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.

The Register Interviews DataCore CEO who waxes lyrically on software-defined storage and future storage technologies

El Reg: “DataCore had a terrific year in 2013, breaking the 10,000 customer site number. It's a solidly successful supplier with a technology architecture that's enabled it and its customers to take advantage of industry standard server advances and storage architecture changes gracefully. 2014 should be no different with DataCore being stronger still by the end of it.”

Article: Future storage tech should KILL all-in-one solutions

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/24/datacore_ceo_software_defined_storage_is_an_accelerator/?page=1

El Reg had a conversation with DataCore president, CEO and co-founder George Teixeira about what’s likely to happen in 2014 with DataCore. Software-defined storage represents a trend that his company is well-positioned to take advantage of and he reckons DataCore could soar this year.

El Reg: How would you describe 2013 for DataCore?

George Teixeira: 2013 was the ‘tip of the iceberg’, in terms of the increasing complexity and the forces in play disrupting the old storage model, which has opened the market up. As a result, DataCore is positioned to have a breakout year in 2014 … Our momentum surged forward as we surpassed 25,000 license deployments at more than 10,000 customer sites [last year].

What’s more, the EMC ViPR announcement showcased the degree of industry disruption. It conceded that commoditisation and the movement to software-defined storage are inevitable. It was the exclamation point that the traditional storage model is broken.

El Reg: What are the major trends affecting DataCore and its customers in 2014?

George Teixeira: Storage got complicated as flash technologies emerged for performance, while SANs continued to optimise utilisation and management - two completely contradictory trends. Add cloud storage to the mix and all together, it has forced a redefinition of the scope and flexibility required by storage architectures. Moreover, the complexity and need to reconcile these contradictions put automation and management at the forefront, thus software.

A new refresh cycle is underway … the virtualisation revolution has made software the essential ingredient to raise productivity, increase utilisation, and extend the life of … current [IT] investments.

Last year set the tone. Sales were up in flash, commodity storage, and virtualization software. In contrast, look what happened to the expensive, higher margin system sales last year – they were down industry-wide. Businesses realized they no longer can afford inflexible and tactical hardware-defined models. Instead, they are increasingly applying their budget dollars to intelligent software that leverages existing investments and lower cost hardware – and less of it!

Server-side and flash technology for better application performance has taken off. The concept is simple. Keep the disks close to the applications, on the same server and add flash for even greater performance. Don’t go out over the wire to access storage for fear that network latency will slow down I/O response. Meanwhile, the storage networking and SAN supporters contend that server-side storage wastes resources and that flash is only needed for five percent of the real-world workloads, so there is no need to pay such premium prices. They argue it is better to centralize all your assets to get full utilization, consolidate expensive common services like back-ups and increase business productivity by making it easier to manage and readily shareable.

The major rub is obvious. It appears when local disk and flash storage resources, which improve performance, defeat the management and productivity gains from those same resources by unhooking them from being part of the centralised storage infrastructure. Software that can span these worlds appears to be the only way to reconcile the growing contradiction and close the gap. Hence the need for an all-inclusive software-defined storage architecture.

A software-defined storage architecture must manage, optimise and span all storage, whether located server-side or over storage networks. Both approaches make sense and need to be part of a modern software-defined architecture.

Why force users to choose? Our latest SANsymphony-V release allows both worlds to live in harmony since it can run on the server-side, on the SAN or both. Automation in software and auto-tiering across both worlds is just the beginning. Future architectures must take read and write paths, locality, cache and path optimizations and a hundred other factors into account and generally undermine the possibility of all-in-one solutions. A true ‘enterprise-wide’ software-defined storage architecture must work across multiple vendor offerings and across the varied mix and levels of RAM devices, flash technologies, spinning disks and even cloud storage.

El Reg: How will this drive DataCore's product (and service?) roadmap this year?

George Teixeira: The future is an increasingly complex, but hidden environment, which will not allow nor require much if any human intervention. This evolution is natural. Think about what one expects from today’s popular virtualization offerings and major applications, but exactly this type of sophistication and transparency. Why should storage be any different?

Unlike others who are talking roadmaps and promises, DataCore is already out front and has set the standard for software-defined storage as our software is in production at thousands of real world customer sites today. DataCore offers the most comprehensive and universal set of features and these features work across all the popular storage vendor brands, models of storage arrays and flash devices. Automating and optimizing the use of these devices no matter where they reside within servers or in storage networks.

DataCore will continue to focus on evolving its server-side capabilities, enhance the performance and productive use of in-memory technologies like DRAM, flash and new wave caching technologies across storage environments. [We'll take] automation to the next level.

DataCore already scales out to support up 16 node grid architectures and we expect to quadruple that number this year.

[We] will continue to abstract complexity away from the users and reduce mundane tasks through automation and self-adaptive technologies to increase productivity. ... For larger scale environments and private cloud deployments, there will be a number of enhancements in the areas of reporting, monitoring and storage domain capabilities to simplify management and optimise ‘enterprise-wide’ resource utilisation.

VSAN "opens the door without walking through it."

El Reg: How does DataCore view VMware's VSAN? Is this a storage resource it can use?

George Teixeira: Simply put, it opens the door without walking through it. It introduces virtual pooling capabilities for server-side storage that meets lower-end requirements while delivering promises of things to come for VMware-only environments. It sets the stage for DataCore to fullfil customers’ need to seamlessly build out a production class, enterprise-wide software-defined storage architecture.

It opens up many opportunities for DataCore for users who want to upscale. VSAN builds on DataCore concepts but is limited and just coming out of beta, whereas DataCore has a 9th generation platform in the marketplace.

Beyond VSAN, DataCore spans a composite world of storage running locally in servers, in storage networks, or in the cloud. Moreover, DataCore supports both physical and virtual storage for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, Oracle, Linux, Apple, Netware, Unix and other diverse environments found in the real world.

Will you be cheeky enough to take a bite at EMC?

El Reg: How would you compare and contrast DataCore's technology with EMC's ScaleIO?

George Teixeira: We see ourselves as a much more comprehensive solution. We are a complete storage architecture. I think the better question is how will EMC differentiate its ScaleIO offerings from VMware VSAN solutions?

George Teixeira: Both are trying to address the server-side storage issues using flash technology, but again why have different software and separate islands or silos of management, one for the VMware world, one for the Microsoft Hyper-V world, one for the physical storage world, one for the SAN?

This looks like a divide and complicate approach when consolidation, automation and common management across all these worlds are the real answers for productivity. That is the DataCore approach. Instead, this silo approach of many offerings appears to be driven by the commercial requirements of EMC versus the real needs of the marketplace.

El Reg: Does DataCore envisage using an appliance model to deliver its software?

George Teixeira: Do we envisage an appliance delivery model? Yes, in fact, it already exists. We work with Fujitsu, Dell and a number of system builders to package integrated software/hardware bundles. We are rolling out the new Fujitsu DataCore SVA storage virtualization appliance platform within Europe this quarter.

We also have the DataCore appliance builder program in place targeting the system builder community and have a number of partners including Synnex Hyve Solutions which provides virtual storage appliances using Dell, HP or Supermicro Appliances Powered by DataCore and Fusion-io.

El Reg: How will DataCore take advantage of flash in servers used as storage memory? I'm thinking of the SanDisk/SMART ULLtraDIMM used in IBM's X6 server and Micron's coming NVDIMM technology.

George Teixeira: We are already positioned to do so. New hybrid NVDIMM type technology is appealing. It sits closer to the CPU and promises flash speeds without some of the negatives. But it is just one of the many innovations yet to come.

Technology will continue to blur the line between memory and disk technologies going forward, especially in the race for faster application response times by getting closer to the CPU and central RAM.

Unlike others who will have to do a lot of hard coding, and suffer the delays and reversals of naivety trying to keep up with new innovations, DataCore learned from experience and designed early on software to rapidly absorb new technology and make it work. Bring on these types of innovations; we are ready to make the most of them.

El Reg: Does DataCore believe object storage technology could be a worthwhile addition to its feature set?

George Teixeira: Is object storage worthwhile? Yes, we are investing R&D and building out our OpenStack capabilities as part of our object storage strategy; other interfaces and standards are also underway. It is part of our software-defined storage platform, but it makes no sense to bet simply on the talk in the marketplace and on these emerging strategies exclusively.

The vast bulk of the marketplace is file and block storage capabilities and that is where we are primarily focused this year. Storage technology advances and evolves, but not necessarily in the way we direct it to, therefore object storage is one of the possibilities for the future along with much more relevant, near term advances that customers can benefit from today.

El Reg: DataCore had a terrific year in 2013, breaking the 10,000 customer site number. It's a solidly successful supplier with a technology architecture that's enabled it and its customers to take advantage of industry standard server advances and storage architecture changes gracefully. 2014 should be no different with DataCore being stronger still by the end of it. ®

Legacy Pharmaceuticals entrusts DataCore's SANsymphony-V Storage Virtualisation to Scale out their Virtual Infrastructure

DataCore SANsymphony at Legacy Pharmaceuticals 

Rather than NetApp, EMC and HP

Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer, Legacy Pharmaceuticals Switzerland GmbH have entrusted DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V to implement and scale out their virtual infrastructure to support the introduction of their critical ERP system based on IFS and Oracle databases.


Read full article at:
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/customer-wins/datacore-sansymphony-at-legacy-pharmaceuticals-switzerland/ 

The software-defined virtual infrastructure is based on DataCore for storage virtualisation and VMware, Inc. for server virtualisation. Overall, the solution provided higher performance and higher availability compared to other evaluated alternatives and the total cost, including what was required for a redundant SAN hardware and software design, was around 60% lower than the price of alternative non-redundant single SAN systems.

"DataCore SANsymphony-V gave us more flexibility and scalability than a hardware SAN and it was able to meet our HA and performance requirements perfectly. Not only did we gain a redundant SAN architecture, but we achieved a 40% savings in the initial investment in comparison to conventional hardware SAN solutions and now we can adjust our storage infrastructure to meet our requirements without having any storage vendor lock-in", said Sascha Fritz, IT expert, Legacy Pharmaceuticals.

As a company in the Swiss pharmaceutical industry, Legacy Pharma is committed to quality and safety standards. These are mandated by the Swiss regulatory and supervisory authority and have specific compliance requirements and remedies which are regularly audited.

The compliance guidelines, required by the state as well as those established based on voluntary standards must also fit within the practical bounds of economic feasibility in regards to the IT that is implemented. The need for compliance and cost-effectiveness IT productivity are key competitive advantages to maintain leadership in the industry.

For these reasons, Legacy Pharma decided to implement a new IT infrastructure and ERP validated system according to the latest GAMP 5 guidelines.

Good Automated Manufacturing Practice (GAMP) is a standard framework for the validation of computerised systems within the pharmaceutical industry. However, for the ERP system with IFS, theolder AS400 environment with NetApp storage but critically without full redundancy, were no longer suitable.

"Therefore our IT environment had to be upgraded. In cooperation with IT service provider Steffen Informatik AG, we decided to go with a virtual infrastructure and put our ERP system on VMs running on VMware," says Sascha Fritz.

At the same time, a new storage solution with appropriate availability and performance needed to be found. The SAN solutions offered by NetApp, EMC and HP that were evaluated did not allow a redundant environment within budget. Finally, the project virtualisation experts at Steffen Informatik AGpresented SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation software that provided sophisticated enterprise storage features and using standard industry storage components.

SANsymphony-V virtualises storage resources regardless of manufacturer or model and provisions virtual disks to physical and virtual servers, and mirrors them synchronously to achieve HA between any two DataCore powered x86 based servers. The storage management for all resources in the infrastructure can be centralised, made flexible and automated. Furthermore, DataCore integrates into the VMware server management systems.

The flexibility of DataCore allowed for the existing NetApp systems to be integrated, but instead they were replaced due to their high continuing maintenance costs.

The new DataCore and VMware based software-defined virtual infrastructure was preconfigured by Steffen Informatik and installed in parallel to the old solution. Then the subsequent migration of physical servers to VMs took place gradually. The new IFS ERP system with all the components for production, development and test systems, including the underlying Oracle databases and MS Exchange, MS SQL, domain server and print services were transferred to the virtual environment. In addition, the Citrix XenApp environment used for virtualisation of applications on thin clients was set up to run on the HA DataCore storage.

"The project was managed by our staff and by Steffen Informatik who were very competent and efficient. Importantly they were able to implement the GAMP 5-validation successfully. Compared to the previous solution, we now have a virtual infrastructure that combines VMware and DataCore as a highly flexible and thus more economical platform to meet our needs. DataCore SANsymphony-V enabled greater performance and higher availability at a cost point that other solutions could not equal or provide. We are very satisfied," says Sascha Fritz.

Opinion and Insights: Revenues Trump Innovation at Large Tech Companies

http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/02/revenues-trump-innovation-large-tech-companies/

Let’s face it. Large B2B tech companies don’t come up with groundbreaking innovations. They are too big and are too busy with action items, corporate politics and intense pressure from the street to develop new innovations and bring those ideas to market in a reasonable timeframe. They also have a big reason not to monkey with the status quo, billions of reasons actually. Faster, cheaper, better typically means less revenue.

Turns out Wall Street isn’t a big fan of cool innovations that decrease revenue, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perched high on the list of career limiting moves in Silicon Valley is driving a plan to develop innovative products and services that will decrease revenue.

The truth is, most great ideas from the major hardware and software vendors leave with their creators, stop on Sand Hill road for funding and end up in a little office in the Valley. Big ideas can mean big money. Visionary engineers aren’t turning their moment of genius over to a big political machine to get kicked around meeting rooms for three years only to resurface neutered and too late to matter anyway.

Big tech companies, especially hardware vendors, will continue to fight to the death to keep their antiquated products moving off the shelves. Sluggish economics made 2013 a great year to buy dated technology; 70, 80, even 90 percent discounts on six-figure hardware deals. What’s happening here? While these products are selling for next to nothing, vendors are now charging 20 percent of the list price for support and updates.

This is a plan that certainly works for Wall Street and it is hard for customers to resist. What would you do if you bought a new car two years ago for $50,000 and your dealer called you at the end of the year saying they’d give you a new care for $5,000? Anyone would take that deal!

VMware had this same problem getting their groundbreaking technology off the ground. Customers could install their technology and use 90 percent less server hardware. While this was great for the customers, HP, Dell and IBM certainly weren’t happy with VMware. The same thing could be said for resellers, as they certainly weren’t interested in selling 90 percent less hardware.

The resellers are just as weary about messing with their nest egg. However large or small, the few VARs that actually survive their first two years in business did so for a reason — they realized that running a tech resale business is about making money. The rash of leads, rebates and SPIFs coming from their big vendors are too lucrative for the resellers with influence to take a chance on anything new.

The hardest part of getting new innovations to market is cutting through the big tech companies marketing machines and their incredibly talented (and well paid) sales people to get prospective customers to consider new technologies. There really isn’t a villain to blame, but there is a hero.

Ultimately, the buyers of technology are the heroes of our industry. They are our saving grace. Despite pressure from their upper management, the people in the trenches that do this because they love it are the ones that keep us moving in the right direction.

To those visionary technologists, don’t believe all the marketing hype from big tech. Keep innovating. By doing so, you will help shape the future of the industry.

Paul Murphy is VP of Worldwide Marketing at DataCore.

Legacy Pharmaceuticals Trusts DataCore to Scale Out Its Virtual Infrastructure and Support its Critical ERP, Oracle and VMware Systems

“DataCore SANsymphony-V gave us more flexiblity and scalablity than a hardware SAN and it was able to meet our high availability and performance requirements perfectly. Not only did we gain a redundant SAN architecture, but we achieved a 40 percent savings in the initial investment in comparison to conventional hardware SAN solutions and now we can adjust our storage infrastructure to meet our requirements without having any storage vendor lock-in", Sascha Fritz, IT Expert at Legacy Pharmaceuticals Switzerland.

Legacy Pharmaceuticals have entrusted DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V to implement and scale out their virtual infrastructure to support the introduction of their critical ERP system based on IFS and Oracle databases. The software-defined virtual infrastructure is based on DataCore for storage virtualisation and VMware for server virtualisation. 

Overall, the DataCore solution provided higher performance and higher availability compared to all other evaluated alternatives and the total cost, including what was required for a redundant SAN hardware and software design, was around 60 per cent lower than the price of alternative non-redundant single SAN systems.

As a leading company in the Swiss pharmaceutical industry, Legacy Pharma is committed to the highest quality and safety standards. These are mandated by the Swiss regulatory and supervisory authority and have specific compliance requirements and remedies which are regularly audited.

The compliance guidelines, required by the state as well as those established based on voluntary standards, must also fit within the practical bounds of economic feasibility in regards to the information technology that is implemented. The need for compliance, cost-effectiveness and innovative IT productivity are key competitive advantages to maintain leadership in the industry. For these reasons, Legacy Pharma decided to implement a new IT infrastructure and ERP validated system according to the latest GAMP 5 guidelines. "Good Automated Manufacturing Practice" (short: GAMP) is a standard framework for the validation of computerised systems within the pharmaceutical industry. However, for the ERP system with IFS, the older AS400 environment with NetApp storage but critically without full redundancy, were no longer suitable.

"Therefore our IT environment had to be upgraded. In cooperation with IT service provider Steffen Informatik, we decided to go with a virtual infrastructure and put our ERP system on virtual machines running on VMware," says Sascha Fritz.

At the same time, a new storage solution with appropriate availability and performance needed to be found. The SAN solutions offered by NetApp, EMC and HP that were evaluated did not allow a fully redundant environment within budget. Finally, the project virtualisation experts at Steffen Informatik presented DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation software that provided sophisticated enterprise storage features and using standard industry storage components.

SANsymphony-V virtualises storage resources regardless of manufacturer or model and provisions virtual disks to physical and virtual servers, and mirrors them synchronously to achieve high-availably between any two DataCore powered x86 based servers. The storage management for all resources in the infrastructure can be centralised, made flexible and automated. Furthermore, DataCore integrates seamlessly into the VMware server management systems.

The flexibility of DataCore allowed for the existing NetApp systems to be easily integrated, but instead they were replaced due to their high continuing maintenance costs.

The new DataCore and VMware based software-defined virtual infrastructure was preconfigured by Steffen Informatik and installed in parallel to the old solution. Then the subsequent migration of physical servers to virtual machines took place gradually. The new IFS ERP system with all the components for production, development and test systems, including the underlying Oracle databases and MS Exchange, MS SQL, domain server and print services were transferred to the virtual environment. In addition, the Citrix XenApp environment used for virtualisation of applications on thin clients was set up to run on the high-availability DataCore storage.

"The project was managed by our staff and by Steffen Informatik who were very competent and efficient. Importantly they were able to implement the GAMP 5-validation successfully. Compared to the previous solution, we now have a virtual infrastructure that combines VMware and DataCore as a highly flexible and thus more economical platform to meet our needs. DataCore SANsymphony-V enabled greater performance and higher availability at a cost point that other solutions could not equal or provide. We are very satisfied," says Sascha Fritz.

ComputerWorld.UK: Chatham House overcomes outages with DataCore storage virtualisation

See full article at: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/infrastructure/3502081/chatham-house-overcomes-outages-with-datacore-storage-virtualisation/ 

Systems can be restored in two hours

Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs global think tank, has solved its data network problems with a virtualisation system from DataCore.

DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation software is being used to solve outage and application access problems at Chatham House in central London.

Paul Curtin, finance and operations director at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said: "Outages were becoming more frequent and a distinct problem. Sporadic performance was also an issue, with unreliable access and poor response times being delivered to staff from critical applications such as Exchange email or database mining."

He said: "Whilst we had benefitted from the success of a consolidated virtualisation deployment some years previously, it was recognised that we were being dramatically hindered by the existing underlying storage supporting the virtual servers.”

...Two HP ProLiant DL385 standard servers running two licences of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software in a mirrored synchronous format were deployed, to form a centrally managed virtual storage pool from which the Institute’s 24 VMware virtual machines (VMs) could "draw disk".

This immediately alleviated the previous I/O bottlenecks, as the multiple VMs running on the same physical servers could now access a readily available shared pool of storage.

Curtin said: "Previously, so unstable was the storage array, that we couldn’t even guarantee 24x7 access. The installation of DataCore’s SANsyphony-V software layer immediately enhanced the service, so the days of 48-hour downtime whilst we re-indexed Exchange email and addressed database corruption have been totally eradicated.”

In addition, a disaster recovery system was also delivered by a third asynchronous SANsymphony-node, housed outside of central london in a secure data centre hosted facility acting as a contingency site.

...Through disaster recovery simulation tests, SDT says it can have all assets, applications and data back up and running within a two-hour window.