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Monday 27 August 2012

VMworld 2012: DataCore Storage Hypervisor Makes Mission-Critical Tier 1 Business Applications Run Up to 5X Faster Virtualized


Enterprise Strategy Group Lab Validation report confirmed benchmark tests with Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange workloads improved workload performance by nearly 5x. As a proof point for performance and cost efficiency, the SANsymphony-V empowered systems were able to support more than 1,500 users as compared to only 322 users on the non-virtualized physical servers.

Today at VMware's VMworld 2012, DataCore Software showcased how SANsymphony™-V 9.0, the newest release of its flagship product, boosts the speed, throughput and availability of virtualized, I/O intensive tier 1 applications like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange. Customers report 2x to 5x faster performance and achieve better than 99.999% uptime after virtualizing their existing storage with SANsymphony-V.

"DataCore fundamentally changes the economics of performance, cost-effectively enabling application owners to virtualize their tier 1 applications as they transform into private clouds," said George Teixeira, CEO and President of DataCore Software. "The DataCore storage hypervisor works hand in hand with VMware to intelligently and economically harness the full power of server caches, solid state disks (SSDs) and existing storage assets so that application owners no longer need to 'rip and replace' storage infrastructures and pay much higher costs to meet their performance and uptime objectives."

Eliminating the I/O Bottlenecks in Virtualized Data Centers
Performance decreases and downtime caused by I/O bottlenecks are the number one reason why enterprises are holding back from virtualizing their I/O intensive tier 1 applications. SANsymphony-V overcomes this by using device-independent adaptive caching and performance boosting techniques to absorb wildly variable workloads so that applications run faster virtualized.

"DataCore's impact on performance was dramatic in every metric we measured. Even more impressive is how SANsymphony-V simplifies management and how easily it can make data center storage more resilient. With a single mouse click disk capacity is served and all the normal error-prone steps to configure, tune and set best paths for high availability get done auto-magically," said Tony Palmer, senior engineer and analyst with ESG Lab. For more on Palmer's observations, watch: http://storagetv.org/datacore/testvideo.php?vidkey=222.

In the ESG Lab Validation report, the benchmark tests confirmed that Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange workloads were able to improve their performance by nearly 5x. As a proof point for performance and cost efficiency, the SANsymphony-V empowered systems were able to support more than 1,500 users as compared to only 322 users on the non-virtualized physical servers.

Harnessing Flash Storage Cost Effectively for Even Greater Application PerformanceTo further increase tier 1 application responsiveness, companies often spend excessively on flash memory-based SSDs. SANsymphony-V's auto-tiering feature optimizes the use of these premium-priced resources alongside more modestly priced, higher capacity disk drives. SANsymphony-V constantly monitors I/O behavior and intelligently auto-selects between server memory caches, flash storage and traditional disk resources in real-time to ensure that the most suitable class or tier of storage device is assigned to each workload based on priorities and urgency. The result is unmatched tier 1 application performance and cost efficiency.

Ensuring Fast and Always Available Applications Without a Major Storage Investment
Once I/O intensive tier 1 applications are virtualized, 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. 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.

Customers Around the World Are Increasing the Performance, Improving the Availability and Reducing the Storage Costs of Their Virtualized Tier 1 Applications
"Since we started using DataCore on the storage side to virtualize our tier 1 applications, we got back on track with our virtualization project," said Pablo Palma, information technology manager at The MLS™, a US real estate advertising and marketing service company. "Before that, I/O bottlenecks and the pesky outages were hitting us at every turn, especially with web servers, file servers and SQL Server. Now we can handle about 300% more transactions than before -- all on the same hardware. Moreover our disk pool is completely redundant, giving us the opportunity to upgrade and expand without taking users down."

"We have virtualized Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint on all of our DataCore/VMware projects and consistently the performance of these applications has been outstanding," said Jim Krantz, president of Krantz Secure Technologies, a full service professional IT services company based in the US. "The performance has been so good that we have not even considered expanding the amount of cache we use, though we could do this easily and inexpensively. Of course DataCore's automated High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions are equally as important for these critical applications. The technology is awesome."

"SAP was the critical element in the project because the SAP system places the highest load and the greatest demand on both performance and on the need for availability," said Jurgen Bechtel, CIO of MENNEKES, a global leader in the manufacturing of electrical products with headquarters in Germany. "The result was very positive -- SAP runs on DataCore, with more performance than on our previous storage systems. The DataCore solution simply proved itself."

"We've been able to support far more virtual machines and far more I/O requests than the IT team had originally expected. Performance has been nothing short of phenomenal," said Craig Beetlestone, lead systems engineer at Ports of Auckland, New Zealand's leading 24x7, 365-day-a-year port company. "With SANsymphony, we have seen the benefits first-hand of improved uptime and being able to do operational maintenance without affecting the business. Lastly, we have peace of mind. We know we don't have to throw away any functionality intelligence because we get to keep using SANsymphony software even as the hardware underneath changes."

For more on virtualizing and running I/O intensive tier 1 applications, go to: http://www.datacore.com/Solutions/Applications.aspx.

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