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Monday 23 May 2016

OSI Food’s European-Wide Data Centers Depend on DataCore’s Software-Defined Platform

The major produce supplier behind fast-food retail giants gains performance and optimization for flagging Microsoft Dynamics ERP systems, SQL databases and VMware environments using DataCore’s SANsymphony across Europe
OSI Food Solutions (OSI) has been successfully using DataCore’s SANsymphony platform to support its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system across Europe. DataCore adds needed agility, resilience and performance to the company’s demanding business applications including Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision), SQL databases, Citrix XenApp and VMware environments.
“As IT support for OSI, it is our job to provide other branches and offices with plug-and-play solutions whenever they are required, so the systems need total compatibility and ease of use, as many production sites do not have their own IT staff. This is why we place great emphasis on reliable systems that are easy to administer. DataCore SANsymphony definitely offers both and from a central management pane,” comments Wolfgang Allgäuer, IT manager for infrastructure based at OSI Food Solutions Germany.
OSI has 17,000 employees located in 60 sites across 25 different countries. Its core business is the production of high-quality convenience meat products, such as meat patties, bacon, pizza and hot dogs. OSI has many large familiar brand name customers including McDonalds, Metro and Tescos, and access to a resilient “Navision” ERP system is essential to facilitate just-in-time logistics.
Storage Solution for Europe-Wide Use OSI Food Solutions Germany serves as both a production site as well as a service provider to its European sister companies within the OSI Group implementing a uniform IT infrastructure strategy across Europe. Adoption of SANsymphony facilitates shared storage and increases performance to its major business applications whilst also safeguarding and optimising OSI’s growing virtual environment. The central IT Department offers procurement, implementation and support of IT infrastructure resting on three pillars: VMware vSphere, Citrix XenApp and DataCore SANsymphony.
Hardware Goes, Software Stays Given that DataCore’s Software-Defined Storage is totally hardware agnostic, OSI continues to reap the cost savings in selection of any underlying hardware:
“The change to DataCore provided us with the option of using lower-priced hardware, while at the same time achieving functionality at enterprise level. We can easily integrate new technologies and freely scale the environment. So the investment has paid off, particularly over the long term,” said Wolfgang Allgäuer.
Apart from the basic functions of virtualization and synchronous mirroring with auto-failover, SANsymphony integrates well-developed storage services, including auto-tiering, thin provisioning, high-speed caching technology and high-level reporting and analysis tools. OSI appreciates the reporting in particular, because it allows any potential latency to be traced and eliminated and deals with spikes in data mining all the way to the backend disk. Integration of VMware vCenter plug-ins into the DataCore GUI has also proved useful as it allows virtual server/storage partitions to be rapidly configured and effectively transferred with a high degree of automation.
The company is planning to add and integrate Flash/SSD memory in order to further increase overall performance. Whether this will take place via external SSD arrays or corresponding PCIs Flash cards, the Software-Defined Storage platform SANsymphony supports both variants and will provide a major boost in performance in combination with DataCore’s parallel I/O technology that is included within the next SANsymphony update.
“We have been using DataCore SANsymphony for years now and we are completely satisfied with it. It’s an easy to manage solution with a good price-to-performance ratio. The combination of DataCore and VMware helps us implement a shared strategy despite the differing requirements at our various international locations” concludes Wolfgang Allgäuer.
A copy of the full case study can be viewed here: https://www.datacore.com/testimonials/osi-international-foods-gmbh

Tuesday 3 May 2016

DataCore Adaptive Parallel I/O Technology Lowers Server and Storage Costs


New results of research conducted by Enteprise Management Associates (EMA).

The Industry Impact Brief makes note of several recent benchmarks results that independently quantify the economic and performance capability of parallel I/O technology. The first result referenced is firm's world record for price performance ($0.08/SPC-1 IO/s) achieved with SANsymphony software-defined storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN software featuring Adaptive Parallel I/O technology. The company also recorded the fastest response time ever measured on the SPC-1 benchmark at that time with 0.32 milliseconds at 100% load (459,000 SPC-1 IO/s) on a hyper-converged system running on a compact off-the-shelf 2U Lenovo server, total costs were only $38,400 [i]. That's 3x to 10x faster than competing systems that cost several hundreds to millions of dollars.

Newer results validated on software from the company use parallel I/O technology to enable compact, power and space saving 2U servers to utilize multicores to multiply server performance; firm's parallel server elevated the numbers to 1.5 million SPC-1 IO/s, while setting a new record response time of 0.10 milliseconds at 100% load [ii]. The result of this is a decreased number of physical servers from five to one, offering savings in capital, software licensing, administrative effort, and environmental expense.
DATACORE_virtual-san-detailed

Detailed in a recently-published Industry Impact Brief, Jim Miller, senior analyst, EMA, states: "DataCore has been delivering significant cost savings with comprehensive storage services for heterogeneous environments long before the creation of the term software-defined storage. By putting multi-core servers to work using Adaptive Parallel I/O technology, DataCore has added a capability to save on capital and operational expenses for both storage and servers."

The economic and productivity impact goes beyond the 'consolidation' boom that server virtualization started, but did not finish. More VMs running on the same CPU delivered the first wave of consolidation savings but on today's multi-core systems with dozens to hundreds of CPU cores available, the potential for more savings is greatly multiplied. However as the number of CPU cores has grown, new performance issues have surfaced in virtualized environments as only a single CPU core is typically assigned by the hypervisor to process I/O operations - despite the abundance of CPU cores available. This restriction creates an 'I/O gap' between application processing and I/O processing, and when paired with the aggregation of mixed workloads, a bottleneck in performance arises.

Enterprise application workloads, and especially databases, achieved limited cost saving benefits since they had to resort to larger cluster complexes and utilize many more systems to overcome the 'I/O gap' and serial processing bottlenecks. Counter to consolidation, this led to more server sprawl to process these demanding business workloads.
DATACORE_virtual-san-use-case-2
Company's Adaptive Parallel I/O software solves this problem by multiplying the performance of virtualized and hyper-converged systems by enabling the execution of many independent I/O streams simultaneously across multiple CPU cores, reducing the latency to service and process I/Os. Rather than serializing I/O as competing products do, parallel I/O software automatically allocates the number of core resources needed to eliminate the mismatch between computational and I/O processing. This reduces the I/O limitations and bottlenecks that restrict the number of VMs and workloads that can be consolidated on server and hyper-converged platforms. The impact of harnessing untapped multi-cores with parallel I/O software completely redefines performance and the economics of TCO; it enables the next wave of hyper-consolidation productivity that allows IT shops to 'do far more with less' and lower server and storage costs.

According to EMA, there are two primary benefits of parallel I/O software: it reduces the number of physical servers while achieving faster application response times using lower-cost, commodity-based storage hardware. This reduction in servers increases in importance as the market transitions from traditional enterprise storage (NAS, SAN, DAS) to enterprise server SAN storage, or hyper-converged systems. Next is the savings in storage costs. By treating the root cause of the problem, performance requirements can be met or exceeded with less costly storage resources. As a result, company's Adaptive Parallel I/O software enables IT organizations to reclaim the savings of virtualization that had become diminished due to the I/O gap.
Hyper-converged System

DATACORE_virtual-san-base
The Industry Impact Brief makes note of several recent benchmarks results that independently quantify the economic and performance 
capability of parallel I/O technology. The first result referenced is firm's world record for price performance ($0.08/SPC-1 IO/s) achieved withSANsymphony software-defined storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN software featuring Adaptive Parallel I/O technology. The company also recorded the fastest response time ever measured on the SPC-1 benchmark at that time with 0.32 milliseconds at 100% load (459,000 SPC-1 IO/s) on a hyper-converged system running on a compact off-the-shelf 2U Lenovo server, total costs were only $38,400 [i]. That's 3x to 10x faster than competing systems that cost several hundreds to millions of dollars.

Newer results validated on software from the company use parallel I/O technology to enable compact, power and space saving 2U servers to utilize multicores to multiply server performance; firm's parallel server elevated the numbers to 1.5 million SPC-1 IO/s, while setting a new record response time of 0.10 milliseconds at 100% load [ii]. The result of this is a decreased number of physical servers from five to one, offering savings in capital, software licensing, administrative effort, and environmental expense.

EMA stated that the company has long been known for delivering significant cost savings with comprehensive storage services for heterogeneous environments. Lenovo Co., Ltd, Fujitsu, Ltd.,Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and Dell Inc. currently offer solutions that include firm's software with their servers. As Adaptive Parallel I/O technology gains traction, EMA believes that other server vendors will follow suit and offer the company's software. Not to do so would put these vendors at a significant disadvantage.

"EMA applauds DataCore for approaching the virtualized server performance problem in a new, more efficient way," continued Miller. "DataCore was recently awarded Best Enterprise Solution for Software-Defined Storage in the recent EMA Radar Report for Enterprise Software-Defined Storage. For parallel I/O technology, DataCore currently has no competition."