Software-Defined Storage enhancements

DataCore continues to advance and evolve its device-independent storage management and virtualisation software, while maintaining focus on empowering IT users to take back control of their storage infrastructure. To that end, the company announced today significant enhancements to its comprehensive management capabilities within version R9 of its SANsymphony™-V storage virtualisation platform.

New advancements in SANsymphony-V include:
· Wizards to provision multiple virtual disks from templates
· Group commands to manage storage for multiple application hosts
· Storage profiles for greater control and auto-tiering across multiple levels of flash, solid state (SSDs) and hard disk technologies
· A new database repository option for recording and analyzing performance history and trends
· Greater configurability and choices for incorporating high-performance “server-side” flash technology and cost-effective network attached storage (NAS) file serving capabilities
· Preferred snapshot pools to simplify and segregate snapshots from impacting production work
· Improved remote replication and connectivity optimizations for faster and more efficient performance
· Support for higher speed 16Gbit fibre channel networking and more.

“Storage is undergoing a sea-change and traditional hardware manufacturers are suffering because they are in ‘catch-up’ mode to meet the new world order for ‘software-defined storage’ where automation, fast flash technologies and hardware interchangeability are standard,” states George Teixeira, co-founder, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “We have listened to our customers and stayed true to our vision. With the latest release of SANsymphony-V, we are well-positioned to help organizations manage growth and leverage existing investments, while making it simple to incorporate current and future innovations. Our software features and flexibility empowers CIOs and IT admins to overcome the many storage challenges faced in a dynamic virtual world.”

Real-World Software-Defined Storage: Customer-driven Enhancements Overcome Challenges
Many of the new features which extend the scope and breadth of storage management would not even occur to companies just developing a software-defined package. They are the product of 15 years of customer feedback and field-proven experience DataCore has had in broad scenarios across the globe.

The enhancements introduced in the latest version of SANsymphony-V take on major challenges faced by large scale IT organizations and more diverse mid-size data centres. Aside from confronting explosive storage growth (multi-petabyte disk farms), organizations are experiencing massive virtual machine (VM) sprawl where provisioning, partitioning and protecting disk space taxes both staff and budget. Problems are further aggravated by the insertion of flash technologies and SSDs used to speed up latency-sensitive workloads. This further compounds the fact that organizations are struggling to meet application performance needs on limited budgets, as well as the complexity and time demands required to manage a growing diversity of different storage models, disk devices and flash technologies, even when they standardize on a single manufacturer.

Bottom-line, companies have to deal with many unknowns in terms of storage. With traditional storage systems, the common practice has been to oversize and overprovision storage and hope that it would meet new and unpredictable demands, but this drives up costs and too often missed the mark. As a result, companies have become smarter and realize it is no longer feasible nor sensible to just throw expensive, purpose-built hardware at the problem. Therefore, companies are demanding a new level of software flexibility that endures and adds value over multiple generations and types of hardware devices. What is needed is a strategic versus one time approach to managing storage.

Notable Advances with SANsymphony-V Update 9.0.3
SANsymphony-V is a strategic productivity solution that works infrastructure-wide across many storage hardware brands and models. Its auto-tuning cache and auto-tiering software maximize the use of available CPU, memory and disk resources to dramatically increase overall storage performance, which translates into faster, more responsive applications. By more effectively leveraging existing disk storage investments, organizations can now cost-effectively add and fully benefit from the latest high-speed technologies like flash memory and SSDs.

DataCore’s software makes it even easier to incorporate and optimize powerful “server-side” flash memory technologies. SANsymphony-V can operate directly with any flash and disk devices directly connected to application servers or can be used across all connected storage area networking (SAN) assets. New configuration flexibility and options have also been documented with the latest release of SANsymphony-V to simplify flash integration and maximize its utilization and performance.

DataCore offers an extensive set of management tools including “heat maps” to optimize performance and cost-effective tiering of storage. Auto-tiering prioritizes and applies the right storage to best fit application and workload needs. Storage profiles provide greater control, and because environments vary, more optimization to improve cost and performance. Profiles for virtual disks can be customized to govern how dynamic policies for auto-tiering, remote replication and synchronous mirror recovery are prioritized, while supplementing default policies built into the software. Virtual disk importance can be set to critical, high, normal, low or archive, controlling which volumes take precedence for shared resources. This ensures important applications benefit from more valuable resources, such as flash memory and SSDs, with less demanding tasks using lower cost, higher density storage.

Auto-regulating the best utilization of precious resources keeps them from unintentionally being consumed by lower priority demands, as often happens with backup snapshots and other replicas of line of business data. Instead, point-in-time copies are directed to tiers of storage more appropriate for their role, while SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, Exchange, SharePoint and other mission-critical apps are directed to higher speed resources.

DataCore customers can now enjoy cutting-edge recording, analysis and reporting for responsive, continuously available IT services. SANsymphony-V adds the ability to record historical performance for trend analysis. By displaying metrics gathered over time, workload spikes and potential bottlenecks can be easily addressed. There’s also emphasis on automating more nuanced aspects of provisioning and advanced storage services. The difficulty here has not so much been the size but the number of virtual hosts and volumes to be coordinated in a predictable, repeatable fashion. Admins now can kick off and manage these tasks effortlessly and visualize their state at a glance. Large scale provisioning is made simple using templates from which virtual disks can be instantiated with the same characteristics (size, profile, availability, etc.).

For business continuity, disaster recovery and offsite data protection, the new release offers faster asynchronous remote replication to meet stringent Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives. It also takes better advantage of lower speed/lower cost wide area networks. Safeguarding against regional catastrophes has raised the urgency for cost-effective remote replication solutions, even for smaller firms.

SANsymphony-V further leverages the Windows Server 2012 platform and Microsoft’s latest clustering capabilities for faster, cost-effective unified NAS file serving and SAN disk services. This allows fully redundant, highly available configurations to scale out across multiple nodes and enable rapid switchover of network file system and Common Internet File System SMB clients despite hardware and facility outages. This powerful combination makes SANsymphony-V a unified NAS/SAN storage platform that is an ideal and affordable choice to support Microsoft Clusters and more demanding Microsoft File Serving environments.

With regards to high performance, low-latency needs, SANsymphony-V supports the newest 16 Gbps fibre channel host bus adapters (HBAs) from Qlogic. These can be mixed and matched with prior generation HBAs, as well as iSCSI NICs employed in less demanding areas of infrastructure. Fibre channel is often the preferred interface between databases, high-speed apps and pools of hybrid and all flash arrays virtualized by DataCore.