New DataCore SANmelody feature highlighted: Non-disruptive disk, array, or vendor substitution - Raw Disk Mirroring

DataCore Releases SANmelody 3.0
Latest update version of vendor’s data storage and disk space management platform targets small and midsized businesses
http://www.information-management.com/news/san_storage_area_network_virtualization-10016293-1.html

Non-disruptive disk, array, or vendor substitution - Raw Disk Mirroring
http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2009/10/raw-disk-mirroring-non-disruptive-disk.html With the release of SANmelody 3.0 PSP2 comes the addition of "raw disk mirroring" which I have touched on in the previous post.
I really don't think this new capability has been given enough coverage when you look at the flexibility it provides. The ability to replace "backend" raw disks without interfering with Virtual Volumes, NMV Volumes or the NMV Pool itself, all while I/O operations continue as normal is an incredible capability.Let look at a scenario: Client maintains a large VMware environment serving ~10TB of data across ~40 thin provisioned virtual volumes server from a SANmelody HA environment with "Vendor A" storage at the backend consisting of many 2Gb FC 146GB 7.5K drives... They are replicating this data to a DR site consisting of SANmelody with "vendor C" disk.Customer has decided to de-comission "vendor A" storage, in place of "vendor B" which contains new 4Gb 300GB 15K rpm drives.Solution: Utilising raw disk mirroring we are able to serve up new capacity from "vendor B" and mirror the raw disks with "vendor A" without touching any of our provisioned volumes. Once mirrors are established we can disconnect "vendor A" and continue as normal without any interuption to the business or to our DR replication solution. But I don't run SANmelody or SANsymphony?.. The 2nd piece of this puzzle is "Proxy volumes support". If you have existing vendor storage and would like the type of flexibility discussed above to migrate data, it can be done. DataCore can "pass through" all of your existing served volumes (with file systems) and mirror the data while it is serving I/O..........

Computer Technology Review:
SNW Fall 2009: DataCore enhances SANmelody storage virtualization solution