QNAP Series of Turbo NAS Solutions Certified ‘DataCore Ready’ for SANsymphony-V

“It is a great pleasure to announce today, the DataCore Ready certification is available for our high-end enterprise storage solutions,” said Jerome Jaussaud, product manager of QNAP. “Now, our customers are able to benefit from all the added value provided by DataCore SANsymphony-V and combine it with their existing or newly-purchased QNAP Turbo NAS systems.”
Being certified by the DataCore Ready Program, QNAP NAS is compliant with DataCore SANsymphony-V software-defined storage infrastructures, and can help organizations maximize the availability and utilization of IT assets and centralize the management of data storage.

For more information, please visit https://www.qnap.com/solution/DataCore-Ready/en/index.php.
The QNAP® enterprise-class TVS-ECx80, TS-ECx80, TS-x79U-SAS and SS-x79U-SAS series of Turbo NAS systems are all certified DataCore Ready for SANsymphony-V™.

Easy deployment

QNAP NAS can be easily deployed to ensure storage availability for an organization's production servers and VDI environment.

This solution deployment scenario contains 3 main components:

• Servers in need of storage and high performance, such as virtualization servers, mail servers and/or databases;
• The base hardware storage with RAID protection and 10GbE capability provided by QNAP;
• DataCore SANsymphony-V that provides virtual storage volumes to the servers plus high availability.

QNAP NAS provides the raw hardware storage to DataCore SANsymphony-V via iSCSI. Organizations can effortlessly use this joint solution to achieve desired performance levels and functions for file backup/archiving and disaster recovery.

“The DataCore Ready designation acknowledges the completion of a rigorous compatibility testing process for solutions that are verified to enhance DataCore software-defined storage infrastructures,” said Phil Williams, VP of Business Development & Strategic Alliances of DataCore. “The combination of DataCore and QNAP provides a very flexible solution to maximize IT infrastructure performance to meet the increasing -- and constantly changing -- storage needs in today’s enterprise environments.”
Being DataCore Ready, QNAP NAS ensures joint solution compatibility that allows organizations to leverage many of the cutting-edge QNAP features to optimize their software-defined storage infrastructure, including 10GbE capability, SSD cache, capacity scalability, the QTS operating system for smart and easy storage management, and a lot more. Coupled with the business-ready features of DataCore SANsymphony-V, organizations can effortlessly use this joint solution to achieve desired storage performance levels, high availability, disaster recovery, and a cost-effective software-defined storage based on virtualization technologies
For more information, please visit https://www.qnap.com/solution/DataCore-Ready/en/index.php.

About QNAP Systems, Inc.
QNAP Systems, Inc., as its brand promise "Quality Network Appliance Provider", aims to deliver comprehensive offerings of cutting edge network attached storage (NAS) and network video recorder (NVR) solutions featured with ease-of-use, robust operation, large storage capacity, and trustworthy reliability. QNAP integrates technologies and designs to bring forth quality products that effectively improve business efficiency on file sharing, virtualization applications, storage management and surveillance in the business environments, as well as enrich entertainment life for home users with the offering of a fun multimedia center experience. Headquartered in Taipei, QNAP delivers its solutions to the global market with nonstop innovation. More information is at www.qnap.com.

Enterprise Management Associates Selects SANsymphony™-V as the Best Enterprise Solution for Software-Defined Storage

DataCore, a leader in Software-Defined Storage, has announced that its SANsymphony™-V storage virtualization and data services platform has been named by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading industry analyst and consulting firm, as the “Best Enterprise Solution for Software-Defined Storage” in the newly-released EMA Radar™ Report for Enterprise Software-Defined Storage.

EMA Radar™ Reports provide an in-depth analysis of industry-leading vendors and products, including their overall market position in comparison with other vendors. The EMA Radar Report for Enterprise Software-Defined Storage solutions evaluates the core capabilities and features to abstract and pool storage infrastructure throughout the entire enterprise, including server attached, network based, commodity, and cloud storage.

“There has been a lack of a consistent definition of what software-defined storage is in the industry. This ambiguity has led to a collection of software products that have a great deal of diversity in the value and capabilities provided,” said Jim Miller, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. “DataCore is rated highest in product strength for reaching the ideal of software-defined storage: abstracting all storage regardless where it is located and providing the richest set of services that are completely independent of the storage hardware -- largely automated. The overall functionality places DataCore as the leader in product strength for the Software-Defined Storage radar report. ”

DataCore SANsymphony-V software-defined storage platform works infrastructure-wide across all types of storage (flash, disk and cloud) to automate and optimize performance and resource allocation. It has the ability to abstract existing network-based storage, and also create hyper-converged virtual SANs with server-attached storage and flash/SSDs that can also be integrated with existing storage infrastructures. DataCore’s powerful enterprise-wide services include caching, universal deduplication, compression, random write acceleration, synchronous mirroring, ‘zero-touch’ recovery, thin provisioning, QoS, auto-tiering, replication, performance monitoring, continuous data protection and data migration. 

DataCore SANsymphony-V was also named a category value leader in the 2015 EMA Radar Report for Enterprise Software-Defined Storage. The report states: “DataCore is one of the most cost effective software-defined storage solutions in this report. Customers can acquire a DataCore license for a fraction of the price of competing solutions.”

In addition to being named the Best Enterprise Solution for Software-Defined Storage and value leader, DataCore has achieved ongoing industry recognition, including several announced worldwide partnerships for hyper-converged solutions based on SANsymphony™-V and DataCore™ Hyper-Converged Virtual SAN. Amongst these are industry leaders including Huawei, Cisco ,Fujitsu and Dell.

Video: DataCore Selected as Winner for 'Storage Virtualisation Product of the Year Award'

DataCore's SANsymphony™-V has won the Storage Virtualization Product of the Year at the 2015 UK Storage Awards. The Awards, known as ‘The Storries,’ are held annually to recognize solutions, organizations and personalities, and reward excellence across the Storage Industry. The awards are voted independently online by 11,000 readers of Storage Magazine.

In addition to becoming the reader’s choice within the Storage Virtualization Product of the Year for 2015, DataCore was voted runner-up in the Product of the Year category. 

DataCore wins Storage Virtualisation Product of the Year at 2015 Storage Awards

DataCore's SANsymphony™-V has won the Storage Virtualization Product of the Year at the 2015 UK Storage Awards held last week in Central London. The Awards, known as ‘The Storries,’ are held annually to recognize solutions, organizations and personalities, and reward excellence across the Storage Industry. The awards are voted independently online by 11,000 readers of Storage Magazine.

Brett Denly, Sales Director, DataCore UK commented: “Achieving Storage Virtualization Product of the Year was our ultimate goal in attending the Awards. Our Software-Defined Solution, SANsymphony™-V is now a 10^th-generation storage virtualization platform, backed and refined with over 17 years of development and with 25,000+ licenses deployed. So, this is a great accolade to receive in recognition of that legacy and the strength of product that we have today, and I would like to thank all those users who took the time to vote for us.”

In addition to becoming the reader’s choice within the Storage Virtualization Product of the Year for 2015, DataCore was voted runner-up in the Product of the Year category and has achieved ongoing industry recognition throughout the year with worldwide partnerships announced for converged and hyper-converged solutions based on SANsymphony™-V and DataCore™ Virtual SAN. Amongst these are industry leaders like Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, Huawei and Lenovo.

DataCore’s Brett Denly, Amanda Bedborough, Emily Darling and Sharon Munday receive the 2015 Storage Virtualization Product of the Year Storage Award.

DataCore SANsymphony-V10 adds New Hyper-Converged Services Plus OpenStack Cloud Support

See complete article in the StorageNewsletter

Manage end-to-end I/O performance, optimize flash, integrate backups, improve space efficiency, provision virtual desktops, and automate hyperconverged and enterprise-wide SDSe deployment

DataCore Software Corporation announced the availability of a number of capabilities included within its all-embracing 'any hypervisor, any storage' SANsymphony-V10 storage services platform and its Virtual SAN release.

The PSP2 update release adds support for OpenStack Cinder, enabling DataCore to deliver its comprehensive set of Software-Defined Storage services to private, hybrid and public clouds built with OpenStack. The release includes features and services to centrally control and manage end-to-end I/O performance, optimize flash, integrate backups, improve space efficiency, serve virtual desktops, and automate hyper-converged and enterprise-wide SDS deployments.

A number of services have been incorporated to enable industry-standard x86 servers to gain the essential enterprise storage functionality needed to meet today's demanding business requirements. DataCore's ability to deliver complete and unified range of hyper-converged, virtual SAN and SDS platform services has fueled a list of alliances and server vendor partnerships with companies seeking to leverage their hardware platforms with company's latest release. The PSP2 release is available and shipping.

Extends powerful enterprise-wide services: The all-embracing software-defined storage platform

Services and enhanced features include:

• Brings SDS to cloud architectures; adds OpenStack support: Enterprises and cloud service providers can use a SDS platform to centralize the provisioning and management of new or existing storage resources via standard OpenStack Cinder commands. Previously, organizations tasked with creating a cloud infrastructure with OpenStack were challenged to utilize already available storage investments or find new cost-effective storage that was OpenStack-compatible and yet able to deliver enterprise capabilities to power their cloud environments.
• Hyperconverged virtual desktop services: This release introduces  VDI services and deployment tools to automate the creation and management of stateful, highly-available virtual desktops. The resulting high-density VDI implementations are cost-effective and especially well-suited for organizations seeking to deploy desktops at a departmental level. The software utilizes company's caching and thin provisioning to diminish the dependency on physical storage. In comparison to other hyperconverged VDI offerings, DataCore does not require expensive flash or disk subsystems to achieve needed performance levels; it optimizes industry-standard servers and DRAM, plus uses fewer, lower-priced internal disks in place of higher-priced external storage, to lower the overall cost per virtual desktop.
• Universal virtual disk deduplication and compression services: Virtual disks can be deduplicated, compressed and scheduled in the background to reduce the space they occupy on disk. Unlike other vendors that limit this type of functionality to their own proprietary or array-specific storage devices, DataCore's space-saving services apply universally across the infrastructure; it extends block-level deduplication and compression to any storage and any file system or hypervisor.
• Backup integration services, added Veeam support and automation: DataCore works with third-party backup products to simplify end-to-end data protection and ensure rapid data recovery at a granular level. DataCore already supports products such as CommVault Simpana's IntelliSnap technology and Microsoft Data Protection Manager, which take advantage of DataCore online snapshots to centralize backups for a wide range of applications, hypervisors, OSs and storage devices. This update provides a similar capability to trigger Veeam backups to usecompany's highly efficient snapshots to relieve the burden of using VM snapshots on hosts. Backups can be scheduled and taken more frequently with minimal impact on applications, improving RPOs and resulting in productivity and speedier recovery.
• Console services and centralized management for distributed groups: Organizations with virtual storage pools distributed across multiple locations can manage the different DataCore server groups from a single user interface. Separate levels of control can be assigned to different administrators across a hierarchy of server groups making it possible to centrally manage, control and delegate responsibilites over widely distributed storage infastructures with fewer people.
• Hyperconverged and popular-use case deployment services: With this update, DataCore continues to simplify and automate how software can be installed, configured and updated to meet different use cases and deployment scenarios. This release makes it easy to set up hyper-converged environments, scalable file systems over clusters, VDI configurations, mixed file/block storage and multi-node HA deployments running the software on either physical or on virtual platforms (Vms).

Delivers centralized and powerful SDS platform
to manage overall I/O performance end-to-end 

SANsymphony-V10 works infrastructure-wide across all types of storage (flash, disk and cloud) to automate and optimize performance and resource allocation. The release offers a set of tools to profile, monitor, instrument, identify 'hot spots' and manage performance-impacting application workloads. 




New performance-enhancing additions included in PSP2 are:

• Performance optimizations for flash: Enhancements have been introduced that impact how DataCore cache performs read operations from flash-based and solid-state storage technologies. The net result is faster application response, lower overhead and better utilization of costly flash memory.
• Expanded instrumentation and metrics: The PSP2 release provides greater visibility to the I/O behavior of virtual and physical disks so users can accurately understand what is happening with storage resources. Updates include additional performance metrics for virtual disks, improved heat maps and performance trending analysis reports, and added support for S.M.A.R.T. alerts from physical storage to help IT administrators better isolate performance and disk problems. This capabilities improve productivity and make it easier to manage larger-scale deployments while reducing the time and expense to troubleshoot root causes of application slowdowns.
• Production-ready Random Write Accelerator (RWA): The previous update introduced this innovation for experimental use under certain conditions; the experimental designation is removed in PSP2. This powerful capability converts high-latency random writes into storage-friendly sequential writes, yielding up to 30 times faster performance for the random-write-heavy workloads that frequently updates databases, ERP and OLTP systems. The result is SSD-like speed from lower-cost spinning disks and a reduction in the need for costly flash resources. This capability also helps optimize flash storage performance.

Closing the server to storage Gap; empowering server vendors to meet enterprise demandsThe gap between servers and storage continues to erode as servers become more powerful and more storage capable. In this new era of commoditized hardware, what matters is the software. DataCore recognized this inevitable shift and pioneered the movement to Software-Defined Storage solutions. With this release, the company advances its platform to deliver complete and proven SDS services stack. The software is comprehensive in scope, providing end-to-end data and storage services that are not limited to a single device, but work across different vendors and types of storage from flash to disk to cloud storage. The release combines a set of enterprise storage services with an enduring software architecture designed to harness the continually improving cost curves and technology advances of the underlying hardware to close the gap. Numerous partnerships signed with global server vendors attest to this new trend of server vendors seeking to benefit by providing DataCore SDS with their platforms, including Huawei, Cisco, Fujitsu and Dell.

"As the leading innovator of SDS technology for more than 17 years, DataCore has seen countless storage devices come and go that are all managed and administered differently. We created DataCore SDS solutions to break down those walls and create an enduring and flexible platform to allow any vendor's storage technology to work together seamlessly," said George Teixeira, CEO, DataCore. "We continue to evolve our SANsymphony-V and Virtual SAN solutions to enable our customers to take full advantage of their existing investments and to prepare them for the long term with a software architecture that is designed to absorb new technologies without disruption as the industry advances."

DataCore’s Fifth Annual State of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) Survey Reveals Surprises

“Two major surprises jump out at you from the findings,” said Deni Connor, founding analyst, SSG-NOW. “The absence of near term spending on Big Data and Object Storage among the majority of respondents, and the relatively small penetration of flash across these 477 organizations. Not surprising are the rising levels of investments on Software-Defined Storage initiatitives known to offer more immediate payoff.”

DataCore’s Fifth Annual State of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) Survey Reveals Surprising Lack of Spending on Big Data, Object Storage and OpenStack

In contrast, more than half of organizations polled (52 percent) look to extend the life of existing storage assets and future-proof their IT infrastructure with SDS in 2015

DataCore has released the results of its fifth annual State of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) survey. The 2015 poll explored the impact of SDS on organizations across the globe, and distills the experiences of 477 IT professionals currently using or evaluating SDS to solve critical data storage challenges. The results yield surprising insights from a cross-section of industries over a wide range of workloads.
The survey also probed for levels of spending on much-hyped topics, including Big Data, Object Storage and OpenStack. Unexpectedly, the findings showed that very little funding is being earmarked in 2015 for these initiatives. Some of the pause may be explained by a number of disillusionments that were disclosed in the findings.

 

On the other hand, this year’s report reveals several major business drivers for implementing Software-Defined Storage. 52 percent of respondents expect SDS will extend the life of existing storage assets and future-proof their storage infrastructure, enabling them to easily absorb new technologies. Close to half of respondents look to SDS to avoid hardware lock-in from storage manufacturers, while lowering hardware costs by allowing them to shop among several competing suppliers. Operationally, they see SDS simplifying management of different classes of storage by automating frequent or complex operations. This is notable in comparison with earlier surveys, as these results portray a sharp increase in the recognition of the economic benefits generated by SDS (reduced CAPEX), complementing the OPEX savings referenced in prior years.
Other surprises include: while flash technology penetration expanded it is still absent in 28 percent of the cases and 16 percent reported that it did not meet application acceleration expectations. Also interesting is that 21 percent reported that highly touted hyper-converged systems did not perform as required or did not integrate well within their infrastructure. On the other hand, Software-Defined Storage and storage virtualization are deemed very urgent now, with 72 percent of organizations making important investments in these technologies throughout 2015. 81 percent also expect similar levels of spending on Software-Defined Storage technologies that will be incorporated within server SANs / virtual SANs and converged storage solutions.

Additional highlights of DataCore’s 2015 State of Software-Defined Storage survey include:

• The ability to add storage capacity without business disruption is identified as the primary reason for choosing storage virtualization software (52 percent of respondents). Supporting synchronous mirroring and metro clusters for high availability to ensure business continuity and asynchronous data replication for remote site disaster recovery are also high on the list.
   
• More than half of the respondents (53 percent) say that they currently have less than 10 percent of capacity assigned to flash storage. The number of participants who answered that flash makes up higher than 40 percent of their storage capacity is only 9 percent.
   
• More than 60 percent of respondents experienced performance degradation or the inability to meet performance after virtualizing server workloads. When asked what the typical causes of performance problems are, 61 percent of participants blame slow applications, and 46 percent single out legacy storage devices as the culprit.
   
• Human errors are driving the need for greater automation. It has become increasingly clear that the complexity which accompanies data growth and diversity is taking a big toll, as 61 percent of respondents indicated that human error was behind application and data center outages.

Software-Defined Storage Technology: Moving the Industry Forward
“This survey sheds new light on how IT professionals approach storage-related innovations. The data reveals that many organizations are moving away from storage functions tied to specific hardware and are deriving real CAPEX and OPEX savings and additional purchasing power by not being locked to particular hardware or being forced to go ‘all new buys’ to modernize their storage infrastructure. It also points out that heavily promoted technologies, such as Object Storage, are more often found at the fringes in pilot programs, where IT is hoping to assess their value,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO at DataCore. “Software-Defined Storage and storage virtualization software, in contrast, are providing the features that the market is demanding right now, such as continuous availability, faster performance and higher efficiency. These concrete benefits carry far more weight in 2015 spending than future promises from yet to be proven technologies and startups.”
The respondents of DataCore’s State of Software-Defined Storage survey come from a diverse set of organizations, both in size and industry, providing statistically significant insights into the similarity in needs for SDS over a wide range of IT environments. Participants were located in North America, South America, Europe and Asia, in a wide range of vertical market segments including financial services, healthcare, government, manufacturing, education, IT services and other related industries. 45 percent of respondents are from organizations with less than 500 employees, 31 percent of respondents from organizations with between 500 and 5,000 employees and 23 percent from organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

DataCore’s 2015 State of Software-Defined Storage Survey was conducted in April, 2015. To view the entire report, please visit: www.datacore.com/sds2015.http://datacore.com/sf-docs/default-source/whitepapers/english/the-state-of-sds-2015-survey.pdf

DataCore Software Announces Amanda Bedborough as Senior Vice President EMEA Field Operations

Amanda Bedborough’s role at DataCore has expanded to include Enterprise Programs, Channel Sales and Overall Sales Results for the EMEA region.

From: Datacentre Solutions DataCore Software says that Amanda Bedborough has been promoted to the new position of Senior Vice President, DataCore EMEA Field Operations. Amanda previously served as the company’s executive level strategist and driver of EMEA go-to-market business initiatives. The positon was created to capture the growing market opportunity and to fulfil the increasing customer demand for the company’s SANsymphony™-V10 software-defined storage (SDS) platform, virtual SAN and hyper-converged solutions. Developing new enterprise account business and expanding our penetration of platform sales within existing accounts will be a primary focus. Amanda will be responsible for driving enterprise sales and programs, building a skilled network of value-added resellers and driving the continued infrastructure investment, new business initiatives and ongoing management of DataCore field resources throughout the EMEA region. Amanda commented. “I’ve worked with numerous technology companies at various stages of growth and evolution and the opportunity at DataCore, in today’s era of software defined everything, is the most exciting role I have been involved with.” Amanda Bedborough brings to DataCore over 20 years’ of experience in senior executive IT positions, creating profitable growth for technology companies such as Corel, 3DFX Interactive and STB Systems. Formerly an Executive Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing for Corel Corporation, Amanda is well qualified to assist DataCore on its next stage of transitional growth, driving our go-to-market strategy for customer acquisition and retention, today and into the future. “Our pursuit of the growing software-defined storage market opportunities and the success of our SANsymphony-V platform and virtual SAN hyper-converged solutions made it important for DataCore to add an executive of Amanda’s calibre to build on our momentum,” said Steve Houck, Chief Operating Officer at DataCore Software. “Amanda is a proven leader and her market experience, initiative and ability to build successful sales teams, develop ‘win-win’ channel partnerships and grow enterprise business accounts will enable us to seize new market opportunities and scale our company to the next level.”

What’s Up with Hyper-Converged and Software-Defined Storage Solutions

In this short video, George Teixeira - CEO & President at DataCore Software - answers a few questions on the landscape of hyper-converged and software-defined storage solutions and the value proposition.

What's in Store for Huawei & DataCore? New Software-defined Storage, Virtualization & Hyper-Converged Solutions

For more information, please visit: Huawei and DataCore: A Global Partnership for Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-Converged Solutions

 

Overcome Health IT Data Storage Challenges

 

Healthcare IT faces many challenges regarding data storage, retrieval and availability due to the critical nature of the industry.  Check out this infographic to learn more, and read below to discover some of the most pressing challenges.

 

Around the Clock Access
First and foremost is the need to ensure continuous data availability, as healthcare operations must run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. With healthcare facilities and emergency rooms always in use, there is rarely a good time for system maintenance or upgrades. And if there is an outage, IT has to quickly bring the data back online.  

Healthcare facilities can also not afford to lose data.  If data is lost or unrecoverable due to an outage, the facility has to manually re-enter the data or repeat the diagnostic procedure, which is expensive and time consuming, not to mention the negative impact on patient care.  IT is under pressure to ensure that systems can survive an outage, whether it is due to a device or site failure.  So, a fundamental question for healthcare IT is how do they ensure their data is always available and/or recoverable in the event of a site (or device) outage?

Explosive Data Growth
Healthcare IT is estimated to be growing at a rate of 75% per year.   Enhancements in color, resolution, and 3D imaging have led to immense growth in images produced from PACS (picture archiving and communications system) -- to the point where each scan can consume gigabytes of data.  The use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) continue to grow, and numerous regulations have contributed to the increase in data, with VNAs (Vendor Neutral Archives) required to store patient data for years, if not decades.

In 2013, there were 500 petabytes of electronic health data. By 2020 it is expected to grow to 20,000 petabytes. IT is challenged to keep up with this demand by freeing up more capacity from existing storage systems, adding capacity quickly and migrating data as needed between storage systems -- without impacting data availability.   How can healthcare IT scale capacity quickly and seamlessly, without affecting availability?

Immediate Response Time
Fast data retrieval is also extremely important. A multitude of applications in a healthcare organization utilize a storage system to store data. As IT tries to scale applications due to increased demand, they find the performance of applications often fall below users’ expectations, leading to complaints.  After root cause analysis, IT typically finds that the storage system is causing a bottleneck.  Server and networks have grown dramatically in performance, but storage systems haven’t kept up.  Getting more performance from storage becomes yet another challenge for the healthcare IT departments, as IT has to answer the question of how to accelerate applications by improving the speed of storage.

Overlaying all of these challenges is the fact that healthcare is a cost-constrained industry. However, unlike other industries, healthcare has greater expectations and lower tolerance for errors.  This is true for the providers of care as well as the IT department.  So, healthcare IT must explore innovative solutions that address these data challenges within the budget they do have.

This is where DataCore comes in.  Check out our Healthcare Solutions to learn how leading healthcare worldwide have addressed their data challenges with cost-effective solutions from DataCore.

Jon Toigo on Huawei, DataCore: A new hyper-converged infrastructure?

Jon Toigo explores the renewed interest in software-defined and hyper-converged storage, and an important partnership between Huawei and DataCore Software.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/opinion/Huawei-DataCore-A-new-hyper-converged-infrastructure?

“It's stunning how the server vendor landscape has shifted from HP and IBM over the last couple of years. Now Lenovo and Huawei have become the third and fourth largest providers of servers by volume, and relatively new players like Cisco UCS have made significant gains in market share.”

Like many storage aficionados, I have been watching the industry and trade press discussions of software-defined storage and more recently, hyper-converged infrastructure, with considerable interest. But, like most storage folks I know, I tend to greet most product announcements in this space with a cynical shrug.

It's not that the evangelism around both software-defined and hyper-converged hasn't resonated: at their core, in my opinion, the software-defined and hyper-converged advocates are advancing a long overdue question about the wisdom of deploying proprietary storage arrays with value-add storage software services embedded on their controllers. 

True SANs could have rectified the problems of "isolated islands of storage" a decade or two ago if vendors had wedded the scale-out serial SCSI fabric interconnect with technologies for virtualizing all of the connected devices. This shared pool of capacity could establish a centralized software-based controller to manage the whole thing. When DataCore Software advanced this approach 17 years ago, it found itself summarily shouted down by the storage hardware vendors.

With all of the renewed interest in the problems and inefficiencies of traditional storage, and the need for a new software-defined or hyper-converged model, you would think that DataCore would be on top of the market. However, the concept of hyper-converged was hijacked out of the gate by hardware vendors, who saw it as a way to glue together commodity servers with commodity storage rigs to create storage appliances that I would argue are not that much different from the monolithic storage they had been selling for decades. 

On the heels of hyper-converged appliances came the hyper-convergence models from server hypervisor vendors. The pitch sounded great: dismiss the hardware guys, deploy generic servers to host hypervisor software and deploy multi-node servers-plus-flash-plus-direct-attached JBODs (just a bunch of disk storage arrays), and put Virtual SAN software on each server "head." A minimum of three nodes were required for high availability, at a combined hardware/software license cost in the neighborhood of $10- to $30,000 per node – placing the solution outside the budgetary reach of IT planners supporting the needs of smaller firms and remote office/branch office environments. To those who are old enough to remember, the whole idea was reminiscent of the IBM mainframe data center of the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the hypervisor software vendor seeking to play the role of the dominant vendor that controls all aspects of the compute infrastructure.

Bottom line: between the proprietary appliance sellers and the proprietary hypervisor vendor server/storage stacks, hyper-converged looked like the same dog as so-called legacy storage, only with different fleas. Hence, my cynicism.

New partnerships show potential for hyper-converged

However, a more interesting story has begun to take shape around hyper-converged that was highlighted again this week with the announcement of a global partnership between DataCore Software and Huawei, a global information and communications technology provider. The agreement aims to deliver hyper-converged solutions based on Huawei hardware and DataCore Software's virtual SAN software. Huawei, while not the dominant market leader in servers or storage, is growing faster than its peers, according to Gartner, especially in Asian and European markets. The decision of the company to leverage hypervisor and hardware-agnostic hyper-converged infrastructure software from DataCore represents a smart break with the relationships that some leading server vendors have made with VMware or Microsoft directly.

DataCore has been quietly chalking up multiple partners for itssoftware-based hyper-converged infrastructure solution. It's stunning how the server vendor landscape has shifted from HP and IBM over the last couple of years. Now Lenovo and Huawei have become the third and fourth largest providers of servers by volume, and relatively new players like Cisco UCS have made significant gains in market share. Interestingly, Cisco UCS, Fujitsu, and Dell (now the second largest provider) have all announced partnerships with the Ft. Lauderdale, FL-based storage virtualization software firm. The Huawei agreement, announced on March 17 at CeBit, suggests that DataCore is delivering on its promises with server vendors. Were DataCore to lock down an agreement with HP-- which needs a lift-- or with Lenovo's server business -- which needs to fill the IBM storage gap --it might well become a household name. 

Of course, DataCore's hyper-convergence partnership strategy isn't unique.Dell sells Nutanix hyper-converged software on PowerEdge servers. Cisco has certified SimpliVity's software and ASIC that handles services such as data deduplication to run on UCS servers. Maxta, a software-only hyper-convergence vendor, supports a wide range of hardware partners. And VMware also has a bunch of partners for its Virtual SAN (VSAN) software, including Dell, HP, EMC, and NetApp.

From a vendor perspective, the benefits of working with a "non-aligned" (that is, not beholden to any specific server hypervisor) hyper-converged infrastructure software provider is clear. They can leverage their breadth of server offerings and support their customers with cost-effective virtual SAN storage regardless of which hypervisor the customer is using --or, in a growing number of cases -- the multiple hypervisors that the customer is using. The hypervisor software companies tend only to provide storage for workloads that have been virtualized using that hypervisor software, to the exclusion of competitor stacks. This will become less and less viable if survey data materializes in the real world and between 30-40% of firms diversify their server hypervisor choices.

While Huawei and DataCore clearly are targeting larger enterprise accounts, they have created a much lower barrier to entry. DataCore brings to the relationship the ability to penetrate remote offices, departmental computing within larger enterprises and, more importantly, smaller accounts that have been largely abandoned by the big hypervisor vendors. Rather than requiring a minimum of three storage nodes, or requiring that firms abandon all current "legacy" storage investments or mandating an investment in new flash storage technology, DataCore enables HA server/storage clusters with only two nodes, and can leverage most legacy storage capacity and both DRAM and flash devices. They provide the proverbial Swiss Army Knife solution for virtual SANs and it may help hardware vendor partners move more gear. Over time this will likely become a stronger message than the "one throat to choke" benefit touted by server hypervisor vendors who want to sell hyper-converged as part of their server virtualization software.

The uptake of the "DataCore-inside" solutions remains to be seen. There is merit to the idea that the ultimate success or failure of the strategy will rely not on the relationships with brand-name server vendors, but with those solution vendors and integrators who intelligently provide flexibility in how servers, software, and storage are integrated to deliver a solution now. Time will tell.

Huawei, DataCore Partner on Hyper-Converged Solutions

 The complete article is available at ChannelBuzz.  

The DataCore-Huawei offerings are targeted at larger customers than the midmarket and lower end of the enterprise where other hyperconverged vendors have been most successful to date.

Chinese-based Huawei and Ft. Lauderdale-based DataCore software have announced a partnership which will integrate Huawei’s hardware and DataCore’s software in a new line of jointly certified hyper-converged solutions that will be sold through the channels of both companies. The first offering from the relationship will integrate Huawei’s FusionServer with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V10 software.

For a software-only player like DataCore, which has abstracted services into a server- agnostic, storage-agnostic platform, these kinds of partnering and OEM relationships with hardware players have always been a key route to market over the 17 years of their existence. This is their second such agreement in the hyper-converged space, following a recently announced one with Fujitsu.

Steve Houck, Chief Operating Officer at DataCore

Our strategy is to acquire customers both through our own sales efforts and OEMing with players like Huawei, Lenovo and Cisco,” said Steve Houck, Chief Operating Officer at DataCore. “We have made a concerted effort to get relationships with these key OEMs.

This is the first formalized partnership DataCore has had with Huawei.

“We had worked with them at the field level, the deal level, but on an opportunistic basis, Houck said. “Huawei sees the importance of having enterprise class software in their systems, especially to gain share in incumbents’ accounts where they are heavily entrenched.”

The new hyper-converged solutions combine the advanced Huawei FusionServer series of rack servers, blade servers, and data center servers with DataCore’s software-defined storage services platform. They provide enterprise-class storage for both self-contained hyper-converged solutions as well as architectures that allow independent scaling of storage and compute, all connected by a Huawei-powered network fabric. They can also integrate and manage legacy storage systems.

While the sweet spot so far for hyper-converged deployments has been the midmarket and small enterprise, the Huawei-DataCore offerings will be aimed at larger companies.

“We are deliberately going upmarket, focusing on the commercial and enterprise markets with very large deployments,” Houck said. He noted that this contrasts with the original midmarket emphasis of the hyperconverged vendors like Nutanix and Nimble.

“The newcomers focused on the midmarket, in part because their people mainly came out of the LeftHands, Equallogics, that first generation of speciality storage arrays whose gear was approaching end of life,” Houck said. “They saw an opportunity to rip and replace in that market. But those systems have some scalability issues, which ours do not. We take all those storage services and scale massively, so we can do massive scale or we can take the lower end of those servers and deploy across thousands of point of sale solutions in retail. In order to scale at level the enterprise demands, you have to have a software-led strategy.”

Houck emphasized that DataCore designed its software 17 years ago for what they accurately forecast would be the environment of today.

“We developed product then on the premise of a future that would be drastically heterogeneous, very fragmented, and would require all sorts of services,” he said. “Hyperconverged vendors are being adopted, but they are also creating new siloes of data. We are seeing the same things now that we saw when VMare was getting adopted, and customers considering a virtualization-first strategy wanted to know it can co-exist with everything else. Today, there are lots of systems, but our value is that we provide a unified storage services platform for a customer who wants that.”

Huawei makes an excellent partner for them, Houck added.

“They have a combination of innovation in the product and also innovation in strategy, looking to disrupt the market,” he said. “Their market share as of today is predominantly outside the U.S., but gaining there is a number one priority for them. As a newcomer they don’t have install base to protect, so they can take more risks, and can do things incumbents can’t do. They are also extremely well-funded and focused. So while their share is low now, it is in a server and storage market that is rapidly changing.”

The Huawei-DataCore products will be sold and supported through a joint effort and will be available through the channels of both companies.

“In the Americas we are working to develop distribution and channel strategy for these products,” Houck said. “DataCore broadly goes to market through tier two distribution and OEM. In the early days we focused on visionary partners with a solution strategy. Every partner will say that’s their strategy, but it’s truly only a subset that sells solutions first. Now with storage being commoditized, we are seeing partners seeing consistent hardware business at risk, and we are seeing more mainstream partners looking at their storage practice as a software practice and lead with virtualization first.”

The deal with Huawei really shows partners where the market is going, Houck said.

“While it’s a partnership about a hyperconverged hardware system, the important message for partners is how software can enable them and their customers to do well in a more fragmented and heterogeneous infrastructure,” he said.

The Huawei and DataCore Hyper-Converged Solutions will be available for shipment in Q2.

Worldwide Launch at Cebit 2015: Huawei and DataCore Announce Strategic Global Partnership for Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-Converged Solutions

                                                                     World Premier and Press Event at Cebit 2015

“We are pleased to launch our new Hyper-Converged Solutions with DataCore and to take the concept of convergence to the next level. In this digital age, businesses can grow very quickly and they need datacenter infrastructure that delivers scalability and improves resilience. With DataCore’s expertise in the Software-defined storage area and Huawei’s experience in providing cutting-edge ICT infrastructure such as high performance servers, storage and SSD cards, our Hyper-Converged Solutions help businesses build a seamless architecture to compete in a fast-changing environment,” said Mr. Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei’s IT product line.

Mr. Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei’s IT product line and George Teixeira, CEO and President, DataCore Software launch global partnership at Cebit 2015

Combination of state-of-the-art Huawei FusionServer with DataCore’s proven Software-Defined Storage software delivers easy-to-use and scalable hyper-converged solutions addressing Microsoft, VMware and business-critical application environments requiring continuous availability, high performance and simplified management.

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, and DataCore Software, a leader in software-defined storage and converged Virtual SAN solutions, announced at the world’s largest IT trade show event at Cebit in Hannover, Gremany the launch of a new line of jointly certified Hyper-Converged Solutions. The first result of the strategic partnership between the two companies combines Huawei’s advanced FusionServer series with DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V10 software. Optionally, Huawei’s Oceanstor high-performance Flash-based SSD storage systems and existing legacy storage systems can be easily added via iSCSI or Fibre Channel connectivity to grow and extend system capabilities beyond the server attached limitations of most other hyper-converged appliance offerings. The new DataCore and Huawei Hyper-Converged Solutions are available for shipment this month and are designed to address the customer need for simple, high-performance and scalable virtual SANs and hyper-converged solutions required in today’s dynamic data center and IT environments.

With the combined Huawei and DataCore hyper-converged solutions, customers can realize the comfort of deploying state-of-the-art server and storage technology from Huawei with a flexible and comprehensive software-defined solution from DataCore that has already been proven in mission-critical applications at over 10,000 customer sites.

Alex Best of DataCore and Jorg Karpinski from Huawei present the compelling value proposition

The new hyper-converged solutions deliver exceptional performance and the highest levels of availability to meet growing business demands within larger-scale enterprises. The Huawei FusionServer series of rack servers, blade servers, and data center servers are designed to address the wide range of customer demands required to build fast, reliable and efficient IT infrastructures that best suit their individual business needs. Combined with DataCore’s software-defined storage services platform, these solutions are able to virtualize, enhance and derive the utmost productive value from a company’s present and future investments. 

“The partnership between Huawei and DataCore opens up our ability to target a largely unfulfilled segment of the marketplace and answer the need for hyper-converged solutions at a whole new price performance level,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore. "Huawei and DataCore have teamed together to fulfill the customer need for fast, affordable and simple-to-use Hyper-Converged Solutions and Virtual SANs that support legacy systems as well as new Microsoft virtualization and Hyper-V projects and mixed VMware ESXi environments running critical applications such as SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, SAP, Oracle and VDI.”

                                                                                      Complete end-to-end solutions

DataCore and Huawei partners can now provide 100% Huawei hardware solutions, end to end, covering storage, network, and compute needs in order to provide complete datacenter solutions with state-of–the –art enterprise storage capabilities. These solutions provide enterprise-class storage features for both self-contained hyper-converged solutions as well as architectures that allow independent scaling of storage and compute, all connected by a Huawei-powered network fabric. Optionally, new Huawei OceanStor storage systems or existing legacy external storage arrays from third parties can also be easily integrated and managed as part of these combined solutions when needed to meet current or future business requirements.

DataCore SANsymphony-V combined with Huawei offers multiple solution use cases, including:

An ideal hyper-converged solution for Microsoft and mixed Hyper-V and VMware projects - The certified DataCore and Huawei FusionServer RH Series based hyper-converged solutions include pre-installed Microsoft server software and is delivered optimized to support demanding Microsoft applications and virtualization projects as well as mixed Hyper-V and VMware environments running business critical applications such as Microsoft SQL server, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics ERP, SharePoint, Exchange, SAP and VDI. These solutions are simple and quick to install and easy to use thereafter.

Metro-clustering for business continuity and disaster recovery – The new hyper-converged solutions have undergone rigorous joint testing and are currently scalable to 64 nodes, yet they require only two nodes minimum to provide fault tolerant data protection and data services. Two or more Huawei based server nodes can be used to pool external storage to easily form a stretch cluster over multiple datacenters. With this, organizations can reliably introduce DataCore’s proven zero-touch failover to provide mission-critical resilience and non-stop data in disaster scenarios. Huawei and DataCore partners can easily enable a broader set of enterprise customers with application availability and mobility, regardless of storage infrastructure, by combining DataCore with Huawei technologies. Asynchronous replication can be enabled to provide further protection in DR scenarios, including failover to public cloud services.

Extreme acceleration for mission-critical business applications – Huawei servers provide a multitude of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) hard drive and flash media options. Combined with SANsymphony-V software, these can be used to deliver data via Fibre Channel or iSCSI to external application clients or internally to applications or VMs inside the FusionCube Converged Infrastructure. DataCore’s write optimization technologies can accelerate random IOPS hard drive performance to match performance associated with Flash SSD media capabilities. DataCore’s new breakthrough Random Write Accelerator capability, an innovation designed to highly optimize random write processing, can boost speeds up to 30 times faster depending on workloads, especially for transaction-oriented applications such as databases and ERP systems. DataCore’s real-time auto-tiering capabilities and ‘heat map’ visualization tools automate and simplify the movement and management of data hotspots to high-performance storage media and can be used to accelerate SAN storage with DAS flash.

Infrastructure-wide storage services; hyper-converged plus external SAN pooling via Huawei for end-to-end connectivity and management – Modern IT infrastructures often contain a complex mix of incompatible legacy SAN arrays and emerging storage products. Storage systems can be easily connected to a DataCore-powered Huawei server or rack to eliminate storage silos. Data can be easily replicated, migrated, and tiered across previously incompatible storage products while new products can easily be brought on-line. Thin provisioning, pioneered by DataCore, allows capacity to be added efficiently, automatically or on-demand, as needed.

With DataCore software, Huawei’s servers and storage products are now able to be easily pooled and integrated with existing storage from a variety of vendors, including EMC, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NetApp. DataCore’s automated caching and tiering technologies also make it easy to leverage the power and resources of Huawei’s servers to accelerate performance over a company’s entire infrastructure of storage assets. This combination supports powerful features like metro-wide shared storage for clusters and business continuance, and automates the optimization, provisioning and migration of data storage across the diversity of new or installed disk and flash-based technologies. 

Huawei and DataCore -- Partners in Action

“We are excited about DataCore Software's comprehensive enterprise storage software capabilities and how they strongly complement our extensive practice,” states Uwe Kramer, general manager at Systems Integrator Kramer & Crew. “DataCore’s Software-Defined Storage technology combined and certified with powerful Huawei IT systems allows us to help customers achieve business agility with highly flexible and performant hyper-converged solutions. With the cooperation of systems integrators like Kramer & Crew, we are able to provide comprehensive services for implementation, maintenance and monitoring of state-of-the-art IT infrastructure from one single source and help customers to easily meet their objectives around business-critical data.”

Pricing and Availability

The Huawei and DataCore Hyper-Converged Solutions will be available for shipment in Q2, 2015. List prices start at around €20.000.

Additional product information: [Huawei and DataCore Hyper-Converged Solution Brief] and [Huawei and DataCore Whitepaper on Oracle OLTP Performance Acceleration]