DataCore SANsymphony V10 ups the ante in the storage virtualisation market

http://kusnetzky.net/analysts-take/sansymphony-10-ups-the-ante.html 

George Teixeira, CEO of DataCore and his colleague Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing, stopped by to discuss how the company has done since our last chat and to introduce version 10 of SANsymphony. They believe that this is the best software for flash storage, DRAM storage and all fashion of rotating media.

What does SANsymphony do?

SANsymphony is a storage virtualization (call it software defined storage if you prefer) product that executes on x86-64 servers, sits in the data path between applications and a huge selection of storage devices and offers significant performance improvements, better utilization of storage devices and significantly improves reliability through redundancy.

The software does this by offering the following capabilities:

• Auto-tiering to automatically move data to the appropriate storage tier to optimize both performance and cost
• Caching that is designed to optimize how data is stored and retrieved regardless of the type of storage device
• Synchronization and Mirroring to assure that data is where it needs to be, when it needs to be there and is highly reliable as well
• Thin provisioning that allows storage to be allocated as needed rather than provisioning the largest space an application is likely to need at some point in the future
• and a long list of other features

Like all virtualization technology, the goal is creating an artificial, virtual view of storage that is different than what the physical storage hardware provides.

What's new with version 10?

DataCore has extended SANsympony's virtual SAN capabilities in a number of ways and describes the product in the following way:

The spotlight on SANsymphony-V10 is clearly on the new virtual SAN capabilities, and the new licensing and pricing choices. However, a number of other major performance and scalability enhancements appear in this version as well:

• Scalability has doubled from 16 to 32 nodes; Enables Metro-wide N+1 grid data protection
• Supports high-speed 40/56 GigE iSCSI; 16Gbps Fibre Channel; iSCSI Target NIC teaming
• Performance visualization/Heat Map tools add insight into the behavior of Flash and disks
• New auto-tiering settings optimize expensive resources (e.g., flash cards) in a pool
• Intelligent disk rebalancing, dynamically redistributes load across available devices within a tier
• Automated CPU load leveling and Flash optimizations to increase performance
• Disk pool optimization and self-healing storage; Disk contents are automatically restored across the remaining storage in the pool; Enhancements to easily select and prioritize order of recovery
• New self-tuning caching algorithms and optimizations for flash cards and SSDs
• ‘Click-simple’ configuration wizards to rapidly set up different use cases (Virtual SAN; High-Availability SANs; NAS File Shares; etc.)

Snapshot analysis

I've spoken with a number of customers who use SANsymphony on a daily basis. If I told you exactly what they've said, you would believe this post was really a marketing message from DataCore in disguise. I often hear stories of huge performance improvements, significant improvements in storage utilization and much better storage reliability.

Although I'm sure that DataCore's competitors would disagree, Teixeria asserts that SANsymphony is "the ultimate storage stack that simply accelerates everything."

He also asserts that all DataCore needs to do is get people to try it and they're hooked. Although I'm usually very skeptical of such claims, after talking with DataCore's customers, I'm beginning to believe it is true.

There are a large number of suppliers in the storage and storage virtualization market. Players such as IBM, EMC, NetApp, HP, HDS and a growing list of other competitors offer products that appear similar. DataCore has to get ahead all of these large and small suppliers to get the ear of IT decision makers. If the company is able to break through all of the noise, the strengths of their product are likely to be convincing.

DataCore Creates Virtual SAN Out of Server Storage

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/it-unmasked/datacore-creates-virtual-san-out-of-server-storage.html

One of the benefits of using a storage management application is that the location of the actual storage device doesn’t matter all that much.

Unify and Federate Physical and Virtual SANs

Taking advantage of that benefit, DataCore’s release of SANsymphony-V10 has added a Virtual-SAN capability that turns all the Flash memory and magnetic storage attached to a server into a shared resource for the applications that access that server.

As of late, there has been a lot of interest in Flash storage on a server, and DataCore CEO George Teixeira notes that most of the Flash storage deployed today on a server is allocated to a single application. Teixeira says that this is a comparatively expensive way to solve an application performance issue because most of the time the Flash storage device is just sitting idle.

SANsymphony-V10 turns Flash and magnetic storage on the server into a resource that can be shared by a cluster of 32 servers, accessing up to 32PB of storage at speeds of up to 50 Million IOPS, says Teixeira.

DataCore is not the only vendor to have turned Flash memory into a shared resource. But Teixeira says the rise of Flash validates a software-defined approach to storage that allows IT organizations to mix and match third-party storage devices as they see fit.

Of course, DataCore would be the first to admit that most IT organizations have only a fraction of their data running in Flash memory. But the percentage of the data that does run in Flash tends to be really hot in terms of how often it needs to be accessed across what is usually a broad application portfolio.

Skyera's skyHawk All-Flash Array Certified as DataCore Ready; Industry Leading Price Performance Meets Software-Defined Storage

Leading All-Flash Storage Array Coupled with SANsymphony-V Dramatically Accelerates Application Performance Across Software-Defined Storage Architectures

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2014/05/06/skyeras-skyhawk-all-flash-array-certified-datacore-ready-industry-leading-price-performan

"Not only is Skyera one of the leading players in the flash storage industry, but they have also revolutionized the industry by developing the only all-flash array to break the hard disk price barrier," said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development at DataCore. "The skyHawk storage array combined with SANsymphony-V provides IT departments with a solution designed to virtualize any application, while dramatically increasing performance. We are pleased to partner with Skyera and welcome them into the DataCore Ready program."

"Skyera offers a uniquely scalable enterprise solid-state storage solution that eliminates storage performance bottlenecks and allows IT departments to virtualize their most demanding workloads," said Radoslav Danilak, CEO of Skyera. "In our effort to help usher in a new era of storage, we are committed to partnering with leading vendors to ensure the optimization of jointly deployed solutions that offer the ultimate efficiency, functionality and simplicity. As such, we are proud to have been accepted into the DataCore Ready program."

New flash-optimized DataCore SANsymphony-V10 release targets VMware VSAN

Read Full Article at SearchVirtualStorage:http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240219880/New-flash-optimized-DataCore-SANsymphony-V-targets-VMware-VSAN?

DataCore Software this week added flash optimization features to its SANsymphony-Vstorage virtualization software. With SANsymphony-V10, DataCore is ready to take on virtual SAN newcomer VMware.

DataCore SANsymphony-V performance and capacity capabilities have been increased, doubling the number of nodes supported from 16 to 32. It can pool up to 32 PB of capacity, scale to 50 million IOPS, and offers metro-wide N-plus 1 grid data protection.

DataCore said SANsymphony-V10 can now self-tune flash and minimize flash wear by allocating the right amount of flash to a specific workload. It also enables flash to be mirrored for high availability to non-flash devices, and its in-memory caching can speed application workloads and optimize write performance.

SANsymphony-V10 runs on x86 servers to create a shared storage pool out of internal flash and disk storage that are available to that server. It also includes plug-ins for VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.

DataCore CEO George Teixeira said SANsymphony-V10 has much greater reach than VMware's recently announced Virtual SAN (VSAN) software, which also turns commodity hardware into shared storage.

"VMware VSAN works only with VMware vSphere and only in the host,"Teixeira said. "What I'm seeing is a world of isolated islands of storage. Each commercial vendor is driving divergent approaches and creating isolated storage islands."

Randy Kerns, a senior strategist at Evaluator Group, said DataCore brings a much more mature product offering in the virtual storage area network (SAN) space compared to other vendors' newer products.

"They have an interesting argument to make," Kerns said. "The product now can manageserver-side flash. It can manage direct-attached storage and SAN-attached storage. It gives you a virtual SAN with many different storage capabilities.

"One of the big things about DataCore is it has had a product offering since 1998 and they have a mature set of features," he continued. "DataCore has been competing with IBM's [SAN Volume Controller] SVC, but now they can compete with VMware VSAN."

…DataCore's Teixeira said SANsymphony-V10 supports any flash from vendors such as Fusion-io, Skyera, Toshiba OCZ, Pure Storage and Violin Memory. The DataCore SANsymphony-V software automatically assigns either flash or lower-cost devices to each workload, depending on its needs.

"Only 5% to 10% of workloads need high-speed flash," Teixeira said. "The software has to be smart enough to see that a database needs flash. Vendors want people to think flash is the great panacea that solves all problems, but it has to coexist with the existing storage."

DataCore offers license packages targeted for different use cases. One license model is priced at $4,000 per server.

"Just add one instance of each server and you're golden," Teixeira said. "You have a vSAN federated with traditional storage."

Multinode DataCore SANsymphony-V10 licenses start in the $10,000 to $30,000 range. DataCore is also offering a virtual SAN package at $4,400 per server that includes auto-tiering, adaptive read-write caching from DRAM, storage pooling, synchronous mirroring, thin provisioning and snapshots. SANsymphony-V10 is scheduled to be generally available May 30.

DataCore SANsymphony Boosts Flash, Ends ‘Storage Islands’

http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/04/30/datacore-sansymphony-boosts-flash-ends-storage-islands/

Software-defined storage vendor DataCore Software rolled out the latest version of its SANsymphony virtual storage area network, which seeks to boost utilization of pricey flash storage technology while pulling together virtual and physical storage services.

DataCore said that version 10 of its virtual SAN software addresses the need to boost utilization of flash storage by directly attaching flash and disk storage to application hosts and clustered servers in a virtual SAN.

In an interview, DataCore CEO and co-founder George Teixeira said the latest version of its virtual SAN software reflects a trend toward moving workloads closer to applications and storage closer to workloads. The added value resides in DataCore’s software stack, which also optimizes flash utilization while preventing virtual and physical services from becoming “isolated storage islands.”

“The software should be able to move across all these environments,” Teixeira added. That’s particularly important as enterprise customers adopt a spectrum of storage options that include flash, storage networks along with private and public clouds.

With that in mind, DataCore said the latest version of its SAN software incorporates an automation feature called “auto-tiering” that allows different flash memory and storage devices to operate across different vendor platforms. The feature can handle up to 15 tiers and is designed to automate the process of identifying the appropriate storage platform within an enterprise, the company claimed.

The automation software also selects the appropriate level of storage depending on the use case. For example, the storage of medical records would require greater security while less sensitive data could be stored at various physical locations using I/O mirroring over metro-area distances.

Teixeira added that flexibility is the key factor driving the shift to software-defined networks. Unlike hardware, which tends to be replaced every several years, “software lives on,” the DataCore CEO noted, and must be able to run on a variety of environments.

The company said version 10 of its virtual SAN software scales performance up to 50 million IOPS and 32 petabytes of capacity across a 32-server cluster.

DataCore said typical multi-node licenses for version 10 of its SANsymphony software range between $10,000 and $25,000. New virtual SAN pricing starts at $4,000 per server. The virtual SAN price includes the auto-tiering feature along with adaptive read/write caching form DRAM, storage pooling, metro-wide synchronous mirroring and thin provisioning, among other features.

The company added that the new virtual SAN software supports operating systems hosted on VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments. SANsymphony Version 10 can also be deployed in a virtual machine or running in native mode on Windows Server 2012 using physical X86 servers.

The company said general availability of version 10 is scheduled for May 30, 2014.

ZDnet: Snapshot Analysis on Software-defined Storage, DataCore style

By Dan Kusnetzky for Virtually Speaking --Read the full ZDNET article at: http://www.zdnet.com/software-defined-storage-datacore-style-7000028876/

Summary: DataCore has released SANsymphony 10 to further expand what its virtual SAN software can do. Call it what you want: storage virtualization, software-defined storage -- or simply fast, reliable and easy.

 

George Teixeira, CEO of DataCore, and his colleague Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing, stopped by to discuss how the company has done since our last chat and to introduce version 10 of SANsymphony.

They believe that this is the best software for flash storage, DRAM storage and all fashion of rotating media…

Snapshot analysis

I've spoken with a number of customers who use SANsymphony on a daily basis. If I told you exactly what they've said, you would believe this post was really a marketing message from DataCore in disguise. I often hear stories of huge performance improvements, significant improvements in storage utilization and much better storage reliability.

Although I'm sure that DataCore's competitors would disagree, Teixeira asserts that SANsymphony is "the ultimate storage stack that simply accelerates everything."

He also asserts that all DataCore needs to do is get people to try it and they're hooked. Although I'm usually very skeptical of such claims, after talking with DataCore's customers, I'm beginning to believe it is true.

There are a large number of suppliers in the storage and storage virtualization market. Players such as IBM, EMC, NetApp, HP, HDS and a growing list of other competitors offer products that appear similar. DataCore has to get ahead all of these large and small suppliers to get the ear of IT decision makers. If the company is able to break through all of the noise, the strengths of their product are likely to be convincing.

 

DataCore Announces SANsymphony-V10, Enterprise-Class Virtual SANs and Flash-Optimising Storage Software Stack

 Next Generation SANsymphony-V10 Software-Defined Storage Platform
http://www.it-director.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=44325

Scales Virtual SANs to More Than 50 Million IOPS and to 32 Petabytes of Pooled Capacity Surpassing Leading Competitors; End-to-End Storage Services Reconciles Virtual SANs, Converged Appliances, Flash Devices, Physical SANs, Networked and Cloud Storage From Becoming ‘Isolated Storage Islands’

Amidst the ever growing demand for enterprise-grade virtual SANs and the need for cost-effective utilisation of Flash technology, DataCore, a leader in software-defined storage, today revealed new virtual SAN functionality and significant enhancements to its SANsymphony™-V10 software – the 10th generation release of its comprehensive storage services platform. The new release significantly advances virtual SAN capabilities designed to achieve the fastest performance, highest availability and optimal use from Flash and disk storage directly attached to application hosts and clustered servers in virtual (server-side) SAN customer cases.

DataCore’s new Virtual SAN is a software-only solution that automates and simplifies storage management and provisioning while delivering enterprise-class functionality, automated recovery and significantly faster performance. It is easy to set up and runs on new or existing x86 servers where it creates a shared storage pool out of the internal Flash and disk storage resources available to that server. This means the DataCore™ Virtual SAN can be cost-effectively deployed as an overlay, without the need to make major investments in new hardware or complex SAN gear.

DataCore contrasts its enterprise-class virtual SAN offering with competing products which are incapable of sustaining serious workloads and providing a growth path to physical SAN assets, and inextricably tied to a specific server hypervisor, rendering them unusable in all but the smallest branch office environments or non-critical test and development scenarios.

The Ultimate Virtual SAN: Inexhaustible Performance, Continuous Availability, Large Scale
There is no compromise on performance, availability and scaling with DataCore. The new SANsymphony-V10 virtual SAN software scales performance to more than 50 Million IOPS and to 32 Petabytes of capacity across a cluster of 32 servers, making it one of the most powerful and scalable systems in the marketplace.

Enterprise-class availability comes standard with a DataCore virtual SAN; the software includes automated failover and failback recovery, and is able to span a N+1 grid (up to 32 nodes) stretching over metro-wide distances. With a DataCore virtual SAN, business continuity, remote site replication and data protection are simple and no hassle to implement, and best of all, once set, it is automatic thereafter.

DataCore SANsymphony-V10 also resolves mixed combinations of virtual and physical SANs and accounts for the likelihood that a virtual SAN may extend out into an external SAN – as the need for centralised storage services and hardware consolidation efficiencies are required initially or considered in later stages of the project. DataCore stands apart from the competition in that it can run on the server-side as a virtual SAN; it can run and manage physical SANs and it can operate and federate across both. SANsymphony-V10 essentially provides a comprehensive growth path that amplifies the scope of the virtual SAN to non-disruptively incorporate external storage as part of an overall architecture.

A Compelling Solution for Expanding EnterprisesWhile larger environments will be drawn by SANsymphony-V10’s impressive specs, many customers have relatively modest requirements for their first virtual SAN. Typically they are looking to cost-effectively deploy fast ‘in memory’ technologies to speed up critical business applications, add resiliency and grow to integrate multiple systems over multiple sites, but have to live within limited commodity equipment budgets.

“We enable clients to get started with a high performance, stretchable and scalable virtual SAN at an appealing price, that takes full advantage of inexpensive servers and their internal drives,” said Paul Murphy, vice president of worldwide marketing at DataCore. “Competing alternatives mandate many clustered servers and require add-on flash cards to achieve a fraction of what DataCore delivers.”
DataCore virtual SANs are ideal solutions for clustered servers, VDI desktop deployments, remote disaster recovery and multi-site virtual server projects, as well as those demanding database and business application workloads running on server platforms. The software enables companies to create large scale and modular ‘Google-like’ infrastructures that leverage heterogeneous and commodity storage, servers and low-cost networking to transform them into enterprise-grade production architectures.

Virtual SANs and Flash: Comprehensive Software Stack is a ‘Must Have’ for Any Flash Deployment
SANsymphony-V10 delivers the industry’s most comprehensive set of features and services to manage, integrate and optimise Flash-based technology as part of your virtual SAN deployment or within an overall storage infrastructure. For example, SANsymphony-V10 self-tunes Flash and minimises flash wear, and enables flash to be mirrored for high-availability even to non-Flash based devices for cost reduction. The software employs adaptive 'in-memory' caching technologies to speed up application workloads and optimise write traffic performance to complement Flash read performance. DataCore’s powerful auto-tiering feature works across different vendor platforms optimising the use of new and existing investments of Flash and storage devices (up to 15 tiers). Other features such as metro-wide mirroring, snapshots and auto-recovery apply to the mix of Flash and disk devices equally well, enabling greater productivity, flexibility and cost-efficiency.
DataCore’s Universal End-to-End Services Platform Unifies ‘Isolated Storage Islands’
SANsymphony-V10 also continues to advance larger scale storage infrastructure management capabilities, cross-device automation and the capability to unify and federate ‘isolated storage islands.’

 “It’s easy to see how IT organisations responding to specific projects could find themselves with several disjointed software stacks – one for virtual SANs for each server hypervisor and another set of stacks from each of their flash suppliers, which further complicates the handful of embedded stacks in each of their SAN arrays,” said IDC’s consulting director for storage, Nick Sundby. “DataCore treats each of these scenarios as use cases under its one, unifying software-defined storage platform, aiming to drive management and functional convergence across the enterprise.”

Additional Highlighted Features
The spotlight on SANsymphony-V10 is clearly on the new virtual SAN capabilities, and the new licensing and pricing choices. However, a number of other major performance and scalability enhancements appear in this version as well:

• Scalability has doubled from 16 to 32 nodes; Enables Metro-wide N+1 grid data protection
• Supports high-speed 40/56 GigE iSCSI; 16Gbps Fibre Channel; iSCSI Target NIC teaming
• Performance visualisation/Heat Map tools add insight into the behavior of Flash and disks
• New auto-tiering settings optimise expensive resources (e.g., flash cards) in a pool
• Intelligent disk rebalancing, dynamically redistributes load across available devices within a tier
• Automated CPU load leveling and Flash optimisations to increase performance
• Disk pool optimization and self-healing storage; Disk contents are automatically restored across the remaining storage in the pool; Enhancements to easily select and prioritise order of recovery
• New self-tuning caching algorithms and optimisations for flash cards and SSDs
• ‘Click-simple’ configuration wizards to rapidly set up different use cases (Virtual SAN; High-Availability SANs; NAS File Shares; etc.)

Pricing and Availability
Typical multi-node SANsymphony-V10 software licenses start in the 8.000 to 20.000 euro range. The new Virtual SAN pricing starts at 3.300 euros per server. The virtual SAN price includes auto-tiering, adaptive read/ write caching from DRAM, storage pooling, metro-wide synchronous mirroring, thin provisioning and snapshots. The software supports all the popular operating systems hosted on VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Simple ‘Plug-ins’ for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft System Center are included to enable simplified hypervisor-based administration. SANsymphony-V10 and its virtual SAN variations may be deployed in a virtual machine or running natively on Windows Server 2012, using standard physical x86-64 servers.
General availability for SANsymphony-V10 is scheduled for May 30, 2014.

Virtualisation Vendors VMware and DataCore Making Inroads on Storage Simplicity

http://www.serverwatch.com/server-trends/virtualization-vendors-making-inroads-on-storage-simplicity.html

...How Well Does Virtual SAN Work Outside of VMware Environments?

But there are still a few questions that need to be answered. For example, how does Virtual SAN work with a SAN you already have?

"It doesn't," is the simple answer, according to George Teixeira, CEO at software-defined storage (SDS) vendor DataCore Software. Unlike DataCore's SANsymphony -V software (for example), which can create virtual storage that supports existing SANs, Virtual SAN is only designed to work with VMware environments, Teixeira points out.

And how does Virtual SAN support presenting its storage to any other system other than ESX? Again, Teixeira says that the answer is that it doesn't — unlike SANsymphony-V, of course, which can work with any combination of hypervisor environments, plus the real physical world.

There's little doubt that VMware will bring its marketing muscle (and software expertise) to bear on Virtual SAN, and that plenty of VMWare customers will start using it. Probably much to the chagrin of traditional SAN vendors and administrators.

But Teixeira believes that there will be benefits for software-defined storage software vendors like DataCore as well. He's counting on the idea that once VMware has educated the market about the benefits of software-defined storage, enterprises will want to investigate other solutions that support heterogeneous hypervisor environments. Not to mention good old fashioned what-you see-is-what-you-get physical servers as well.

eWeek on DataCore's Software Defined Storage Survey

http://www.eweek.com/blogs/storage-station/datacore-sds-survey-cites-simplicity-security-as-top-issues.html

Software-defined networking has earned a large share of press coverage when it comes to trendy IT topics, and with all the new demands now being foisted on networks, the attention certainly is deserved. But software-defined storage is also a major part of the big new distributed IT picture, and similar issues involving security, high data volumes, and management continue to disrupt systems old and new.

Software-defined storage is data center infrastructure that is managed and automated by intelligent software as opposed to the storage hardware itself.

In an effort to try and understand these problems, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based storage software provider DataCore each year conducts a survey of global IT professionals to get more specific about current storage challenges that enterprises are facing and find out what market forces are driving demand for SDS.

This year's "State of Software-Defined Storage 2014" report, released April 17, indicates that these IT managers expect SDS to simplify management (26 percent) of their "isolated islands" of storage devices, enable them to reduce disruptions (30 percent), better protect investments (32 percent) and future-proof their infrastructure (21 percent) to absorb new technologies such as solid-state flash media.

A Lot to Ask for Software to Accomplish

That's a lot to ask from a particular set of IT tools and products, but that's what the market is saying.

DataCore, of course, has more than a passing interest in this topic, since its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software is, in fact, software-defined, deploying standard Windows servers and using off-the-shelf hard or flash disks to provide a high level of shared file services at a lower price point than most bigger-name vendors.

Here are some of the key data points in this year's DataCore research, a targeted survey that included insights from 388 highly placed storage managers and administrators.

--Organizations look for software-defined storage (SDS) to both simplify management (26 percent) of their incongruous storage devices and enable them to future proof their infrastructure (21 percent).

--More than half the respondents (63 percent) said that they currently have less than 10 percent of capacity assigned to flash storage.

--The two main factors that impede organizations from considering different models and manufacturers of storage devices were the plethora of tools required to manage them (41 percent) and the difficulty of migrating between different models and generations (37 percent).

--Thirty-nine percent of respondents said that they don't run into these concerns because independent storage virtualization software allows their organizations to pool different devices and models from competing manufacturers and manage them centrally.

--Nearly 40 percent of respondents said that they were not planning to use flash or solid-state disks for server virtualization projects due to cost concerns.

--When asked how serious an obstacle performance degradation or the inability to meet performance expectations was when virtualizing server workloads, 23 percent of respondents ranked it as the most serious obstacle and 32 percent viewed it as somewhat of an obstacle to virtualization.

--Similar to last year, both the ability to enable storage capacity expansion without disruption (30 percent) and the improvement of disaster recovery and business continuity practices (32 percent) ranked highest for reasons that organizations deployed storage virtualization software.

Why SDS Can Be an Effective Approach

The bottom line, according to the findings, is that software-defined storage, if installed and automated correctly, can be an effective tool to stop the proliferation of separate storage islands within IT infrastructures. The added benefit is that most legacy hardware can be kept online, with only the software needing updating.

"One of the biggest and most frustrating IT problems organizations face is the difficult task of managing diversity [of data] and migrating [data] between different vendors, models and generations of storage devices—which prevent them from entertaining more attractive alternatives from competing suppliers," said DataCore President and CEO George Teixeira.

"Software-defined storage is not only designed to help organizations pool all of their available storage assets, but it allows organizations the ability to manage end-to-end and to add any type of storage asset to their existing storage architecture."

- See more at: http://www.eweek.com/blogs/storage-station/datacore-sds-survey-cites-simplicity-security-as-top-issues.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter#sthash.3uZyXTxL.dpuf 

Data Storage Placement Host-side or SAN-side: Which side are you on?

Storage Magazine Article: Which side are you on?

http://www.btc.co.uk/Articles/index.php?mag=ST&page=compDetails&link=4024

DataCore's Augie Gonzalez considers both sides of the storage placement argument and concludes that maybe we don't have to take sides at all

There is a debate raging as to where data storage should be placed: inside the server or out on the storage area network (SAN). The split between the opposing views of the network grows wider each day. The controversy has raised concerns among the big storage manufacturers, and will certainly have huge ripple effects on how you provision capacity going forward.

DAS BACK IN THE LIMELIGHT 
20 years ago, SANs were a novelty. Disks primarily came bundled in application servers - what we call Direct Attached Storage (DAS) - reserved to each host. Organisations purchased the whole kit from their favourite server vendor. DAS configurations prospered but for two shortcomings; one with financial implications and the other affecting operations.

First, you'd find server farms with a large number of machines depleted of internal disk space, while the ones next to them had excess. We lacked a fair way to distribute available capacity where it was urgently required. Organisations ended up buying more disks for the exhausted systems, despite the surplus tied up in the adjacent racks.

The second problem with DAS surfaced with clustered machines, especially after server virtualisation made virtual machines (VMs) mobile. In clusters of VMs, multiple physical servers must access the same logical drives in order to rapidly take over for each other should one server fail or get bogged down.

SANs offer a very appealing alternative - one collection of disks, packaged in a convenient peripheral cabinet where multiple servers in a cluster can share common access. The SAN crusade stimulated huge growth across all the major independent storage hardware manufacturers including EMC, NetApp and HDS and it also spawned numerous others. Might shareholders be wondering how their fortunes will be impacted if the pendulum swings back to DAS, and SANs fall out of favour?

Such speculation is fanned by the dissatisfaction with the performance of virtualised, mission-critical apps running off disks in the SAN, which lead directly to the rising popularity of flash cards (solid state memory) installed directly on the hosts.

HOST-SIDE VIEWPOINT
The host-side flash position seems pretty compelling; much like DAS did years ago before SANs took off. The concept is simple; keep the disks close to the applications and on the same server. Don't go out over the wire to access storage for fear that network latency will slow down I/O response.

The fans of SAN argue that private host storage wastes resources and it's better to centralise assets and make them readily shareable. Those defending host-resident storage contend that they can pool those resources just fine. Introduce host software to manage the global name space so they can get to all the storage regardless of which server it's attached to. Ever wondered how? You guessed it; over the network. Oh, but what about that wire latency? They'll counter that it only impacts the unusual case when the application and its data did not happen to be co-located.

Well, how about the copies being made to ensure that data isn't lost when a server goes down? You guessed right again: the replicas are made over the network.

What conclusion can we reach? The network is not the enemy; it is our friend. We just have to use it judiciously.

Now then, with data growth skyrocketing, should organisations buy larger servers capable of housing even more disks? Why not? Servers are inexpensive, and so are the drives. Should they then move their Terabytes of SAN data back into the servers?

WHY TAKE SIDES?
For many organisations, it makes perfect sense to have some storage inboard on the servers up close to the applications, augmented by some externally shared storage on premise, and the really bulky backups in the public cloud - especially those requiring long-retention. The problem for those taking sides is they refuse to accept the other alternatives. And so it's all about picking one location versus the other.

What if, instead of choosing sides, one designs software to leverage storage assets in all three places: the Server, the SAN and the Cloud, eliminating the prejudice over location? Organisations are then free to route the requests where most appropriate, and put the network to good use when it's beneficial.

Techniques like infrastructure-wide automated storage tiering put these principles into action. Really active blocks stay close to the programs servicing the requests from local flash storage, whereas infrequently used data gets directed further away over the wire.

In-memory caching plays a critical role keeping everything going smoothly. It leverages the super high speed DRAM close to the app, to mask potential downstream delays from slower hardware.

Software capable of exacting dynamic control over caches, storage placement, replicas, and thin provisioning - that's where all the intelligence come into play, and the key to distributing data appropriately across all 3 locations (server, SAN and cloud).

Don't push me to take sides. Different situations call for different approaches, that's why the industry has progressed this far. One thing is for certain, it's a debate that is set to run and run.

More info: www.datacore.com 

Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance modernises its storage infrastructure with DataCore Software Defined Storage

See:  Article in SNS Europe 

The “Ministero dell'Economia e delle Finanze” (the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, MEF) located in Rome has deployed DataCore’s SANsymphony-V solution to improve productivity and modernise its mission-critical IT infrastructure. The DataCore software-defined storage platform has been implemented to centralise storage management and improve the utilisation across a wide range of storage hardware systems and devices from different vendors including EMC and HP. DataCore consolidates and simplifies the provisioning of storage resources, significantly accelerates performance and adds high availability and a new level of flexibility to the existing mix as well as to future storage additions.

The Ministry of Economy and Finance, also known by the acronym MEF, is one of the most important and influential ministries within the Italian Government. It is the executive body responsible for economic, financial and budget policy. The organisation manages the planning of public investments, coordinates public expenditures and verifies its trends, revenue policies and the overall tax system. The MEF operates the State’s public land and heritage, land register and customs; it plans, coordinates and verifies operations to foster economic, local and sectorial development, and is responsible for setting out cohesive policies, processes and the requirements pertaining to the public budget.

As part of the project to optimise and consolidate IT data centres, MEF selected DataCore’s software-defined storage solution with the primary objective of preserving their existing and very diverse set of storage investments made over many years - comprising a range of systems from EMC VMax, EMC Centera to HP EVAs. In addition, it was critical for MEF to streamline and centralise management in order to gain productivity and to provision highly available storage capacity when needed, where needed quickly within minutes.

After evaluation of a number of industry solutions, MEF decided it needed to implement the DataCore storage virtualization as the best fit for their various and demanding requirements. MEF’s decision for DataCore’s Software-defined Storage approach was based on a number of factors, one being that SANsymphony-V transforms storage into an enterprise-wide resource that can be pooled and used more efficiently than hardware-driven SAN approaches where each storage system creates a separate inefficient island of storage. The DataCore software importantly also optimizes overall utilisation and makes storage provisioning dynamic and automatic – a rapid process versus a time consuming and complicated task that in the past often took days, if not weeks, to accomplish.

SpeedCrew technology partners, an authorised and trained DataCore software solution provider with a highly skilled team and a long history of IT field experience, designed and implemented the project. SpeedyCrew deployed DataCore SANsymphony-V on four standard x86 server platforms, providing redundancy and data protection together with centralised management of over 200TB of storage across multiple EMC VMax and EMC Centera and HP EVA systems. MEF also will benefit from the addition of high end advanced storage features including thin provisioning, metro-wide mirroring, high speed adaptive caching, replication, auto-tiering, all of which can be applied their existing and future storage investments.

For high availability and business continuity all relevant data is synchronously mirrored across buildings and departments between the DataCore nodes. When one server is down, the remaining nodes take the workloads (auto-failover) until the system is up and resynchronised (auto-failback) automatically. To accelerate the performance of the underlying hardware, DataCore leverages the Random Access Memory (RAM) in each node. This allows for fast ‘in-memory’ high speed caching to accelerate the workloads for MEF’s business critical applications. DataCore has also made it easy for MEF to scale out and grow dynamically in the future by allowing it to add storage hardware of their choice of vendor, model or technology including flash SSD resources when they may be required.

"We chose DataCore because we wanted a solution that would allow MEF to modernise and virtualise our storage and IT infrastructure without being locked- in to specific hardware vendors or technologies. This gives us flexibility, scalability and freedom in our choice. SANsymphony-V allows us to use the most appropriate and innovative offerings on the market and makes it easy if needed to grow or adapt our environment to meet future requirements. DataCore not only reduces our storage related costs by consolidating management, it enables us to buy less expensive hardware and it also enables us to protect our existing investments. Moreover, the Software-defined layer in our infrastructure gives us flexibility to optimize whatever we use and puts us back in control to shop storage for the best value to allow us to cost-effectively deal with growth”, comments the information systems team at MEF.

Menora Foods Achieves 100% Uptime, Lower Costs and Faster Performance with DataCore Software-Defined Storage

DataCore’s Software Defined Storage Platform Delivers Increased Application Performance and Reduced Costs As a Result of SANsymphony-V

Menora Foods, Australia’s leading food marketing and distribution business, has successfully implemented DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform. Backed by DataCore, Menora Foods software-defined storage architecture can now ensure that their critical business applications, including the Menora-developed ERP system, the company’s warehousing systems, distribution systems and more, remain available and don’t interrupt business productivity.

“DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform protects and mirrors all of our vital storage and VMs across our campus-wide sites and has made our lives far easier,” explained Vikash Reddy, IT Manager at Menora Foods. “Now we can sleep peacefully without the worry of our systems failing as SANsymphony-V provides the high availability and business continuity results we were seeking.”

Menora Foods owns and distributes some of Australia’s favorite and most trusted brands. The leading food marketing and distribution company imports food products from many different countries and distributes them to major retail supermarket chains. Without SANsymphony-V, Menora Foods risked physical disk failure. Prior to DataCore, if a server went down a day or two would be spent trying to restore the primary branch – and secondary branches would consequently fail. The result were damaging to the company’s overhead in production and cost. All of Menora Foods’ data and VMs are now being supported by SANsymphony-V storage.

“With DataCore’s virtualized storage platform, we noticed an increase in performance on the report coming out of our ERP system. When the ERP system was on physical storage, some of the reports were noticeably slow to generate,” explained Vikash. “However, with DataCore in place there has been around a 30% increase in speed and time. The performance has definitely increased and DataCore was the difference.”

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V has increased Menora Foods’ uptime to 99.999%. Two servers are now implemented on DataCore’s virtualization platform and synchronously mirrored resulting in all systems being accessible and operational, eliminating downtime if one server room powered off. According to Menora Foods, the cost savings between DataCore versus traditional hardware SAN systems was somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000. Menora Foods will continue to cut costs in the future due to the company’s ability to utilize DataCore on existing hardware without upgrading to new models every three to five years, as compared to a traditional SAN vendor.

“As the largest food distributor in Australia, Menora Foods needs to ensure that their critical business applications are always on and running at peak performance,” said Steve Houck, COO at DataCore. “By leveraging DataCore’s storage virtualization platform, Menora Foods has noticeably increased application uptime and performance, all while reducing their storage related costs.”

IMATION DELIVERS A COMPELLING COST-EFFECTIVE SOLUTION TO EXPENSIVE STORAGE SYSTEMS WITH DATACORE READY NEXSAN E-SERIES STORAGE ARRAYS

Nexsan E-Series storage arrays coupled with the SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software provide powerful and cost-effective storage infrastructure for Microsoft, VMware, Oracle and other virtualized environments

“The combined DataCore SANsymphony-V and Nexsan E-Series solution allows IT administrators to create the optimal virtualized storage architecture on highly reliable, proven Nexsan E-Series hardware,” said Mike Stolz, vice president of marketing and technical services for Imation’s Nexsan solutions.

Download Solution Brief:  Nexsan delivers efficient storage virtualization solution with DataCore

Real World Customer Example: United Arab Shipping Company uses DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software and Nexsan storage arrays

Mike Stolz continues “Without virtualization, storage and compute capacity are often wasted in application-specific silos. In a virtualized environment, hardware resources can be pooled and optimized from heterogeneous devices, which significantly improves flexibility for the IT administrator.”  

Imation (NYSE:IMN), a global data storage and information security company, announced that its Nexsan™ E-Series™ storage arrays have been certified as DataCore Ready. When combined with the DataCore SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform, the solution offers data centers rapid ROI through significant improvements in data availability, agility, performance and flexibility.

The integrated solution offers users a variety of benefits, including:

Performance – Using Nexsan E-Series arrays as a high-performing storage foundation, SANsymphony-V further increases performance by supporting RAM caches of up to a terabyte to dramatically accelerate reads and writes. SANsymphony-V also automatically rebalances loads due to hotspots to further improve response and throughput.

Efficient provisioning – The Nexsan E-Series system allows IT professionals to mix-and-match SAS, SATA and solid state drives. SANsymphony-V then provisions virtual disks as required to support different types of workloads. Granular thin provisioning and automated capacity reclamation gives administrators more options for improving efficiency.

Auto-tiering – SANsymphony-V continuously analyzes what blocks of data need higher I/O throughput and automatically assigns those blocks to the appropriate storage tier. Throughout this automated process, priority workloads like SQL databases can be given preference to fast storage including flash, while cooler data or lower prioritized workload data can be moved to lower-cost drives. E-Series storage arrays deliver virtually unlimited flexibility for configuring storage tiers according to capacity, performance and price characteristics, and the solution enables multiple tiers to be configured in a single Nexsan E-Series system or across other existing storage hardware.

Business continuity – By keeping data in two physically separate locations at the same time with the help of synchronous mirroring, the combined solution prevents storage from becoming a single point of failure for stretched cluster configurations. Imation and DataCore offer an appealing alternative to very expensive storage arrays. Disaster recovery scenarios also are supported by enabling asynchronous replication across distant sites.

Migration – Storage investments risk creating more complexity and islands of incompatible devices. DataCore SANsymphony-V and Nexsan E-Series work together to pool existing storage assets, eliminating risk of incompatibility and improving ROI across the entire infrastructure. Also, DataCore SANsymphony-V fully virtualizes data from the underlying hardware, enabling migration of data from legacy systems to Nexsan E-Series with minimal or no interruption to running workloads.

“DataCore and Imation have a long-standing history of collaboration as evidenced by numerous joint customers worldwide who leverage our solutions as a part of their storage architectures,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development at DataCore. “Nexsan E-Series storage arrays combined with SANsymphony-V offer IT departments a highly efficient blueprint for optimizing IT resources and maximizing the effective value of storage investments.”

For the complete announcement, please see:  Imation News Release

DataCore at Cebit 2014 showcases new solutions and the many advantages of DataCore’s Software-defined Storage platform

DataCore’s latest SANsymphony-V platform is being demonstrated and displayed at one of the world's largest IT exhibits at Cebit in Germany; DataCore's booth is within the “Virtualisation & Storage Forum“ (hall 2, booth A44). 

Visitors are being shown the recently announced Fujitsu DataCore Storage Virtualisation Appliance (SVA), a turnkey bundled solution that combines the best capabilities of both companies. The new SVA systems will initially be available in Germany starting this month and will be launched in additional European countries during Q2.
For more information: Fujitsu DataCore Storage Virtualisation Appliance (SVA)

Additionally, DataCore has also introduced its next release of DataCore Virtual Desktop Server (VDS) with new enhancements and pricing that make it simple to deploy cost-effective and easy to use virtual desktop environments.

For more information: http://www.datacore.com/products/Product-Archive/VDS.aspx 

What’s the future of the data center? What about Software-defined Storage?

 

                

 

As detailed in a recent article on Wikibon, “Data centers are at the center of modern software technology, serving a critical role in the expanding capabilities for enterprises.” Data centers have enabled the enterprise to do much more with much less, both in terms of physical space and the time required to create and maintain mission-critical information.

 

But the technology surrounding the data center is positioned to evolve even more dramatically, in terms of conception, configuration, and utilization. More importantly, the technologies surrounding the data center will both have an impact and be impacted over time. Towards the end of last year, Gartner identified eight areas to consider when developing a data center strategy that balances cost, risk and agility. We wanted to take that analysis further, reaching out to thought leaders across the enterprise technology space, for their perspectives on the future of data center technology.

DataCore CEO on the traditional Storage Model is Broken

George Teixiera, President, DataCore Software The traditional storage model is broken. Behavior has shifted and disrupted how businesses buy storage as they can no longer afford to rip out the old and throw more costly new hardware at their problems. Instead they are seeking smart automated software that runs on lower cost hardware and optimizes their existing investments and provides the agility to easily add new technologies non-disruptively. Bottom-line, the path to a software-defined data center where users gain freedom of hardware choice and control of their resources is inevitable and that means storage must also be software-defined.

Mr. Teixeira creates and executes the overall strategic direction and vision for DataCore Software. Mr. Teixeira co-founded the company and has served as CEO and President of DataCore Software since 1998.

Full story: What’s the future of the data center? The big list of thought leadership perspective

CeBIT 2014: DataCore takes centre stage at the "Virtualisation & Storage Forum" and showcases real-world Software Defined Storage

DataCore, the leader in software-defined storage, has unveiled its plans for this year’s Cebit event. Over the last 12 months there has been an increasing volume of software-defined storage announcements, marketing hype and promises made – ironically most coming from traditional storage hardware vendors. DataCore will cut through this hype by showcasing real-world customer examples and highlighting successful use cases and the many innovations and features that have resulted from more than 16 years’ experience in delivering advanced storage virtualisation platforms. DataCore’s  SANsymphonyTM-V platform will be demonstrated and displayed within the “Virtualisation & Storage Forum“ (hall 2, booth A44) organised by distributor, Arrow ECS. Visitors will also be updated on the recently announced Fujitsu DataCore Storage Virtualisation Appliance (SVA), a turnkey bundled solution that combines the best capabilities of both companies. Additionally, DataCore will introduce its next release of DataCore Virtual Desktop Server (VDS) with new enhancements and pricing that make it simple to deploy cost-effective and easy to use virtual desktop environments.

DataCore has a proven track record in delivering software-defined storage (SDS) solutions to more than 10,000 customer sites successfully over the last 16 years. DataCore’s SDS platform optimises and spans all the popular vendor brands and types of storage including flash memory running locally on servers, disk subsystems running over storage networks and even cloud storage. It complements and optimises VMware and Microsoft virtual server and desktop offerings. Most importantly, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V allows businesses to decouple their storage hardware choices from software making hardware buys highly cost-efficient. Businesses are able to free themselves from their dependence on specific hardware manufacturer's feature sets and lock-ins, making it easy to shop and get the best pricing and cost savings when refreshes, upgrades or new purchases have to be done. The software also improves productivity by centralising storage management, adding ultra-high availability capabilities for data protection and dramatically improving performance.

Increasingly modern data centres have adopted the SDS approach to cope with growth, gain agility and to protect and extend the useful life of their existing storage investments. SDS allows new technologies and innovations to be easily incorporated when needed. DataCore offers the industry’s most powerful and comprehensive auto-tiering capability, ’heat maps’ to identify performance bottlenecks, advanced continuous data protection and self-learning ‘in-memory’ performance acceleration caching technologies. Please stop by the stand and speak to the DataCore experts, who will inform and help educate visitors on the latest state of technology as well as provide guidance and outlooks on the future developments.

Test drive the new turnkey Fujitsu DataCore storage virtualization appliances
DataCore and Fujitsu will formerly launch the new line of jointly integrated and tested, high-performance Fujitsu DataCore SVAstorage virtualisation appliances powered by DataCore’s ground breaking SANsymphony-V software platform and Fujitsu’s most advanced PRIMERGY server technology at Cebit 2014.

Additionally, at the show, DataCore will also unveil the latest release of the DataCore VDS 2.1 software, which provides cost-effective virtual desktops for any enterprise. In addition to supporting Windows Server 2012 R2, DataCore VDS will also now support a dual Primary-/Standby-Mode that makes a dedicated hot standby host unnecessary and this greatly increases the availability and usage of the installation. VDI clones can be set up and maintained for each host with a DataCore VDS console. In addition, the licensing model has been revamped and further simplified.

"The hype and the real need around software-defined storage has been acknowledged and promoted by even the major hardware manufacturers who see this movement and the trend to commoditization as inevitable. This validates our approach and confirms to us and to our customers located at more than  10,000 sites worldwide that we have been on the right technology track for over 15 years - with the difference that our software actually spans the wide range of storage, flash and cloud systems and makes hardware dependency a thing of the past. DataCore delivers cost savings, flexibility and efficiency advantages of a  SDS approach to the benefit of the customer", said Stefan von Dreusche, Director Central Europe at DataCore Software."

DataCore is offering free tickets to CeBIT 2014 (Hanover, Germany (March 10th – 14th) at http://www.vs-forum.com/cebit_ticket.html. Please select “DataCore” in the vendor menu and schedule an appointment. You will receive an electronic ticket by e-mail after registration.

To arrange a press briefing with DataCore executives at the "Virtualisation & Storage Forum" (CeBIT, Hall 2 / A40), please contact your local KPR Global partner.