DataCore Continues to Advance its Proven Software-defined Storage and Updates SANsymphony-V

“Storage is undergoing a sea-change today and traditional hardware manufacturers are suffering because they are in catch-up mode to meet the ‘new world order’ for software-defined storage where automation, fast flash technologies and hardware interchangeability are standard,” said George Teixeira, co-founder, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “We have listened to our customers and stayed true to our vision. With the latest release of SANsymphony-V, we are well-positioned to help organizations manage growth and leverage existing investments, while making it simple to incorporate current and future innovations. Our software features and flexibility empowers CIOs and IT admins to overcome the many storage challenges faced in a dynamic virtual world.”

Amid all the talk and future-looking promises of software-defined storage from hardware-biased manufacturers, DataCore Software has delivered real-world solutions to thousands of customers worldwide. DataCore continues to advance and evolve its device-independent storage management and virtualization software, while maintaining focus on empowering IT users to take back control of their storage infrastructure. To that end, the DataCore has just announced a number of significant enhancements to the comprehensive management capabilities within version R9 of its SANsymphony™-V storage virtualization platform.

New advancements in SANsymphony-V include:

• Wizards to provision multiple virtual disks from templates 
• Group commands to manage storage for multiple application hosts 
• Storage profiles for greater control and auto-tiering across multiple levels of flash, solid state (SSDs) and hard disk technologies 
• A new database repository option for recording and analyzing performance history and trends 
• Greater configurability and choices for incorporating high-performance “server-side” flash technology and cost-effective network attached storage (NAS) file serving capabilities 
• Preferred snapshot pools to simplify and segregate snapshots from impacting production work 
• Improved remote replication and connectivity optimizations for faster and more efficient performance 
• Support for higher speed 16Gbit Fibre Channel networking and more.

Real-World Software-Defined Storage: Customer-driven Enhancements Overcome Challenges
Many of the new features which extend the scope and breadth of storage management would not even occur to companies just developing a software-defined package. They are the product of DataCore’s 15 years of customer feedback and field-proven experience in broad scenarios across the globe.

The enhancements introduced in the latest version of SANsymphony-V take on major challenges faced by large scale IT organizations and more diverse mid-size data centers. Aside from confronting explosive storage growth (multi-petabyte disk farms), organizations are experiencing massive virtual machine (VM) sprawl where provisioning, partitioning and protecting disk space taxes both staff and budget. Problems are further aggravated by the insertion of flash technologies and SSDs used to speed up latency-sensitive workloads. The time and resource demands required to manage a broadening diversity of different storage models, disk devices and flash technologies – even when standardized with a single manufacturer – are a growing burden for organizations already struggling to meet application performance needs on limited budgets.

The bottom line is that companies are forced to confront many unknowns in terms of storage. With traditional storage systems, the conventional practice has been to oversize and overprovision storage with the hope that it will meet new and unpredictable demands, but this drives up costs and too often fails to meet performance objectives. As a result, companies have become smarter and have realized that it is no longer feasible or sensible to simply throw expensive, purpose-built hardware at the problem. Companies today are demanding a new level of software flexibility that endures over time and adds value over multiple generations and types of hardware devices. What organizations require is a strategic – rather than an ad hoc – approach to managing storage.

SANsymphony-V is a strategic productivity solution that works infrastructure-wide across many storage hardware brands and models. Its auto-tuning cache and auto-tiering software maximize the use of available CPU, memory and disk resources to dramatically increase overall storage performance, which translates into faster, more responsive applications...