DataCore CEO to Speak at SNW Spring 2013 Virtualization Panel on the Role of the Storage Hypervisor and How it Transforms Storage Economics

George Teixeira on Panel to Highlight Performance, Cost Savings and Flexibility of Hardware-independent Storage Hypervisor Software – Detailing Latest Innovations, Benefits and Customer Use Cases

DataCore Software’s President and CEO, George Teixeira, has been invited to participate in a panel discussion at SNW Spring 2013 on the storage hypervisor. With trends such as software-defined storage and managing Flash-based technologies and tiers of storage for business-critical application performance the subject of industry discussion, the panel will provide an overview on the role of the storage hypervisor, benefits, different approaches, current realities and its future, including its ability to transform the economics of storage.

For a summary of the main points, please read the recent blog post by Mr. Teixeira: Storage Hypervisors and Software-defined storage .

Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group will moderate a handpicked panel of experts, industry pioneers and executives from VMware, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and DataCore. The SNW session - “Analyst Perspective: The Storage Hypervisor: Myth or Reality?” - will take place on Tuesday, April 2 at 5:00 pm ET at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida, as part of SNW’s Virtualization Track.

DataCore Software is the storage hypervisor leader and premier provider of storage virtualization software. A storage industry veteran, Teixeira co-founded the company and has served as president and CEO since 1998.

Introduced in June 2012, DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V 9.0 – “the Storage Hypervisor for the cloud” –transformed the economics of virtualization for organizations of all sizes worldwide by delivering flexibility, performance, value and scale, regardless of the storage hardware used. Recently, in February 2013, DataCore unveiled its latest version of SANsymphony-V, providing expanding enterprise IT environments, virtualized applications and hybrid clouds extended scalability, added performance optimization and greater cost savings courtesy of robust, new configurability choices.

SNW is the world’s largest independently produced conference series focused on the evolution of architecture for a new world of Big Data and business agility. Produced by Computerworld - and co-owned by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association - SNW remains unbiased and vendor agnostic. SNW provides a forum of open thought leadership and practical education that defines the spectrum of storage, data and infrastructure solutions available to a highly qualified audience of enterprise technology decision-makers.

Faster Application Performance Tip: Share Flash Across Virtualized Workloads with Fusion-io and DataCore Storage Virtualization Software

  

Does your business have a need to speed up response times and provide continuous availability for your critical applications? Core business applications like Oracle, SAP, SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint often perform poorly when virtualized. More often than not the root cause is data I/O bottlenecks. If you are looking at solid-state memory technologies as your answer, then register today for a 30-minute webinar hosted by DataCore Software and Fusion-io.

At the beginning of the year, George Teixeira –our president and CEO– shared his thoughts on how 2013 would become the year of software-defined storage and pointed out five major trends in the market. One of the trends is that Tier 1 applications will go virtual and performance is critical. Another trend is that SSD flash technologies will be used everywhere; storage is not just disk drives.

Keeping these trends in mind, there are two top issues reported by customers attempting to consolidate virtualized Tier 1 apps which frequently force them to give up. The most striking is related to performance. Consolidation causes apps to run unacceptably slower than when hosted on their own dedicated server. Customers also complain about erratic behavior. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The apps were originally isolated onto private machines for two reasons; to avoid contention for shared resources, and make troubleshooting and tuning easier.

Server virtualization does a really good job of removing the contention for processing (CPU) resources. The I/O contention for shared storage remains challenging. The ancillary problem appears later, when they realize how susceptible to outages their Tier 1 apps become after consolidation, especially for those who unintentionally introduce single points of failure into their storage configurations.

If you are experiencing slow application performance in your virtualized environment due to data I/O bottlenecks and you are looking at solid-state memory technologies as your answer to help your business, then this half hour webinar will be well worth your time.

Join DataCore Software and Fusion-io to learn how to:

• Integrate flash memory to overcome I/O bottlenecks in real-world environments
• Combine flash technology with existing storage
• Speed up virtualized applications 2X to 5X
• Prevent storage from slowing down or taking down your applications

Sharing flash across virtualized workloads can help increase user productivity and improve the application experience. A more agile and dynamic business with better user experience and greater IT efficiency are just some of the benefits that can be realized.

When: Wednesday, April 10, 2013 @ 1:00pm EDT (USA Eastern Time)
How: REGISTER NOW!

Looking forward to seeing many of you online!


Jamila Gunawardena, Sr. OEM Sales Engineer, Fusion-io

                       
Carlos Nieves, Sr. Manager, Product Marketing, DataCore Software

 

  

DataCore Customer Event Celebrates 15 Year Anniversary Introduces DataCore VDS to Meet UK & Nordic SMB Demand for Affordable VDI Solutions

At last weeks’ DataCore Software Northern Europe Conference entitled ‘Optimising your Virtual Environment,’ DataCore Software, the premier provider of storage virtualisation software, along with DataCore solution providers and alliance partners, celebrated its 15th year anniversary and introduced to a packed auditorium, the new DataCore VDS (Virtual Desktop Server) software platform to Northern European customers in search of simple, affordable VDI solutions for small to mid-size businesses.

DataCore Introduces a New Software Product line: DataCore VDS - The Virtual Desktop Server
The announcement encouraged immediate positive uptake from the 100+ attendees keen to find out more about the potential impact of the announcement to their portfolio and environment.

One of the top DataCore R&D Directors took delegates through how DataCore VDS is designed to cost-effectively deploy and serve virtual desktops. DataCore VDS is a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) application-specific use case that optimally applies DataCore’s architectural advantages to make it practical to deploy persistent 'stateful' virtual desktops at a lower cost and higher performance than alternatives.

DataCore VDS: A Powerful ‘Stateful’ Virtual Desktop Solution
True virtual desktops are ‘stateful’ (or persistent), they deliver a similar user experience as if a user is on a physical desktop or laptop PC. With ‘stateful’ virtual desktops, an end-user is assigned a virtual machine for their own use to run applications, to browse, to do downloads. Turn the virtual desktop off and then back on and it retains the ‘State’ of what you were doing, it is just like when you close and open a laptop.

DataCore VDS addresses unfulfilled SMB market demand for cost-effective solutions
Small and medium businesses want to adopt desktop virtualisation for the same reasons large enterprises do – to reduce desktop management costs, improve productivity and increase business agility, but they often find enterprise-class solutions overkill for smaller environments.

Unlike VDI offerings aimed at ‘Big Companies’ on the market which are complex and require many 1000’s of desktops to justify the high costs involved, DataCore VDS dramatically lowers the complexity and significantly reduces the cost per VDI instance. The solution is priced and sized for small, medium size businesses and departmental users. DataCore VDS addresses this unfulfilled market demand with cost-effective and simple to use solutions specifically designed to meet the budgets and needs of 50 to 200 virtual desktop deployments. Most importantly, DataCore VDS makes it economically possible to not sacrifice performance and have a ‘true’ desktop user experience.

The Ultimate Objective: A Great User Experience
Other VDI approaches tend to be complex, costly and inefficient. Also, they are difficult to install and manage. While the ultimate objective is to provide users with a virtual desktop that performs and works as well or better than a physical computer, this objective is the first to be sacrificed due to the high costs needed to achieve the ‘true’ desktop experience and responsiveness that end-users expect.  Storage has been the major barrier and cost factor; current VDI approaches have had to use expensive storage networks, enterprise storage arrays, fast disks, SSDs and shared storage to achieve needed performance. However the economics do not make sense.  The cost of storage has limited VDI deployments only to large companies with big budgets.  All the above arguments together dictate the need for a new approach to address the storage cost and performance challenges.

DataCore VDS Compelling Benefits
DataCore VDS is the easy and affordable virtual desktop solution designed for SMBs. It deploys on a single server, and includes the tools Windows® administrators need to rapidly deliver centrally-managed virtual desktops to any user for less than the cost of new PCs.

The DataCore VDS highly efficient architecture eliminates up to 75 percent of VDI costs without compromising performance and most importantly the user experience. DataCore VDS is:

Simple and Fast to Install, Administer and Use

• Runs on off-the-shelf servers; any storage
• Intuitive and easy for administrators to use

Affordable and Super Storage Efficient

• Uses a fraction of storage compared to other VDI architectures

A High Performance Optimized Architecture

• Delivers ‘Best in Class’ price performance
• Optimally manages I/O traffic and caches to achieve high performance

A Powerful ‘Stateful’ Virtual Desktop Computing Solution

• True Desktop computing. What users expect!

DataCore is focused on solving storage problems and VDI is storage challenged
“We are not moving away from our core business, we are doing what we do best. DataCore VDS is fundamentally a storage solution that leverages Microsoft virtualisation capabilities and DataCore’s powerful architectural advantages to makes VDI practical and affordable,” states George Teixeira, CEO and President, DataCore Software.

Product Pricing, Roll Out and Availability
DataCore VDS will be released this month in Germany & UK where select partners have already been trained. In Q2, the solution will be made available exclusively in Europe through DataCore’s established network of trained and authorized EMEA based solution providers.

Pricing starts at under EURO 4.600 for a DataCore VDS software license able to support 50 virtual desktops.

Also announced at the conference, Simon Birbeck, Waterstons, is awarded DataCore Master Certified Engineer status elevating him to the ranks of elite engineers for the most complex environments.

Harvest The Benefits Of Storage Virtualization; IT departments that don't are wasting money

 

IT departments that do not enthusiastically embrace storage virtualization are essentially wasting money.

By Mark Peters, ESG Senior Storage Analyst

At a recent industry conference, a senior manager from a very sizeable IT organization took me to one side to ask -- quietly! -- whether I thought thin provisioning "is okay? It safe to try?" Really? Maybe you're surprised -- but I can tell you that every time we research such tools at ESG we are amazed at how far the adoption (perhaps I should say "active use") is behind what operational and financial logic would seem to dictate.
Read the full article at:
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/harvest-the-benefits-of-storage-virtuali/240151123
Highlights:

Harvesting The Benefits of Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization offers benefits to the storage infrastructure that are similar to those that server virtualization delivers on the compute side. In other words, storage virtualization is breaking the mold so that the true value of data services is no longer limited by hardware characteristics. Instead of dedicated pools of storage capacity that cannot be shared, a virtualized storage pool can enable:

-- Reclamation of stranded storage capacity: This makes unused capacity available to any servers, users or applications accessing the (now) general pool. In addition, when storage is no longer needed, it becomes part of the pool again and can be used elsewhere.

-- Consolidated storage management: Applying to all storage resources, this can eliminate multiple tools and processes for different types of storage arrays and media. Consolidating storage management under one umbrella makes the environment easier to manage and provides less opportunity for both human and administrative errors.

-- Advanced storage management features: These can extend the useful life of storage devices, as well as maximize the return on investment and potentially prevent, or at least delay, additional storage purchases. For example, in a virtualized storage environment, functions such as snapshots, remote replication and thin provisioning, which may come bundled with a storage system, can be shared across arrays that don't have those features.

-- More energy-efficient operations: This can be achieved by using storage virtualization to improve disk utilization, which in turn reduces the number of physical machines while simultaneously reducing data center floor space, power and cooling requirements.

-- Non-disruptive data migration: While data migration is a core concept in executing a pragmatic and sensible tiered storage strategy, it has also long been seen as one of the most common and disruptive storage tasks. In traditional storage environments, it's not at all uncommon for users to decide that the pain is enough to prevent them from enjoying the gain! But with storage virtualization, data can be moved non-disruptively (and often even automatically) between storage tiers, further optimizing hardware infrastructure costs.

-- Reduced capital expense and total cost of ownership for storage: This is all-but guaranteed with the implementation of storage virtualization. A virtualized storage environment replaces the fragmented, dedicated DAS, SAN and NAS topologies (which -- in traditional storage worlds -- invariably operate with separate storage resources and often a unique set of management tools) with a centralized and more flexible storage pool.

Virtualized storage is essentially accomplished in the same way as the virtualization of servers: The physical controller hardware and disk resources are logically separated from the data services. With virtualized storage, a pool of flexible, consolidated resources with a common management interface is built using capacity from multiple arrays that can have different specifications and software features, and may even have come from different vendors. Because storage is not dedicated to any specific server or application, it creates a much more flexible and responsive environment while also permitting increased utilization rates.

In addition, while users may be able (using VMware vMotion or some such tool) to move a running application between servers, traditional, fixed storage won't automatically go along with the change, thus rendering it all-but pointless. Virtualizing the computing element without virtualizing the storage as well precludes the complete agility and true utility-like resource provisioning that most IT shops are looking for; if the storage cannot match what the servers can do, then the anticipated service levels cannot be met.

The economic and operational value of virtualizing storage is clear. For decades, most organizations have had a fairly cavalier attitude towards storage. It's not that IT wasn't aware of its rising costs -- it's more that it didn't see any other ways to address the problems with which it was faced. But virtualization has changed all that, demonstrating a way to operate with greater efficiency. Users that do not enthusiastically embrace it are essentially wasting money, while at the same time missing out on operational improvements that can only be gained in fully virtualized environments.
It's worth a few minutes to check that you're maximizing your potential storage virtualization benefits and not falling into the adoption gap.

Thanks for a Great DataCore Customer and Partner Event, DataCore Celebrates 15 Year Anniversary and Introduces DataCore VDS to Meet UK/Nordics Demand for Affordable SMB Virtual Desktop Solutions

DataCore Northern European Customer & Partner Conference 2013
DataCore Customer Event Celebrates 15 Year Anniversary and Introduces DataCore VDS to Meet UK & Nordic Demand for Affordable SMB Virtual Desktop Solutions

Thanks all for a super event last week, hosted in downtown London at the ME/Melia Hotel. It was great to see over 100 attendees and have a chance to hear customer presentations, get a preview on DataCore VDS (Virtual Desktop Server) available in April 2013 and to hear the latest features on the DataCore roadmap.

To review the latest DataCore VDS information, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/VDS.aspx
or learn more by downloading these documents:
Announcement Release
DataCore VDS Solution Brief
DataCore VDS Powerpoint Presentation
DataCore VDS Technical Design Guidelines

Key Presentations:
Bjarne Poulsen, Managing Sales Director for Northern Europe kicked off the event.
At the event, the Keynote on 'Software-defined Storage' was presented by DataCore CEO, George Teixeira.
George Dochev, a technical leader that has been with DataCore for 15 years presented the DataCore roadmap for 2013.

Featured Customer Presentation - Open University
Open University, ICT and System Manger Paul Alexander presented their Virtual IT environment and spoke to how DataCore is the virtual foundation of their infrastructure.

Also at the event, we had a number of alliance partner that presented the value of combined solutions with DataCore.

DataCore London Customer Event Alliance Partners:  @Microsoft @Fusionio @SGI @Nexsan @XIO @whiptail @virtualsharp @DotHill

 

 

 

CeBIT 2013: DataCore Showcases SANsymphony-V Advances and Introduces DataCore VDS Exclusively in Europe to Meet Channel Demand for Affordable SMB Virtual Desktop Solutions

 

At CeBIT 2013 (Hanover, Germany (March 5th – 9th) DataCore Software, the premier provider of storage virtualization software, is showcasing the latest advances in its SANsymphony™-V Storage Hypervisor and introducing the new DataCore VDS (Virtual Desktop Server) software platform to European solution providers in search of simple, affordable VDI solutions to target the large base of small to mid-size businesses.

DataCore Showcases SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor Advances
At the “Virtualization & Storage Forum” (Hall 2, Stand A40), organized by DataCore’s distribution partner Arrow ECS and CeBIT, DataCore is presenting its latest SANsymphony-V performance acceleration and auto-tiering enhancements, more powerful CDP capabilities, greater scalability, support for Windows Server 2012 and highly optimized integration of Flash-based storage to dramatically speed up mission-critical tier-1 applications. For more information read here.


DataCore Introduces a New Software Product line: DataCore VDS - The Virtual Desktop Server
DataCore VDS is designed to cost-effectively deploy and serve virtual desktops. DataCore VDS is a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) application-specific use case that optimally applies DataCore’s architectural advantages to make it practical to deploy persistent 'stateful' virtual desktops at a lower cost and higher performance than alternatives.

DataCore VDS: A Powerful ‘Stateful’ Virtual Desktop Solution
True virtual desktops are ‘stateful’ (or persistent), they deliver a similar user experience as if a user is on a physical desktop or laptop PC. With ‘stateful’ virtual desktops an end-user is assigned a virtual machine for their own use to run applications, to browse, to do downloads. Turn the virtual desktop off and then back on and it retains the ‘State’ of what you were doing, it is just like when you close and open a laptop.

DataCore VDS addresses unfulfilled SMB market demand for cost-effective solutions
Small and medium businesses want to adopt desktop virtualization for the same reasons large enterprises do – to reduce desktop management costs, improve productivity and increase business agility, but they often find enterprise-class solutions overkill for smaller environments.

Unlike VDI offerings aimed at ‘Big Companies’ on the market which are complex and require many 1000’s of desktops to justify the high costs involved, DataCore VDS dramatically lowers the complexity and significantly reduces the cost per VDI instance. The solution is priced and sized for small, medium size businesses and departmental users. DataCore VDS addresses this unfulfilled market demand with cost-effective and simple to use solutions specifically designed to meet the budgets and needs of 50 to 200 virtual desktop deployments. Most importantly, DataCore VDS makes economically possible to not sacrifice performance and a ‘true’ desktop user experience.

The Ultimate Objective: A Great User Experience
Other VDI approaches tend to be complex, costly and inefficient. Also, they are difficult to install and manage. While the ultimate objective is to provide users with a virtual desktop that performs and works as well or better than a physical computer, this objective is the first to be sacrificed due to the high costs needed to achieve the ‘true’ desktop experience and responsiveness that end-users expect. Storage has been the major barrier and cost factor; current VDI approaches have had to use expensive storage networks, enterprise storage arrays, fast disks, SSDs and shared storage to achieve needed performance. However the economics do not make sense. The cost of storage has limited VDI deployments only to large companies with big budgets. All the above arguments together dictate the need for a new approach to address the storage cost and performance challenges.

DataCore VDS Compelling Benefits
DataCore VDS is the easy and affordable virtual desktop solution designed for SMBs. It deploys on a single server, and includes the tools Windows® administrators need to rapidly deliver centrally-managed virtual desktops to any user for less than the cost of new PCs.

The DataCore VDS highly efficient architecture eliminates up to 75 percent of VDI costs without compromising performance and most importantly the user experience. DataCore VDS is:

• Simple and Fast to Install, Administer and Use
  - Runs on off-the-shelf servers; any storage
  - Intuitive and easy for administrators to use
• Affordable and Super Storage Efficient
  - Uses a fraction of storage compared to other VDI architectures
• A High Performance Optimized Architecture
  - Delivers ‘Best in Class’ price performance
  - Optimally manages I/O traffic and caches to achieve high performance
• A Powerful ‘Stateful’ Virtual Desktop Computing Solution
  - True Desktop computing. What users expect!

"DataCore VDS addresses a major new business market opportunity, and for us, it is a real "sweet spot". It allows us to deliver simple and affordable VDI solutions well matched for 50 to 200 virtual desktop environments. Unlike highly complex VDI solutions that may be cost-effective for very large 1000 or more desktop projects, DataCore VDS removes many implementation barriers and greatly reduces the cost per virtual desktop instance,” says Jürgen Thurau, Senior Consultant at DataCore partner IT-On.NET GmbH. “Small and medium enterprises can finally operate a virtual desktop infrastructure economically to improve productivity and reduce costs. We are extremely optimistic and ready to work with the DataCore to establish DataCore VDS solution successfully in the marketplace.”

DataCore is focused on solving storage problems and VDI is storage challenged
“We are not moving away from our core business, we are doing what we do best. DataCore VDS is fundamentally a storage solution that leverages Microsoft virtualization capabilities and DataCore’s powerful architectural advantages to makes VDI practical and affordable,” states George Teixeira, CEO and President, DataCore Software.

Product Pricing, Roll Out and Availability
DataCore VDS will be released in April in Europe where select partners have already been trained. The solution will be made available during Q2 exclusively in Europe through DataCore’s established network of trained and authorized EMEA based solution providers.

Pricing starts at under EURO 4.600 for a DataCore VDS software license able to support 50 virtual desktops.