Translate

Friday 27 March 2015

Huawei, DataCore Partner on Hyper-Converged Solutions

 The complete article is available at ChannelBuzz.  

The DataCore-Huawei offerings are targeted at larger customers than the midmarket and lower end of the enterprise where other hyperconverged vendors have been most successful to date.
Chinese-based Huawei and Ft. Lauderdale-based DataCore software have announced a partnership which will integrate Huawei’s hardware and DataCore’s software in a new line of jointly certified hyper-converged solutions that will be sold through the channels of both companies. The first offering from the relationship will integrate Huawei’s FusionServer with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V10 software.
For a software-only player like DataCore, which has abstracted services into a server- agnostic, storage-agnostic platform, these kinds of partnering and OEM relationships with hardware players have always been a key route to market over the 17 years of their existence. This is their second such agreement in the hyper-converged space, following a recently announced one with Fujitsu.
Steve Houck
Steve Houck, Chief Operating Officer at DataCore
Our strategy is to acquire customers both through our own sales efforts and OEMing with players like Huawei, Lenovo and Cisco,” said Steve Houck, Chief Operating Officer at DataCore. “We have made a concerted effort to get relationships with these key OEMs.
This is the first formalized partnership DataCore has had with Huawei.
“We had worked with them at the field level, the deal level, but on an opportunistic basis, Houck said. “Huawei sees the importance of having enterprise class software in their systems, especially to gain share in incumbents’ accounts where they are heavily entrenched.”
The new hyper-converged solutions combine the advanced Huawei FusionServer series of rack servers, blade servers, and data center servers with DataCore’s software-defined storage services platform. They provide enterprise-class storage for both self-contained hyper-converged solutions as well as architectures that allow independent scaling of storage and compute, all connected by a Huawei-powered network fabric. They can also integrate and manage legacy storage systems.
While the sweet spot so far for hyper-converged deployments has been the midmarket and small enterprise, the Huawei-DataCore offerings will be aimed at larger companies.
“We are deliberately going upmarket, focusing on the commercial and enterprise markets with very large deployments,” Houck said. He noted that this contrasts with the original midmarket emphasis of the hyperconverged vendors like Nutanix and Nimble.
“The newcomers focused on the midmarket, in part because their people mainly came out of the LeftHands, Equallogics, that first generation of speciality storage arrays whose gear was approaching end of life,” Houck said. “They saw an opportunity to rip and replace in that market. But those systems have some scalability issues, which ours do not. We take all those storage services and scale massively, so we can do massive scale or we can take the lower end of those servers and deploy across thousands of point of sale solutions in retail. In order to scale at level the enterprise demands, you have to have a software-led strategy.”
Houck emphasized that DataCore designed its software 17 years ago for what they accurately forecast would be the environment of today.
“We developed product then on the premise of a future that would be drastically heterogeneous, very fragmented, and would require all sorts of services,” he said. “Hyperconverged vendors are being adopted, but they are also creating new siloes of data. We are seeing the same things now that we saw when VMare was getting adopted, and customers considering a virtualization-first strategy wanted to know it can co-exist with everything else. Today, there are lots of systems, but our value is that we provide a unified storage services platform for a customer who wants that.”
Huawei makes an excellent partner for them, Houck added.
“They have a combination of innovation in the product and also innovation in strategy, looking to disrupt the market,” he said. “Their market share as of today is predominantly outside the U.S., but gaining there is a number one priority for them. As a newcomer they don’t have install base to protect, so they can take more risks, and can do things incumbents can’t do. They are also extremely well-funded and focused. So while their share is low now, it is in a server and storage market that is rapidly changing.”
The Huawei-DataCore products will be sold and supported through a joint effort and will be available through the channels of both companies.
“In the Americas we are working to develop distribution and channel strategy for these products,” Houck said. “DataCore broadly goes to market through tier two distribution and OEM. In the early days we focused on visionary partners with a solution strategy. Every partner will say that’s their strategy, but it’s truly only a subset that sells solutions first. Now with storage being commoditized, we are seeing partners seeing consistent hardware business at risk, and we are seeing more mainstream partners looking at their storage practice as a software practice and lead with virtualization first.”
The deal with Huawei really shows partners where the market is going, Houck said.
“While it’s a partnership about a hyperconverged hardware system, the important message for partners is how software can enable them and their customers to do well in a more fragmented and heterogeneous infrastructure,” he said.
The Huawei and DataCore Hyper-Converged Solutions will be available for shipment in Q2.

Thursday 19 March 2015

Worldwide Launch at Cebit 2015: Huawei and DataCore Announce Strategic Global Partnership for Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-Converged Solutions


                                                                     World Premier and Press Event at Cebit 2015

“We are pleased to launch our new Hyper-Converged Solutions with DataCore and to take the concept of convergence to the next level. In this digital age, businesses can grow very quickly and they need datacenter infrastructure that delivers scalability and improves resilience. With DataCore’s expertise in the Software-defined storage area and Huawei’s experience in providing cutting-edge ICT infrastructure such as high performance servers, storage and SSD cards, our Hyper-Converged Solutions help businesses build a seamless architecture to compete in a fast-changing environment,” said Mr. Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei’s IT product line.

Mr. Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei’s IT product line and George Teixeira, CEO and President, DataCore Software launch global partnership at Cebit 2015

Combination of state-of-the-art Huawei FusionServer with DataCore’s proven Software-Defined Storage software delivers easy-to-use and scalable hyper-converged solutions addressing Microsoft, VMware and business-critical application environments requiring continuous availability, high performance and simplified management.

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, and DataCore Software, a leader in software-defined storage and converged Virtual SAN solutions, announced at the world’s largest IT trade show event at Cebit in Hannover, Gremany the launch of a new line of jointly certified Hyper-Converged Solutions. The first result of the strategic partnership between the two companies combines Huawei’s advanced FusionServer series with DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V10 software. Optionally, Huawei’s Oceanstor high-performance Flash-based SSD storage systems and existing legacy storage systems can be easily added via iSCSI or Fibre Channel connectivity to grow and extend system capabilities beyond the server attached limitations of most other hyper-converged appliance offerings. The new DataCore and Huawei Hyper-Converged Solutions are available for shipment this month and are designed to address the customer need for simple, high-performance and scalable virtual SANs and hyper-converged solutions required in today’s dynamic data center and IT environments.
With the combined Huawei and DataCore hyper-converged solutions, customers can realize the comfort of deploying state-of-the-art server and storage technology from Huawei with a flexible and comprehensive software-defined solution from DataCore that has already been proven in mission-critical applications at over 10,000 customer sites.
Alex Best of DataCore and Jorg Karpinski from Huawei present the compelling value proposition
The new hyper-converged solutions deliver exceptional performance and the highest levels of availability to meet growing business demands within larger-scale enterprises. The Huawei FusionServer series of rack servers, blade servers, and data center servers are designed to address the wide range of customer demands required to build fast, reliable and efficient IT infrastructures that best suit their individual business needs. Combined with DataCore’s software-defined storage services platform, these solutions are able to virtualize, enhance and derive the utmost productive value from a company’s present and future investments. 
“The partnership between Huawei and DataCore opens up our ability to target a largely unfulfilled segment of the marketplace and answer the need for hyper-converged solutions at a whole new price performance level,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore. "Huawei and DataCore have teamed together to fulfill the customer need for fast, affordable and simple-to-use Hyper-Converged Solutions and Virtual SANs that support legacy systems as well as new Microsoft virtualization and Hyper-V projects and mixed VMware ESXi environments running critical applications such as SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, SAP, Oracle and VDI.”
                                                                                      Complete end-to-end solutions
DataCore and Huawei partners can now provide 100% Huawei hardware solutions, end to end, covering storage, network, and compute needs in order to provide complete datacenter solutions with state-of–the –art enterprise storage capabilities. These solutions provide enterprise-class storage features for both self-contained hyper-converged solutions as well as architectures that allow independent scaling of storage and compute, all connected by a Huawei-powered network fabric. Optionally, new Huawei OceanStor storage systems or existing legacy external storage arrays from third parties can also be easily integrated and managed as part of these combined solutions when needed to meet current or future business requirements.
DataCore SANsymphony-V combined with Huawei offers multiple solution use cases, including:
An ideal hyper-converged solution for Microsoft and mixed Hyper-V and VMware projects - The certified DataCore and Huawei FusionServer RH Series based hyper-converged solutions include pre-installed Microsoft server software and is delivered optimized to support demanding Microsoft applications and virtualization projects as well as mixed Hyper-V and VMware environments running business critical applications such as Microsoft SQL server, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics ERP, SharePoint, Exchange, SAP and VDI. These solutions are simple and quick to install and easy to use thereafter.


Metro-clustering for business continuity and disaster recovery – The new hyper-converged solutions have undergone rigorous joint testing and are currently scalable to 64 nodes, yet they require only two nodes minimum to provide fault tolerant data protection and data services. Two or more Huawei based server nodes can be used to pool external storage to easily form a stretch cluster over multiple datacenters. With this, organizations can reliably introduce DataCore’s proven zero-touch failover to provide mission-critical resilience and non-stop data in disaster scenarios. Huawei and DataCore partners can easily enable a broader set of enterprise customers with application availability and mobility, regardless of storage infrastructure, by combining DataCore with Huawei technologies. Asynchronous replication can be enabled to provide further protection in DR scenarios, including failover to public cloud services.


Extreme acceleration for mission-critical business applications – Huawei servers provide a multitude of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) hard drive and flash media options. Combined with SANsymphony-V software, these can be used to deliver data via Fibre Channel or iSCSI to external application clients or internally to applications or VMs inside the FusionCube Converged Infrastructure. DataCore’s write optimization technologies can accelerate random IOPS hard drive performance to match performance associated with Flash SSD media capabilities. DataCore’s new breakthrough Random Write Accelerator capability, an innovation designed to highly optimize random write processing, can boost speeds up to 30 times faster depending on workloads, especially for transaction-oriented applications such as databases and ERP systems. DataCore’s real-time auto-tiering capabilities and ‘heat map’ visualization tools automate and simplify the movement and management of data hotspots to high-performance storage media and can be used to accelerate SAN storage with DAS flash.


Infrastructure-wide storage services; hyper-converged plus external SAN pooling via Huawei for end-to-end connectivity and management – Modern IT infrastructures often contain a complex mix of incompatible legacy SAN arrays and emerging storage products. Storage systems can be easily connected to a DataCore-powered Huawei server or rack to eliminate storage silos. Data can be easily replicated, migrated, and tiered across previously incompatible storage products while new products can easily be brought on-line. Thin provisioning, pioneered by DataCore, allows capacity to be added efficiently, automatically or on-demand, as needed.
With DataCore software, Huawei’s servers and storage products are now able to be easily pooled and integrated with existing storage from a variety of vendors, including EMC, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NetApp. DataCore’s automated caching and tiering technologies also make it easy to leverage the power and resources of Huawei’s servers to accelerate performance over a company’s entire infrastructure of storage assets. This combination supports powerful features like metro-wide shared storage for clusters and business continuance, and automates the optimization, provisioning and migration of data storage across the diversity of new or installed disk and flash-based technologies. 
Huawei and DataCore -- Partners in Action
“We are excited about DataCore Software's comprehensive enterprise storage software capabilities and how they strongly complement our extensive practice,” states Uwe Kramer, general manager at Systems Integrator Kramer & Crew. “DataCore’s Software-Defined Storage technology combined and certified with powerful Huawei IT systems allows us to help customers achieve business agility with highly flexible and performant hyper-converged solutions. With the cooperation of systems integrators like Kramer & Crew, we are able to provide comprehensive services for implementation, maintenance and monitoring of state-of-the-art IT infrastructure from one single source and help customers to easily meet their objectives around business-critical data.”
Pricing and Availability
The Huawei and DataCore Hyper-Converged Solutions will be available for shipment in Q2, 2015. List prices start at around €20.000.



Tuesday 17 March 2015

The Register: Huawei and DataCore spawn a beautiful hyper-converged system


A hyper-converged server and storage system is coming as the offspring of a Huawei-DataCore deal giving channel partners of both an answer to Nutanix, Simplicity, and EVO: RAIL-type offerings.
Basically it’s Huawei FusionServer servers running DataCore SANsymphony-V software with Huawei Oceanstor direct-attached storage made into a virtual SAN across 2 to 64 servers. Also, 3rd-party storage can be virtualised through DataCore’s software and added into the storage resource pool.
Two or more Huawei server nodes can be used to pool external storage and form a stretch cluster over multiple data centres, with DataCore failover, using sync mirroring, providing non-stop data access if there is a disaster in either location.

The systems can have pre-installed Microsoft server software and be delivered optimised to support Microsoft applications and Hyper-V virtualisation projects, as well as VMware ones. Supported apps include SQL server, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics ERP, SharePoint, Exchange, SAP and VDI.

The two suppliers say DataCore and Huawei channel partners can now provide 100 per cent Huawei hardware products, end to end, covering storage, network and compute needs.

It’s good news for Huawei, whose channel can now pitch its servers and disk and flash storage into accounts with existing third-party storage arrays and use DataCore software as the glue to bring it all together, ticking the software-defined and hyper-converged boxes on the way.

For DataCore it’s good news as well, coming on top of existing deals with Cisco (UCS), Dell (PowerEdge) and Fujitsu (Primergy) for their servers. All server vendors are jumping aboard the hyper-converged and software-defined storage bandwagons as a way to sell more servers and their own direct-attached storage.

They see the virtual SANs inherent in such offers as a way to divert customer spend previously devoted to third-party SAN arrays into their own pockets.

Get a briefing doc about the combined Huawei/DataCore system here (pdf).
Huawei/DataCore hyper-converged systems will be available for shipment later this month within EMEA. List prices start at around €20.000. 



Friday 13 March 2015

DataCore and Cisco Unified Computing Systems, Extends Software-Defined Storage Services Infrastructure-wide

“Cisco UCS has become a leading force in enterprise computing infrastructure, and DataCore is excited to extend its capabilities to include the delivery of Tier-1 enterprise storage services to business customers.” said Steve Houck, COO of DataCore Software. “Software-Defined Storage allows organizations to have greater choice while protecting their existing investments. SANsymphony-V and Cisco UCS combine to deliver a comprehensive, powerful, yet intuitive platform that allows organizations to address their storage needs and derive more value across their complete infrastructure.”
DataCore Achieves Cisco Compatibility Certification
DataCore Software and Cisco announced today that its SANsymphony™-V and Virtual SAN software, version 10.0.1, has successfully achieved Cisco Interoperability Verification Testing (IVT) compatibility certification with Cisco's Unified Computing System, the UCS C-Series Rack-Servers. See today’s latest press release for more details:  DataCore Software Achieves Cisco Compatibility Certification
DataCore and Cisco: New Use Cases + Extends Enterprise Storage Services Infrastructure-wide

DataCore SANsymphony-V combined with Cisco UCS C-Series offers multiple solution scenario highlights, including:
External SAN Pooling via Cisco VIC Connectivity – Modern IT infrastructures often contain a complex mix of incompatible legacy SAN arrays and emerging storage products. Storage systems on the Cisco Virtual Interface Card Hardware Compatibility List (VIC HCL) can be easily connected to a DataCore-powered C-series rack to eliminate storage silos. Data can be easily replicated, migrated, and tiered across previously incompatible storage products while new products can easily be brought on-line. Thin provisioning, pioneered by DataCore, offers modular scalability with minimal initial investment by allowing capacity to be added efficiently, automatically or on-demand, as needed.
Metro-Clustering of Existing and New Storage for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery – Two or more Cisco UCS nodes can be used to pool external storage to easily form a stretch cluster over multiple datacenters. With this, organizations can reliably introduce DataCore’s proven zero-touch failover™ to provide mission-critical resilience and non-stop data in disaster scenarios. Cisco partners can easily enable a broader set of enterprise customers with application availability and mobility, regardless of storage infrastructure, by combining DataCore-powered C-series rack with technologies such as Cisco OTV. Asynchronous replication can be enabled to provide further protection in DR scenarios, including failover to public cloud services.
Extreme Acceleration for Business Applications – Cisco UCS servers provide a multitude of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) hard drive and flash media options. Combined with SANsymphony-V software, these can be used to deliver data via Fibre Channel or iSCSI to external application clients or internally to applications or VMs inside the UCS server. DataCore’s write optimization technologies can accelerate random IOPS hard drive performance to match performance associated with Flash SSD media capabilities. DataCore’s real-time auto-tiering capabilities and ‘heat map’ visualization tools automate and simplify the movement and management of data hotspots to high-performance storage media and can be used to accelerate SAN storage with DAS flash.
DataCore’s SANsymphony-V is a proven 10th-generation software platform with 25,000+ licenses deployed at more than 10,000 customer production sites globally. To learn more, please see:DataCore Software-Defined Storage
Cisco and DataCore Partners in Action
DataCore and Cisco partners can now provide 100% Cisco hardware solutions, end to end, covering storage, network, and compute needs in order to provide complete datacenter solutions with Tier-1 enterprise storage capabilities. These solutions provide enterprise-class storage features for both self-contained hyper-converged setups as well as architectures that allow independent scaling of storage and compute, all connected by a Cisco-powered network fabric. Optional new or legacy external storage systems from third parties can be easily integrated into these solutions according to business requirements.
The Cisco Solution Partner Program, part of the Cisco Partner Ecosystem, unites Cisco with third-party independent hardware and software vendors to deliver integrated solutions to joint customers. As a Solution Partner, DataCore Software offers a complementary product offering and has started to collaborate with Cisco to meet the needs of joint customers. For more information on DataCore Software, go to:https://marketplace.cisco.com/catalog/companies/datacore-software-corporation.

Thursday 12 March 2015

Sydney Airports Corporation and Cheap as Chips Overcome Real-life Storage Management Issues with DataCore

A software-defined storage strategy has enabled Sydney Airports Corporation to overcome real-life storage management issues. Prior to DataCore, data storage at Sydney Airports was characterized by disparate systems – driven by multiple leaders and cost strategies. The environment was awash in vendor-specific solutions, which were only upgradeable through system vendors. The impact of all of this was that Sydney Airports had no hardware independence and was literally “boxed in” to high-cost, traditional storage systems.

By embracing DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software-defined storage Sydney Airports Corporation has been able to reduce storage related costs as well as–
  • Greatly reducing capital and operating expenses associated with storage.
  •  Extending the life of storage investments and skip expensive refresh cycles.
  • Avoiding costly hardware lock-in and opening doors to more attractive alternatives from competing suppliers.
Necessary High Availability for Mission-Critical Databases and Applications Is Assured
“DataCore’s software-defined storage solution is transforming IT infrastructures and the management of storage environments throughout the world," stated Carlos M. Carreras, Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations at DataCore Software. "We see a significant customer shift towards hardware-agnostic and application-centric architectures using common data services across their entire storage investment.  Best of all, DataCore customers report cutting storage costs on average by half."

According to Carreras, DataCore is becoming more and more sought after as companies are seeking to utilize their storage resources fully and to gain much needed redundancy for their data – and thereby ensure uptime and non-stop business operations.

DataCore’s 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.

Delivering Highly Dynamic Virtual Environments

DataCore wins Cheap as Chips contract

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.  At Cheap as Chips, ICT Manager Eamonn Merrifield eliminated the need to buy storage from any one specific vendor by leveraging DataCore.  “This is real empowerment – and enables us to choose best technology for us – in terms of function and cost,” he stated.

“The economic benefits resulting from DataCore’s software-defined storage platform are very compelling,” explained Carreras. 

Click here to realize the software-defined data center:

Monday 9 March 2015

Hyper-Converged and Software-defined Storage, Why they go together


Sushant Rao of DataCore Software details real-world scenarios of how a hyper-converged infrastructure is the right approach to combine storage, compute, networking and virtualisation in one unit
One of the fundamental requirements for virtualising applications is the underlying shared storage. Applications can move around to different servers as long as those servers have access to the storage with the application and its data. Typically, shared storage takes place over a Storage Area Network (SAN). However, SANs typically have issues in virtualised environments. The first is providing consistent, reliable I/O performance where it is needed. As different applications start, stop and process data, the load on the SAN varies greatly. If a database starts a large job processing data, the SAN may become overwhelmed, which will start impacting the performance of other applications that are acting in a normal state.

Applications that are performance-sensitive are particularly susceptible to this issue, including databases (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server); applications and ERP systems based on databases (SAP, Oracle Applications, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics); VDI (VMware and Citrix); and communications systems (Microsoft Exchange, VoIP). In addition, as the number of applications in the environment grows, IT needs to be able to scale out infrastructure seamlessly and quickly. Any time maintenance is done on a SAN, the storage needs to go offline, leading to a disruption. Another issue, especially in smaller environments such as remote sites, is the reliability and complexity of SANs. When remote or regional locations (retail shops, bank branches, manufacturing plants, call centres, distribution centres, surgeries, etc.) have applications on-site, IT needs to address issues with availability and management of the infrastructure. In the simplest case, an office has two servers to ensure high availability at the compute layer.

However, the servers are connected to a SAN (typically a low-end storage array and network connections), which itself is a single point of failure. If the SAN goes offline for any reason it doesn't matter that there are two servers; the applications have an outage, which disrupts the business. Usually there are no IT staff on-site, so simplicity of management and reducing complexity are very important. Due to the challenges of using SANs in a virtual environment, organisations are currently looking for new options. Hyper-converged infrastructure is a solution that seems well-suited to address these issues.

WHY HYPER-CONVERGED?
To provide consistent high-performance, IT can create application-specific clusters. By running the same type of application on the cluster (e.g. databases), IT is able to manage performance and identify/resolve bottlenecks more effectively. In addition, to avoid the performance limitations of a SAN, hyper-converged storage utilises Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) within servers as shared storage, moving data closer to the applications. This architecture provides better I/O performance closer to the application (therefore creating better response times), resulting in less complexity and lower cost.

RELIABLE APPLICATION PERFORMANCE
A hospital recently used DataCore Software's Virtual SAN software to create a hyper-converged system to achieve better and more consistent application performance. The hospital had 12 physical servers running its PBX system. The organisation wanted to virtualise this application (into 12 VMs) but it was essential to provide the same level of reliable performance as the physical servers (since voice communication is vital in a hospital environment). The hospital knew it wanted a dedicated cluster for the virtualised PBX application. But, its IT staff were not satisfied with available options, such as VMware Virtual SAN, which required a minimum of three physical servers (and later, they learned that actually four servers were recommended).

The consensus was that utilising three servers to run 12 VMs was wasteful and unnecessarily expensive. Instead, the hospital chose DataCore's Virtual SAN software. This solution only required two servers for failover, which reduced costs by 33% from the onset. In addition, DataCore Virtual SAN uses adaptive RAM caching to accelerate I/O. RAM is generally 10x faster than Flash storage, so the performance of the virtualised PBX was "through the roof." In addition, the RAM caching meant that Flash storage was optional, further reducing costs for the hospital.

The last consideration was the ability to scale with a converged architecture, compute and memory scale with storage capacity. If more storage capacity is needed, but additional compute / memory is not, then the options are less than desirable. IT can either change the drives in the servers to offer higher capacity or add another server. However DataCore Virtual SAN, with its Integrated Storage Architecture, can utilise a central SAN to complement the direct-attached storage inside the servers. This means that additional storage capacity is made available from the central SAN and data resides on the tier that best matches its performance requirement. For example, "hot" data remains close to the server tier and "cold" data remains on the SAN. This option provided the hospital with the ability to optimise application performance and add greater flexibility to scale storage and compute/memory as needed.

REGIONAL SUPPORT
For regional sites that need to run a mixture of workloads through a highly available infrastructure, the logical solution is to turn to the local storage in the servers into redundant shared storage, thereby increasing availability. In addition, reducing the amount of hardware needed for availability reduces the physical footprint of the infrastructure (which may be limited in a remote branch) as well as the costs. Lastly, by combining compute, network and storage into one infrastructure, the complexity of managing separate pieces is removed.

SDS BRINGS IT ALL TOGETHER
There is a downside to hyper-converged storage. Each deployment becomes a separate storage system to manage and maintain. To ensure that yet another, separate data island isn't created with hyper-converged infrastructure, it needs to be integrated into the overall storage infrastructure and management. This is where DataCore's Software-defined Storage platform comes in.

By augmenting hyper-converged infrastructure with the capacity advantages and investments made in existing SANs, DataCore can scale storage capacity and performance easily and efficiently. More importantly, the DataCore SDS platform unifies all of the storage systems from different vendors and provides one set of comprehensive storage services across the entire storage infrastructure - under a single pane of management - so it is easy to administer the storage infrastructure and unify separate data islands.
More info: www.datacore.comwww.datacore.com

"To provide consistent high-performance, IT can create application-specific clusters. By running the same type of application on the cluster (e.g. databases), IT is able to manage performance and identify/resolve bottlenecks more effectively. In addition, to avoid the performance limitations of a SAN, hyper-converged storage utilises Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) within servers as shared storage, moving data closer to the applications. This architecture provides better I/O performance closer to the application (therefore creating better response times), resulting in less complexity and lower cost."



Friday 6 March 2015

Dell PowerEdge Servers and DataCore Make Great Software-Defined Storage Solutions

by Steve Houck, Chief Operating Officer of DataCore -Post from Dell4Enterprise Blog

As applications and data become more important, companies are transforming their data centers into private cloud infrastructure. This move will enable companies to provide high levels of availability, reliability and performance to applications, while dramatically reducing costs and simplifying management of the infrastructure.

Servers and, to a large extent, networks have moved to a private cloud model where the underlying infrastructure has been abstracted, pooled and automated.

But sometimes companies take a different approach to storage. Walk into any data center and you’re sure to find different types of storage systems, each bought to satisfy specific requirements and sometimes for different projects. For customers with disparate storage environments or lacking a strategically implemented hybrid SAN environment, often times high-performance storage was justified for latency-sensitive applications, while lower-cost, high-capacity storage made better sense for less-critical applications.

Unfortunately, sometimes companies find themselves with different storage systems, each in an “island” with different functionality and managed separately. Such diversity can complicate how storage resources are allocated and managed. Storage is the next big step in private cloud infrastructure.

DataCore has created a solution that virtualizes, pools and manages all storage from any vendor, regardless of model. Once-isolated storage systems can now become part of an enterprise-wide capacity pool, classified into tiers according to their unique characteristics. The system administrator can easily provision capacity and set high-level policies to allow the software to dynamically select the most appropriate storage tier and paths to achieve the desired levels of performance and availability.


This solution utilizes the latest generation Dell PowerEdge servers and DataCore SANsymphony™-V software, transforming isolated storage systems into a centrally managed storage infrastructure, helping you derive the most value from your storage investments, present and future. Using DataCore’s storage virtualization technology, Dell Storage MD Series, SC Series and PS Series arrays can be easily integrated with existing storage.

  • Dramatically improves performance of all applications: High-performance caching algorithms intelligently anticipate reads, evaluate usage patterns and transform random writes into sequential writes. In addition, auto-tiering software dynamically matches workloads to the most appropriate class of storage from the virtual pool.
  • Instantly reduces storage costs by increasing capacity utilization and reducing management complexity: Eliminates wasted storage capacity by pooling all of your storage, regardless of make/manufacturer. Each storage device is used in a way that best matches its capacity and performance capabilities.
  • Prevents storage outages from affecting applications: Synchronous mirroring with “zero touch” failover and failback between any types of storage ensures that applications are not disrupted by storage or site outages. Easily migrate data between unlike systems, during production, with zero impact to applications.
  • Quickly meets the needs of the business:  Centralized management using a common set of commands across disparate systems, together with extensive automation and orchestration, simplifies administration and allows IT to respond to business needs easily and without disrupting other applications.


Bottom line: DataCore’s SANsymphony-V Software-defined Storage platform together with Dell PowerEdge servers combine to empower your storage to new levels of performance, availability, automation and orchestration.

Thursday 5 March 2015

Delivering Leading Sustained Performance with OCZ’s Z-Drive 4500 PCIe SSD Series and DataCore Software-defined Storage



Validated by PCIe SSD Verification Testing Conducted by DataCore Software (as part of the DataCore Ready Program Certification) Scott Harlin OCZ Storage Solutions

DataCore Software is a global leader in software-defined storage particularly related to virtualization.  Its flagship product, SANsymphony-V, is DataCore’s tenth generation storage virtualization solution, and as of this publishing, has been deployed in more than 10,000 customer sites worldwide.  The software is designed to maximize IT infrastructure performance, availability and utilization by virtualizing storage assets.  Once deployed, it seamlessly manages and scales data storage architectures, combines all available storage into a single storage pool and virtualizes it, delivering large performance gains through a hardware-agnostic model.
As SANsymphony-V software is highly regarded and used extensively worldwide, OCZ’s Z-Drive 4500 PCIe SSD Series complements this software with performance optimization, virtualization, caching, and large densities, amongst a host of other features and capabilities.  It is backed by a more robust architectural design (over the previous generation Z-Drive R4 Series), as well as an advanced suite of enterprise-class endurance and data reliability tools expected by today’s IT managers.  In the software-defined datacenter, virtualization and system efficiencies are driven through software requiring a cost-effective approach to managing storage growth while maximizing hardware investments, such as SSDs.
To identify those hardware solutions that are trusted to enhance DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software-defined storage infrastructures, the DataCore Ready Program was established.  Those solutions listed as DataCore Ready have completed additional verification testing to provide customer confidence of joint solution compatibility.  A DataCore Ready designation is awarded to these third party hardware products that have successfully met the verification test criteria.

Wednesday 4 March 2015

DataCore Teams with Cisco to Certify UCS Platform, Expand Enterprise Use Cases and Extend Storage Services Infrastructure-wide

“Cisco UCS has become a leading force in enterprise computing infrastructure, and DataCore is excited to extend its capabilities to include the delivery of Tier-1 enterprise storage services to business customers.” said Steve Houck, COO of DataCore Software. “Software-Defined Storage allows organizations to have greater choice while protecting their existing investments. SANsymphony-V and Cisco UCS combine to deliver a comprehensive, powerful, yet intuitive platform that allows organizations to address their storage needs and derive more value across their complete infrastructure.”
DataCore Achieves Cisco Compatibility Certification
DataCore Software and Cisco announced today that its SANsymphony™-V and Virtual SAN software, version 10.0.1, has successfully achieved Cisco Interoperability Verification Testing (IVT) compatibility certification with Cisco's Unified Computing System, the UCS C-Series Rack-Servers. See today’s latest press release for more details:  DataCore Software Achieves Cisco Compatibility Certification
DataCore and Cisco: New Use Cases + Extends Enterprise Storage Services Infrastructure-wide

DataCore SANsymphony-V combined with Cisco UCS C-Series offers multiple solution scenario highlights, including:
External SAN Pooling via Cisco VIC Connectivity – Modern IT infrastructures often contain a complex mix of incompatible legacy SAN arrays and emerging storage products. Storage systems on the Cisco Virtual Interface Card Hardware Compatibility List (VIC HCL) can be easily connected to a DataCore-powered C-series rack to eliminate storage silos. Data can be easily replicated, migrated, and tiered across previously incompatible storage products while new products can easily be brought on-line. Thin provisioning, pioneered by DataCore, offers modular scalability with minimal initial investment by allowing capacity to be added efficiently, automatically or on-demand, as needed.
Metro-Clustering of Existing and New Storage for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery – Two or more Cisco UCS nodes can be used to pool external storage to easily form a stretch cluster over multiple datacenters. With this, organizations can reliably introduce DataCore’s proven zero-touch failover™ to provide mission-critical resilience and non-stop data in disaster scenarios. Cisco partners can easily enable a broader set of enterprise customers with application availability and mobility, regardless of storage infrastructure, by combining DataCore-powered C-series rack with technologies such as Cisco OTV. Asynchronous replication can be enabled to provide further protection in DR scenarios, including failover to public cloud services.
Extreme Acceleration for Business Applications – Cisco UCS servers provide a multitude of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) hard drive and flash media options. Combined with SANsymphony-V software, these can be used to deliver data via Fibre Channel or iSCSI to external application clients or internally to applications or VMs inside the UCS server. DataCore’s write optimization technologies can accelerate random IOPS hard drive performance to match performance associated with Flash SSD media capabilities. DataCore’s real-time auto-tiering capabilities and ‘heat map’ visualization tools automate and simplify the movement and management of data hotspots to high-performance storage media and can be used to accelerate SAN storage with DAS flash.
DataCore’s SANsymphony-V is a proven 10th-generation software platform with 25,000+ licenses deployed at more than 10,000 customer production sites globally. To learn more, please see:DataCore Software-Defined Storage
Cisco and DataCore Partners in Action
DataCore and Cisco partners can now provide 100% Cisco hardware solutions, end to end, covering storage, network, and compute needs in order to provide complete datacenter solutions with Tier-1 enterprise storage capabilities. These solutions provide enterprise-class storage features for both self-contained hyper-converged setups as well as architectures that allow independent scaling of storage and compute, all connected by a Cisco-powered network fabric. Optional new or legacy external storage systems from third parties can be easily integrated into these solutions according to business requirements.
The Cisco Solution Partner Program, part of the Cisco Partner Ecosystem, unites Cisco with third-party independent hardware and software vendors to deliver integrated solutions to joint customers. As a Solution Partner, DataCore Software offers a complementary product offering and has started to collaborate with Cisco to meet the needs of joint customers. For more information on DataCore Software, go to:https://marketplace.cisco.com/catalog/companies/datacore-software-corporation.