major market need for affordable desktop virtualization solutions in a climate where smaller budgets and the European financial crisis are impacting all IT decisions. DataCore VDS 2.0 removes many of the most painful implementation obstacles while significantly reducing the cost per virtual desktop instance, states Mr. Hagen.

Special Offer to VMware vExperts, VCPs and VCIs
DataCore Software is offering a free one-year, Not-for-resale (NFR) license to VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals and VMware Certified Instructors. The NFR licenses can be used in non-production environments, for evaluations, demonstrations and training purposes. VMware vExperts, VCPs and VCIs can access and download the software from the DataCore website at http://pages.datacore.com/Free_NFR_Software.html