DataCore is a Platinum Sponsor and Keynote presenter at SNW Europe, Datacenter & Virtualization World 2012; Learn What’s New and Why Thousands of Customers Choose to Run their Business with DataCore Software

“Thousands of customers throughout the world  have already realized the compelling performance and productivity advantage of DataCore™ SANsymphony-V,“ states Christian Hagen, Vice President and Managing Director EMEA. "The DataCore storage hypervisor greatly improves the economics and harnesses the full power of server caches, solid state disks (SSDs) and existing storage assets so that application owners no longer need to 'rip and replace' storage infrastructures and pay much higher costs to meet their performance and uptime objectives."

At SNW Europe 2012, attendees are learning: How to Run Faster Virtualized: By Eliminating the I/O Bottlenecks in Clouds and Virtualized Data Centers

30. Oct, 11:20 – 11:50:
Keynote: How new storage solutions enable organizations to reinvent themselves
Christian Hagen, Vice President EMEA & Managing Director, DataCore Software

30. Oct, 11:55 and 15:20 + 31. Oct. 11:20:
Hands-On-Labs: How to configure your SAN with the one and only true Storage Hypervisor SANsymphony-V
Presented by Christian Marczinke, Director Strategic Systems Engineering & Chief Solutions Architect EMEA



30. Oct, 14:40 - 15:00:
Focus Session: Speeding the Transition to a Responsive, Virtualized Storage Infrastructure
Alexander Best, Director Technical Business Development EMEA, DataCore Software

31. Oct, 10:15 – 10:50:
Vendor Updates: SANsymphony™- V 9.0 – What's New in the Storage Hypervisor for the Enterprise
Alexander Best, Director Technical Business Development EMEA, DataCore Software

SNW Europe 2012: DataCore Software Presents 'What's New in the Storage Hypervisor for the Enterprise' and Powers Cloud and Business Applications to Run Faster Virtualized

DataCore is a Platinum Sponsor and Keynote presenter at SNW Europe, Datacenter Technologies & Virtualization World 2012; Learn What’s New and Why Thousands of Customers Choose to Run their Business with DataCore Software

Today at the SNW Europe, Datacenter Technologies & Virtualization World 2012 event in Germany, DataCore Software showcased many of the powerful storage management capabilities of SANsymphony™-V 9.0, "The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud" including ‘Heat maps’ and tools to pinpoint storage bottlenecks and optimize storage pool management, high availability stretch-site mirroring, automatic Continuous Data Protection features for fast application recovery and enterprise-wide flash SSD storage auto-tiering and adaptive caching capabilities that significantly boost the speed, throughput and availability of virtualized, I/O intensive business applications like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange. Attendees can stop by booth #2 under the motto "DataCore Software: Elevator to the Cloud" and find out why thousands of customers report significantly faster performance and better than 99.999% uptime after virtualizing their existing storage with SANsymphony-V.

 

“Thousands of customers throughout Europe have already realized the compelling performance and productivity advantage of DataCore™ SANsymphony-V,“ states Christian Hagen, Vice President and Managing Director EMEA. "The DataCore storage hypervisor greatly improves the economics and harnesses the full power of server caches, solid state disks (SSDs) and existing storage assets so that application owners no longer need to 'rip and replace' storage infrastructures and pay much higher costs to meet their performance and uptime objectives."

 

Run Faster Virtualized: By Eliminating the I/O Bottlenecks in Clouds and Virtualized Data Centers
"DataCore's impact on performance was dramatic in every metric we measured. Even more impressive is how SANsymphony-V simplifies management and how easily it can make data center storage more resilient. With a single mouse click disk capacity is served and all the normal error-prone steps to configure, tune and set best paths for high availability get done auto-magically," said Tony Palmer, senior engineer and analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group Lab.

In the ESG Lab Validation report, the benchmark tests confirmed that Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange workloads were able to improve their performance by nearly 5x as compared to running the same workloads on non-virtualized physical servers.

To further increase tier 1 business critical application responsiveness, companies often spend excessively on flash memory-based SSDs. SANsymphony-V's auto-tiering and adaptive caching feature optimize performance and the use of these premium-priced flash resources alongside more modestly priced, higher capacity disk drives. SANsymphony-V constantly monitors I/O behavior and intelligently auto-selects between server memory caches, flash storage and traditional disk resources in real-time to ensure that the most suitable class or tier of storage device is assigned to each workload based on priorities and urgency.

Keynote Presentation, Hands-on-lab demos and ‘What’s new and important to know’ sessions

At SNW Europe DataCore will demonstrate functional versatility and performance scalability of its hypervisor under the motto "Elevator to the Cloud" at booth 2 with its distribution partner ADN and in the Hands-On-Lab. The conference program of the Platinum sponsor is complemented by a key note of Vice President and Managing Director EMEA Christian Hagen and further presentations and demos for the architecture of dynamic virtual storage infrastructures.

Additional DataCore Programs and Features being showcased:

DataCore at the event will also spotlight:

• New system builder partners and DataCore’s commitment to working with partners to build an ecosystem of appliance-focused, value-add versions of its storage hypervisor that meet their individual customer needs.
• New Cloud Service Providers and hosters that are using SANsymphony-V under the DataCore Cloud Service Provider Program.
• A SANsymphony-V 9.0.1 update release this month to enable support for Windows Server 2012 applications hosts and a follow-up update release expected early next year to support running SANsymphony-V on Windows Server 2012.
• How to empower VMware SRM and VAAI benefits across heterogeneous storage arrays and the announcement of an update release of the vSphere plug-in that supports storage reclamation and enables VMware administrators to control and schedule SANsymphony-V services, provisioning, taking snapshots and tasks directly from their VMware vCenter Server Management Platform.
• New simpler to use and time saving recovery with Continuous Data Protection (CDP) to rapidly rollback in time and recover critical Tier 1 business workloads and VMs.
• A sneak preview of partner-integrated ‘datacenter in a box’ unified SAN/NAS storage systems and a pre-packaged Virtual Desktop Server reference architecture that features the cost and performance advantages of running Microsoft Hyper-V and DataCore SANsymphony-V co-resident on the same platform.

Test Drive the DataCore Storage Hypervisor; Free License Key of SANsymphony-V

Download a 30 Day Free Trial download of SANsymphony-V at: www.datacore.com/Software/Closer-Look/Demos.aspx

DataCore Software Awarded “Innovation Leader of the Year” at CIO Summit 2012

DataCore Software has been awarded “Innovation Leader of the Year” by CIO Europe Summit 2012. IDC analysts and C-Level executives of over 60 European IT departments who attended the summit selected DataCore based on its latest release of its storage software SANsymphony™-V 9.0 – the storage hypervisor for the Cloud optimized for private clouds, cloud service providers and large scale data centres.

“CIO Europe Summit Frankfurt 2012 gathered over 60 C-level executives from the CIO industry across Europe. It is the arena for senior level executives to engage in focused dialogue with their peers, examine management objectives and meet with the solution providers who can best meet their needs,” said Marc Baker, EMEA CIO Summit Director at GDS International. “One of the most impressive participants at the event in 2012 was DataCore. A large number of the CIOs and delegates were really impressed with the workshop and one-to-one meetings. Huge congratulations to DataCore for being awarded ‘Innovation Leader of the Year’ following the release of SANsymphony-V 9.0.”

 

Introduced in June 2012, DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V 9.0 offers customers superior flexibility, powerful automation and exceptional value. It is transforming the economics of virtualization for organizations of all sizes worldwide, by delivering flexibility, performance, value and scale, regardless of the storage hardware they use. "The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud" optimizes storage pool management, high availability stretch-site mirroring and automatic continuous data protection features for fast application recovery. SANsymphony-V 9.0 also features enterprise-wide flash SSD storage auto-tiering and adaptive caching capabilities that significantly boost the speed, throughput and availability of virtualized business applications like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange.

“We are very pleased with the CIO Summit 2012 Award as it witnesses the acceptance and market footprint of our storage hypervisor technology in larger scale enterprises. Thousands of customers throughout Europe have already realized the compelling performance and productivity advantage of DataCore™ SANsymphony-V,” said Stefan von Dreusche, Sales Director EMEA, Central Europe Region. “The DataCore storage hypervisor greatly improves the economics of new and existing storage assets so that application owners no longer need to 'rip and replace' storage infrastructures and pay much higher costs to meet their performance and uptime objectives."

At the CIO Summit in October 2012, 65 of Europe's most influential CIOs attended the eighth Chief Information Officer Europe Summit (CIO EU 8) to strategize on IT issues and share best practices and key subject presentations. The CIOs and the event’s analyst partner IDC presented and focused on managing data challenges, the ubiquitous question of cloud computing and the array of regulatory and security requirements surrounding it. https://twitter.com/cioeurope / http://pic.twitter.com/xHdhqkAd

 

Video: George Teixeira, CEO of DataCore Software talks about Storage Virtualization and DataCore

In this Video, during a recent visit to DataCore’s HQ, George Teixeira (CEO, president and co-founder) talks about his company and the relationship between DataCore and the business in Europe.
http://juku.it/en/articles/video-george-teixeira-talks-datacore.html


George Teixeira talks DataCore from Juku on Vimeo.

CIO Summit Presents 'Innovation Leader of the Year' Award to DataCore for SANsymphony-V 9.0 Storage Hypervisor

CIO Summit: DataCore was presented the 'Innovation Leader of the Year' Award for SANsymphony-V 9.0 Storage Hypervisor.

At the CIO Summit this week, 65 of Europe's most influential CIOs attended the eighth Chief Information Officer Europe Summit (CIO EU 8) to strategize on IT issues and share best practices and key subject presentations. The CIOs and the analyst firm IDC presented and focused on managing data challenges, the ubiquitous question of cloud computing and the array of regulatory and security requirements surrounding it.

CIO Europe‏@cioeurope

Huge Congratulations to @DataCore awarded Innovation Leader of the Year following the release of SANsymphony(tm)-V 9.0 #cioeu

DataCore on why it's the last man standing

By Chris Mellor
Read the full article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/24/datacore_picture/

“There is only one viable software SAN virtualization product available today and that is SANsymphony-V.”

“What about convergence, virtual storage appliances, flash-accelerated servers, and the cloud? DataCore will tweak, tune, optimise and develop SANsymphony to take account of them all and deliver what it has been focused on all along; a virtualized pool of SAN storage delivering data to servers in a fast and protected manner."

Why is DataCore the only dedicated software SAN virtualisation appliance vendor left standing? The answer lies in a skewed revenue geographic model, staff majority ownership of the company and a fair amount of luck.

It's also down to a solid product, though other companies with great products have failed where DataCore did not.

DataCore has absorbed $100m worth of funding and developed nine generations of storage virtualisation software – which it calls storage hypervisors – while other software storage virtualisation developers have withered and died in the face of storage array and server vendor selling their own storage virtualisation software paired with hardware; IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC) for example. How has DataCore managed to prosper - it has prospered - and survive in the face of such competition? The answer lies in the unique nature of the company and its founders.

DataCore was founded in 1998 with the realisation that a SAN disk drive array was, or could be, an X86 server running drive array controller code, using its attached storage and presenting as virtual disks of networked, block-access storage. Customers could buy standard servers, provision them with commodity disk drives, and so have freedom of choice rather than being restricted to storage array manufacturers' disk drive prices, often quite high, software licensing and functionality. They can also buy external storage arrays and have DataCore's SANsymphony software control them too. Thus DataCore helped pioneer the SAN virtualisation appliance idea.

SANsymphony, a storage hypervisor as DataCore views it, and its associated products support a variety of server operating systems and hypervisors, and provide modern SAN array features such as virtualisation, high-availability and thin provisioning. It can run in a dedicated server or as a virtual machine and there are more than 6,000 DataCore customers with more than 20,000 software licenses bought.

Why is DataCore the last man standing?

Firstly, the product is good; it does what it says it does on the box...

Read the full 3 page article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/24/datacore_picture/

Law firms gain peace of mind and more with DataCore storage hypervisor

The practice of law makes stringent demands on storage technology, most notably in terms of availability, disaster recovery, and efficiency. A modern law firm’s income—based on hourly billing--depends on constant access to critical applications for case management, e-discovery and litigation support, billing, document management, and more. Both the application servers and the storage underlying these applications must be able to run non-stop. Preservation of the firm’s data, and perhaps more important, that of their clients, against any threat from user error to a hurricane, is of course a top priority. And unless data storage assets are used efficiently, the growing volume of data involved in even a small-to-medium-sized legal practice--encompassing anything from PDF contracts to multi-gigabyte video depositions—can quickly overwhelm any reasonable storage budget.

Read More: Rennert Vogel Mandler & Rodriguez, P.A. and Stikeman-Elliott share their DataCore experience...

Storage Strategies Now Analyst Report: Virtualizing business-critical applications without hesitation using the DataCore SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor

"DataCore practically invented the concept of storage virtualization and has the years of experience in the field across thousands of customers and multiple generations of its product to claim a leadership position in the space now known as software-defined storage infrastructure. With SANsymphony-V R9, this experience is embodied in the comprehensive functionality and scalability of the product. The benefits it yields with regards to performance and availability are even more pronounced in scenarios where business-critical (Tier 1) applications must be virtualized and consolidated."

Read the full snapshot report by James E. Bagley, Senior Analyst &

Deni Connor, Founding Analyst
Storage Strategies NOW Snapshot Report: 

http://pages.datacore.com/StorageStrategiesNOW.html

 

The virtualization and consolidation of business-critical applications is a high priority for IT operations in organizations of all sizes. But the owners of these applications often balk at virtualization because of a set of unknowns that surround the loss of dedicated server hardware.

The truth is that applications perform differently in a virtualized environment as opposed to dedicated server hardware. Virtualization causes contention for shared storage resources and the performance of formerly well-behaved applications can become unpredictable. When performance becomes erratic and response times suffer, users grumble and application owners want their physical machines back. Storage equipment outages for routine maintenance, upgrades and expansion compound the problem because many virtual machines rely on those same resources.

Critical Business Applications: Storage virtualization can boost performance, Too

Interesting DataCenter Acceleration Post: http://www.datacenteracceleration.com/author.asp?section_id=2412&doc_id=252221

Storage virtualization appears to be a good way to give key apps greater performance.

The good thing about the computer industry is that every so often, the stars align and the opportunity arises for an explosion of new products in a particular sector. Over the past decade, for instance, all sorts of new data-storage schemes have come into being, each with its own special function or strength...

...The result for many IT operations has been a landscape of disparate storage solutions, not all of which are on such good speaking terms with each other. Can you say, proprietary stacks? Heterogeneity?

And right now, a whole new tier of storage is coming into play: flash-based solid-state drives (SSD), which add still more complexity and difference to the mix.

Fortunately, there's a good solution at hand, a way to effectively pave over many of the differences between disparate storage products and create what amounts to a unified architecture. It's virtualization, the same idea that has been playing out so well in the server world, making it possible to decouple applications and their software stacks from underlying hardware.

Or, put another way, virtualization can effectively hide and insulate applications from many if not all complexities, peculiarities, and incompatibilities by using software to abstract a set of resources and create the illusion of a single resource. That can bring down operational costs.

One of the many companies pushing the idea of cross-vendor storage virtualization has been DataCore Software, which sells to midsized and large enterprises running Windows Server. And lately, it has been pushing storage virtualization as a way to boost performance, too, especially of apps that have been virtualized on the server.

Company COO Steve Houck explains the problem: Once a bunch of apps have been virtualized and made to share a physical host under control of a hypervisor, their varying I/O patterns may easily conflict with each other. One app's fairly random traffic spikes can easily disrupt another's more regular I/Os, for instance. Indeed, it's widely accepted that this I/O problem is one of the most difficult hurdles to face newcomers to server virtualization.

Once storage resources themselves are virtualized, however, the movement and caching of data can be better managed and adjusted on the fly to meet the changing needs of specific apps and maintain or even boost their performance, Houck tells us. In fact, a storage hypervisor like DataCore's can work hand-in-hand with the server hypervisor -- supplied by VMware, for instance -- to resize caches in its own RAM memory, watch I/O patterns with an eye to identifying most-used data for caching closer to or even inside the server, and quickly redirect I/Os away from defective storage devices.

Typically, DataCore's hypervisor runs on a pair of Windows-based servers situated between the enterprise's compute servers and its physical storage devices. These servers manage their own in-memory data caches while also overseeing data mirroring, backups, and other operational chores.

According to Enterprise Strategy Group, an IT consulting outfit, benchmark tests (performed on behalf of DataCore) showed Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange workloads enjoying a nearly fivefold improvement in performance when storage was managed by DataCore's SANSymphony-V product.

Numbers like that -- and I imagine DataCore's not alone in achieving such performance gains through storage virtualization -- are hard to ignore. This clearly is a technology that any enterprise should investigate if it's truly interested in accelerating the performance of critical applications.

The Storage Hypervisor Rumble at SNWusa: Execs from HDS, Virsto, IBM and DataCore Debate, Discuss and Explain the Role of the Storage Hypervisor

Today, DataCore Software President and CEO George Teixeira will participate in a panel discussion at Computerworld SNW Fall 2012 on the storage hypervisor and its proven role in optimizing the storage component of virtualization and private cloud projects.

Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) will moderate a handpicked panel of experts, industry pioneers and executives from IBM, HDS, Virsto and DataCore Software. The SNW session, “Industry Perspective: Storage Management: Multiple Unique Supervisors Versus One Storage Hypervisor - A Panel Discussion,” will take place today - Tuesday, October 16 at 1:55 p.m. PT at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California as part of SNW’s Virtualization Track.

DataCore Software is the storage hypervisor leader and premier provider of storage virtualization software. A storage industry veteran, Teixeira co-founded the company and has served as president and CEO since 1998.

Introduced in June 2012, DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V 9.0 – “the Storage Hypervisor for the cloud” – offers customers superior flexibility, powerful automation and exceptional value. It is transforming the economics of virtualization for organizations of all sizes worldwide, by delivering flexibility, performance, value and scale, regardless of the storage hardware they use.

SNW is the world’s largest independently-produced conference series focused on the evolution of architecture for a new world of mobility, Big Data and business agility. SNW is produced by Computerworld and co-owned by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).

Who: George Teixeira CEO, DataCore Software; Mark Peters, Enterprise Strategy Group; Mark Davis CEO, Vistro; Ron Riffe Business Line Manager, IBM; Claus Mikkelsen Chief Scientist, HDS. 

What: Panel Discussion: “Industry Perspective: Storage Management: Multiple Unique Supervisors Versus One Storage Hypervisor”

When: Tuesday, October 16 at 1:55 p.m. PT

Where: SNW Fall 2012, Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, California

VMworld Europe 2012: DataCore Storage Hypervisor Optimises SSD Flash Storage and Server Caches

Makes I/O-Intensive Business Critical Applications Run Faster Virtualised

Barcelona & Reading – October 10, 2012 - Today at VMware's VMworld Europe 2012,DataCore Software, the storage hypervisor leader and premier storage virtualisation software provider, is showcasing how SANsymphony™-V 9.0, the newest release of its flagship product, boosts the speed, throughput and availability of virtualised, I/O-intensive tier 1 applications like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange. Customers report up to 5x faster performance and achieve better than 99.999% uptime after virtualising their existing storage with SANsymphony-V.

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

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

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

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

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

Ensuring Fast and Always Available Applications Without a Major Storage Investment
Once I/O intensive tier 1 applications are virtualized, SANsymphony-V ensures high availability, eliminating single points of failure and disruption through application-transparent physical separation stretched across rooms or off-site with full auto-recovery capabilities for the highest levels of business continuity. SANsymphony-V effectively virtualizes whatever storage is on a user's floor, whether direct-attached or SAN-connected, to achieve the robust and responsive shared storage environment necessary to support highly dynamic virtual IT environments.

Customers Around the World Are Increasing the Performance, Improving the Availability and Reducing the Storage Costs of Their Virtualized Tier 1 Applications
"SAP was the critical element in the project because the SAP system places the highest load and the greatest demand on both performance and on the need for availability," said Jurgen Bechtel, CIO of MENNEKES, a global leader in the manufacturing of electrical products with headquarters in Germany. "The result was very positive -- SAP runs on DataCore, with more performance than on our previous storage systems. The DataCore solution simply proved itself."

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

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

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

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

DataCore Empowers Software-defined Storage Infrastructures and Private Clouds; SANsymphony-V Certified VMware Ready™

DataCore Software announced that SANsymphony™-V is certified as VMware Ready™ and easily integrates with VMware’s portfolio of solutions, allowing data centre and private cloud operators to gain the most from their virtual infrastructure investments. At VMworld Europe 2012, DataCore today showcased SANsymphony™-V 9.0 “The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud,” which offers customers many far-reaching innovations essential to managing enterprise-wide storage and to quickly deploying agile, scalable cloud storage infrastructures.

Empowering VMware SRM and VAAI Benefits Across Heterogeneous Storage Arrays

VMware VAAI storage-based hardware acceleration lowers CPU and memory consumption, enables faster deployment, supports VMware vMotion® for storage tasks and disk creation, as well as higher VM consolidation ratios. However, these capabilities only work with VAAI-compliant storage arrays. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V extends VAAI hardware acceleration benefits across heterogeneous storage arrays, regardless of whether those arrays have native VAAI support or the VMFS volumes span the same brand of array enclosure.

The storage hypervisor sits in front of all types of storage vendor arrays and devices, presenting DataCore-powered virtual disks/LUNs to VMware vSphere. The software masks the physical characteristics of the underlying storage devices. Bottom-line, it does not matter which physical storage array is sitting on the back-end.

The DataCore storage hypervisor empowers VMware administrators to:

• Replicate LUNs or migrate virtual disks across different storage arrays non-disruptively

• Facilitate the implementation of powerful capabilities like VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM) on top of those virtualized and replicated disks

• Enable VAAI operations across diverse hardware platforms

• Simplify migrations and VMware Storage vMotion

• Free up the VMkernel for other activities by offloading work to the storage hypervisor

VMware vCenter™ Server Plug-In Makes it Easy for VMware vSphere Admins to Eliminate Storage Issues

DataCore has made available a VMware vCenter Server plug-in that integrates enterprise-wide storage hypervisor management with VMware vCenter Server to empower VMware administrators with the ability to easily manage virtual machines (VMs) and storage from a single console. Enterprises can now control and schedule key SANsymphony-V storage virtualization services, taking snapshots and provisinong capacity directly from their VMware vCenter console. The DataCore VMware vCenter Server management plug-in software is available immediately for download to all SANsymphony-V customers.

Computerworld: Creating cohesive storage management

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232051/Creating_cohesive_storage_management?taxonomyId=19&pageNumber=2

Storage 'Hypervisors'
A growing number of vendors are offering "storage hypervisors" that virtualize the storage and, in some cases, their associated file servers to create scalable, flexible pools of storage. This virtualization layer often runs on standard x86 servers and is optimized for specific functions, storage protocols or applications. One example is DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V, which links to VMware's vCenter to automatically discover VMware servers running in a customer's environment. A systems administrator can then associate a given class of storage with various servers, and SANsymphony automatically provisions it.

Hosting and integration services firm Amnet Technology Solutions has been using SANsymphony for close to three years, and senior technologist Rich Conway says the product has provided "absolutely phenomenal" redundancy. "The entire storage infrastructure was essentially mirrored, where both sides are active/active, and if any component of either side fails for any reason, our entire grid stays up and our customers don't even notice," he says. SANsymphony has also enabled Amnet to eliminate planned downtime for routine maintenance such as firmware upgrades, says Conway...