Thursday 27 June 2013

Virtualization World: DataCore SANsymphony-V Brings Smooth Sailing, Performance and Cost Savings for United Arab Shipping Company

http://virtualizationworld365.info/news_full.php?id=27961

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V combines with the power of Solid State Disk to provide ultra high I/O and enterprise management capabilities.

DataCore Software announced that the world’s 3
rd largest shipping organisation, United Arab Shipping Company (UASC) has dramatically increased performance using DataCore’s SANsymphony-V and RamSan’s SSD.

Ashraf Jamal, UASC’s Data Centre Manager, Dubai, observes
 “Whilst SSDs can be up to 100 times faster than SAS hard disk drives, there is high price tag for this performance – up to 20 times higher cost per GB. However what we have seen by using DataCore SANsymphony-V to auto-tier RamSan, and Nexsan, is that in reality we save by requiring significantly less storage hardware to house, manage and cool.”

UASC is an established colossus of the shipping world, covering over 200 destinations globally, via an expanding fleet of containerized, conventional and temperature controlled cargo vessels, including three recently launched ‘green’ super containerships -the largest and most advanced such vessels in the world. Back in 2010, in line with its continued plan for growth, UASC initiated a full overhaul of global IT systems, moving data centers from Singapore to Dubai and transitioning its entire network to the latest high performance integrated container carrier information system, 'TRUST', to automate business operations and provide lightning fast communication with the company’s fleet. Within the  ‘TRUST’ system sits fleet management; company email; HR system; AMOS fleet maintenance system and accounts; together with over 22,000 outlets – that allow users to book shipments/source fleet bills and obtain rates.

Ashraf Jamal reflects on the then user feedback that pointed towards variable and slow performance of applications: 
“Providing the infrastructure behind one of the world’s largest commercial shipping fleets requires lightning fast performance to reduce processing time and retain competitive edge; whilst providing enhanced management and speed of recovery for our core applications. To achieve this, we consulted our trusted advisors for over 4 years, ProTechnology (ProTech).”

Combined SSD/SANsymphony-V solution provides an affordable ultra high speed appliance with auto tiering, mirroring, snapshotting and replication:


Ali Saadawi, Senior Account Manager at DataCore Gold Partner ProTech, was instrumental in the design phase at UASC:- 
“Working with UASC, we devised a high performance computing infrastructure using TMS’s RamSan-630 Rackmount appliance working together with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V solution running on two Dell PowerEdge R710 servers.  The resultant combination creates an ultra high speed appliance with auto tiering, mirroring, snapshotting and replication in an affordable solution. From the outset, we projected that the combination of RamSan and DataCore would provide a 40% increase in the performance of RamSan alone - already one of the world’s fastest SSDs.”

Also within the Storage Area Network, ProTech installed 3 Nexsan SATABeasts 2’s, all connected over the Fibre Channel network through QLogic HBAs.

In its rawest form in a test environment, the RamSan-630 proved capable of achieving a powerful 1,200,000 IOPS (Input Output per Second) speed from the SSDs, meaning data transfer rates were hundreds of times faster than traditional mechanical hard disks. The team at UASC were able to combine that raw performance with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V unique caching algorithms to harness further dramatic jumps in I/O. (The caching within SANsymphony-V essentially recognizes I/O patterns to anticipate which blocks to read next so that it can be fulfilled quickly from memory at electronic speeds). Of even greater importance to the team was the ability to provide storage efficiency by intelligently auto-tiering data to cope with performance demands. With DataCore’s SANsymphony-V in place, the software dynamically chooses between allocating data to the RamSan’s high-end SSDs and the lower cost, higher capacity Nexsan SATABeast 2 drives. It achieves this through monitoring I/O behaviour, determining frequency of use, then dynamically moving blocks of information to the most suitable class or tier of storage device. Therefore SANsymphony™-V software automatically promotes USACs most frequently used blocks to the fastest tier, whereas least frequently used blocks get “demoted” to the slowest tier.

Now in a production environment, with the team increasing the capacity licence for SANsymphony-V with both snapshot and synchronous mirroring becoming favourite features of SANsymphony-V. The Continuous Data Protection(CDP) feature, allows UASC to return to an earlier point-in-time without taking explicit backups or interrupting applications; whilst logging and timestamping I/Os. This is helpful when USAC needs to quickly and seamlessly recover in minutes to a point in time to undo unintended data modifications, or to recover from an application bug incident. Previous Ashrif notes, this was a laborious and time consuming process that previously could take six or eight hours, locating and restoring tapes and recovering tables. Unsurprisingly for an organisation that takes high availability very seriously, SANsymphony-V’s real-time I/O synchronous replication eliminates single point of failures while making UASCs mirrored virtual disks behave like one, multi-ported shared drive.

Ashrif is pleased to endorse DataCore’s SANsymphony-V in a high performance computing environment. 
“Now our HPC environment is affordable, secure and easy to maintain and our TRUST and core applications certainly run faster and are more manageable through our unified storage management and virtualization layer, thanks to SANsymphony-V.”

And for the future, UASC plan to add replication to their Kuwait corporate head office, some 1000km away  for Disaster Recovery, but that’s a different chapter!

Thursday 20 June 2013

United Arab Shipping Company uses DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software to increase performance and lower costs

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V combines with the power of Solid State Disk to provide ultra high I/O and enterprise management capabilities. 

DataCore Software announced that
the world’s 3rd largest shipping
organisation, United Arab
Shipping Company (UASC) has dramatically increased performance using DataCore’s SANsymphony-V and RamSan’s SSD.


Ashraf Jamal, UASC’s Data Centre Manager, Dubai, observes “Whilst SSDs can be up to 100 times faster than SAS hard disk drives, there is high price tag for this performance – up to 20 times higher cost per GB. However what we have seen by using DataCore SANsymphony-V to auto-tier RamSan, and Nexsan, is that in reality we save by requiring significantly less storage hardware to house, manage and cool.”

UASC is an established colossus of the shipping world, covering over 200 destinations globally, via an expanding fleet of containerised, conventional and temperature controlled cargo vessels, including three recently launched ‘green’ super containerships -the largest and most advanced such vessels in the world. Back in 2010, in line with its continued plan for growth, UASC initiated a full overhaul of global IT systems, moving data centres from Singapore to Dubai and transitioning its entire network to the latest high performance integrated container carrier information system, 'TRUST', to automate business operations and provide lightning fast communication with the company’s fleet. Within the  ‘TRUST’ system sits fleet management; company email; HR system; AMOS fleet maintenance system and accounts; together with over 22,000 outlets – that allow users to book shipments/source fleet bills and obtain rates.

Ashraf Jamal reflects on the then user feedback that pointed towards variable and slow performance of applications: “Providing the infrastructure behind one of the world’s largest commercial shipping fleets requires lightning fast performance to reduce processing time and retain competitive edge; whilst providing enhanced management and speed of recovery for our core applications. To achieve this, we consulted our trusted advisors for over 4 years, ProTechnology (ProTech).”

Combined SSD/SANsymphony-V solution provides an affordable ultra high speed appliance with auto tiering, mirroring, snapshotting and replication: 

Ali Saadawi, Senior Account Manager at DataCore Gold Partner ProTech, was instrumental in the design phase at UASC:- “Working with UASC, we devised a high performance computing infrastructure using TMS’s RamSan-630 Rackmount appliance working together with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V solution running on two Dell PowerEdge R710 servers.  The resultant combination creates an ultra high speed appliance with auto tiering, mirroring, snapshotting and replication in an affordable solution. From the outset, we projected that the combination of RamSan and DataCore would provide a 40% increase in the performance of RamSan alone - already one of the world’s fastest SSDs.” 

Also within the Storage Area Network, ProTech installed 3 Nexsan SATABeasts 2’s, all connected over the Fibre Channel network through QLogic HBAs.

In its rawest form in a test environment, the RamSan-630 proved capable of achieving a powerful 1,200,000 IOPS (Input Output per Second) speed from the SSDs, meaning data transfer rates were hundreds of times faster than traditional mechanical hard disks. The team at UASC were able to combine that raw performance with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V unique caching algorithms to harness further dramatic jumps in I/O. (The caching within SANsymphony-V essentially recognizes I/O patterns to anticipate which blocks to read next so that it can be fulfilled quickly from memory at electronic speeds). Of even greater importance to the team was the ability to provide storage efficiency by intelligently auto-tiering data to cope with performance demands. With DataCore’s SANsymphony-V in place, the software dynamically chooses between allocating data to the RamSan’s high-end SSDs and the lower cost, higher capacity Nexsan SATABeast 2 drives. It achieves this through monitoring I/O behaviour, determining frequency of use, then dynamically moving blocks of information to the most suitable class or tier of storage device. Therefore SANsymphony™-V software automatically promotes USACs most frequently used blocks to the fastest tier, whereas least frequently used blocks get “demoted” to the slowest tier.

Now in a production environment, with the team increasing the capacity licence for SANsymphony-V with both snapshot and synchronous mirroring becoming favourite features of SANsymphony-V. The Continuous Data Protection(CDP) feature, allows UASC to return to an earlier point-in-time without taking explicit backups or interrupting applications; whilst logging and timestamping I/Os. This is helpful when USAC needs to quickly and seamlessly recover in minutes to a point in time to undo unintended data modifications, or to recover from an application bug incident. Previous Ashrif notes, this was a laborious and time consuming process that previously could take six or eight hours, locating and restoring tapes and recovering tables. Unsurprisingly for an organisation that takes high availability very seriously, SANsymphony-V’s real-time I/O synchronous replication eliminates single point of failures while making UASCs mirrored virtual disks behave like one, multi-ported shared drive.

Ashrif is pleased to endorse DataCore’s SANsymphony-V in a high performance computing environment. “Now our HPC environment is affordable, secure and easy to maintain and our TRUST and core applications certainly run faster and are more manageable through our unified storage management and virtualization layer, thanks to SANsymphony-V.”

And for the future, UASC plan to add replication to their Kuwait corporate head office, some 1000km away  for Disaster Recovery, but that’s a different chapter!

Friday 14 June 2013

DataCore Continues to Advance its Proven Software-defined Storage and Updates SANsymphony-V

“Storage is undergoing a sea-change today 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,” said 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.”

Amid all the talk and future-looking promises of software-defined storage from hardware-biased manufacturers, DataCore Software has delivered real-world solutions to thousands of customers worldwide. DataCore continues to advance and evolve its device-independent storage management and virtualization software, while maintaining focus on empowering IT users to take back control of their storage infrastructure. To that end, the DataCore has just announced a number of significant enhancements to the comprehensive management capabilities within version R9 of its SANsymphony™-V storage virtualization 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.
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 DataCore’s 15 years of customer feedback and field-proven experience 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 centers. 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. The time and resource demands required to manage a broadening diversity of different storage models, disk devices and flash technologies – even when standardized with a single manufacturer – are a growing burden for organizations already struggling to meet application performance needs on limited budgets.

The bottom line is that companies are forced to confront many unknowns in terms of storage. With traditional storage systems, the conventional practice has been to oversize and overprovision storage with the hope that it will meet new and unpredictable demands, but this drives up costs and too often fails to meet performance objectives. As a result, companies have become smarter and have realized that it is no longer feasible or sensible to simply throw expensive, purpose-built hardware at the problem. Companies today are demanding a new level of software flexibility that endures over time and adds value over multiple generations and types of hardware devices. What organizations require is a strategic – rather than an ad hoc – approach to managing storage.

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...

Monday 10 June 2013

Danish tunnel builder Femern opts for DataCore storage virtualisation

By Anthony Adshead, ComputerWeekly.com

The organisation overseeing construction of the 18km €5.5bn Fehmarnbelt tunnel between Denmark and Germany has deployed DataCore storage virtualisation software in place of its existing Dell EqualLogic array, cutting disk costs by around 75%.
Danish state-owned Femern’s IT systems will be used by up to 150 engineering staff directly, as well as numerous consultants and contractors who need access via VMware ESX to CAD drawings, specifications and workflow systems for the project, which will complete in 2021.
In preparation for commencement of construction work on the underwater tunnel and an expected expansion of data, Femern examined its systems and found its existing EqualLogic iSCSI SAN prone to I/Obottlenecks and reaching end of life.
Tim Olsson, IT manager at Femern, said the organisation did not consider upgrading the EqualLogic array because of its complexity and the cost of buying disk.
“The EqualLogic array was at the end of its life and coming with an increased high price tag," he said. "We didn’t buy another one because it was too complex for our needs, with features we did not use, and that it locked us into buying only disks from EqualLogic.”
Femern consulted with its IT partner COMM2IG, which recommended DataCore’sSANsymphony-V storage software with Fusion-io PCIe server flash to boost performance for access to tier 1 applications.
Two DataCore SANsymphony-V nodes were implemented on two HP DL380 G7 servers. Each server has two CPUs and 96GB of RAM, plus a 320GB Fusion-io PCIe ioDrive2 card. Overall, there is 50TB of storage capacity based on HP direct-attached storage in SAS and SATAdrives.
With the flash layer and the two spinning disk types there are three tiers of storage, between which DataCore automatically migrates data according to use characteristics to ensure data is matched as best as possible to the cost of storage it resides on.
Software-only storage adds flexibility
DataCore is a software-only storage product that customers can install on any suitable server hardware. It provides storage virtualisation functions that can pool disk on direct-attached storage or commodity or legacy arrays to create shared storage.
The market is dominated by suppliers that sell storage hardware bundled with their own controller software and operating systems (OS). Software products aim to break that link by offering storage software that can be deployed on commodity servers with standard disk drives to cut.
That was one of the chief draws of DataCore for the Femern IT department, according to Olsson.
“With DataCore, we can be more flexible in where we get our disks from," he said. "We can buy cheaper, slow disk or faster disk and make it available to our apps with DataCore. It’s a seamless way of scaling capacity. So, for example, when the HP arrays reach end of life, it will be a fluent process to migrate to the next physical media.”
Olsson estimated that buying DataCore plus HP direct-attached disk cost 50,000 Danish Kroner (about £6,000) instead of the DKr 300,000 (£35,000) a new EqualLogic array would have been.
Did Femern consider the possible extra work involved in a software storage product compared with a factory-produced array with in-built controller software?
“It took some time to set DataCore up with the switches and so on, but once set up it’s easy to add disk and make it available to the apps,” said Olsson.

Featured SlideShow: Virtualization's Top Challenges: Storage Performance, Costs

Storage Costs have increased


Most IT organizations are familiar with virtualization, yet many struggle with storage performance and cost issues. A new survey of 477 IT professionals conducted by Datacore Software, a provider of storage virtualization software, finds that 42 percent have problems with storage performance and costs. Additionally, 51 percent report that their storage budgets remained the same year-over-year, while 20 percent said they were reduced. Only 30 percent said their storage budgets grew in 2013. At the same time, 52 percent said storage now accounts for more than 25 percent of their virtualization budget. Putting all these numbers together highlights an opportunity for the channel in the form of helping IT organizations identify ways to manage storage more efficiently at a time when costs are rising and new initiatives involving big data are just getting off the ground. Among those opportunities are the emergence of flash storage and solid-state drives (SSDs), which the survey finds has seen limited adoption, and cloud storage, which is another much-hyped technology that has yet to see broad adoption. In both cases, adoption seems inevitable once channel partners show customers how it can be done cost effectively. Here are key takeaways from the study.

Full story:
http://www.channelinsider.com/virtualization/slideshows/virtualizations-top-challenges-storage-performance-costs/

Friday 7 June 2013

DataCore Software Named Among Top Finalists for the 2013 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award

DataCore Software, a premier provider of storage virtualization software, today announced it has been selected as a finalist for the Microsoft 2013 Partner of the Year Award in the server platform category.

“Since DataCore™ was founded 15 years ago, its storage virtualization solutions have been written to work solely on Microsoft-based platforms,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliance & business development at DataCore Software. “Our SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform helps Microsoft customers to gain the most from their storage investments, which is an absolutely critical component to any organization’s data center. This award validates the value that DataCore can provide to those who demand the highest performance from their IT infrastructure.”

The 
Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions during the past year.

Wednesday 5 June 2013

Need Faster Enterprise Apps and Continuous Availability? Storage Virtualization Done Right Accelerates and Protects Tier 1 Applications

What’s holding you back from virtualizing business-critical applications like Oracle, VDI, SAP, Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint?

Our guess is you’re concerned about decreased performance and increased downtime.

But have you asked yourself why these apps tend to run slowly and erratically once virtualized? Here’s a hint: It’s not virtualization. No – these performance and availability issues stem from competition for shared storage resources. The resulting inconsistencies in service levels cause users to become frustrated, productivity and organizational efficiency to plunge – and your business to take hits that it can’t afford.

DataCore SANsymphony-V allows you to take advantage of the benefits that come with virtualizing tier 1 applications – without taking on the risks. With SANsymphony-V, you get: faster virtualized tier-1 apps, continuous availability (and peace of mind), less time and money spent on upgrades, and a more responsive, agile IT environment. Listen to this on-demand webcast or follow the links below to learn more.

Microsoft SQL Server
DataCore optimizes storage efficiency, performance and availability for scalable Microsoft Exchange Environments.

Microsoft Sharepoint
DataCore empowers Microsoft SharePoint environments to provide the highest levels of data availability, performance, & responsiveness of service.

SAP Business Applications
DataCore ensures performance & scalability at a lower ownership cost, higher service quality, & protection of your critical SAP ERP & App systems.

Microsoft Exchange
DataCore optimizes storage efficiency, performance and availability for scalable Microsoft Exchange Environments.

Oracle
DataCore maximizes the performance and return on your investment in Oracle databases, applications, & data warehouses for your information infrastructure.

VDI
DataCore makes the economics of storage work for VDI. The SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor is specifically designed to handle the unique challenges of VDI environments.