Friday 27 March 2015

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
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.

Thursday 19 March 2015

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.



Wednesday 18 March 2015

The Register: Huawei and DataCore Software-Defined Storage spawn a beautiful Hyper-Converged system


A hyper-converged server and storage system is coming as the offspring of a Huawei-DataCore deal giving channel partners of both an answer to Nutanix, Simplicity, and EVO: RAIL-type offerings.
Basically it’s Huawei FusionServer servers running DataCore SANsymphony-V software with Huawei Oceanstor direct-attached storage made into a virtual SAN across 2 to 64 servers. Also, 3rd-party storage can be virtualised through DataCore’s software and added into the storage resource pool.
Two or more Huawei server nodes can be used to pool external storage and form a stretch cluster over multiple data centres, with DataCore failover, using sync mirroring, providing non-stop data access if there is a disaster in either location.

The systems can have pre-installed Microsoft server software and be delivered optimised to support Microsoft applications and Hyper-V virtualisation projects, as well as VMware ones. Supported apps include SQL server, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics ERP, SharePoint, Exchange, SAP and VDI.

The two suppliers say DataCore and Huawei channel partners can now provide 100 per cent Huawei hardware products, end to end, covering storage, network and compute needs.

It’s good news for Huawei, whose channel can now pitch its servers and disk and flash storage into accounts with existing third-party storage arrays and use DataCore software as the glue to bring it all together, ticking the software-defined and hyper-converged boxes on the way.

For DataCore it’s good news as well, coming on top of existing deals with Cisco (UCS), Dell (PowerEdge) and Fujitsu (Primergy) for their servers. All server vendors are jumping aboard the hyper-converged and software-defined storage bandwagons as a way to sell more servers and their own direct-attached storage.

They see the virtual SANs inherent in such offers as a way to divert customer spend previously devoted to third-party SAN arrays into their own pockets.

Get a briefing doc about the combined Huawei/DataCore system here (pdf).
Huawei/DataCore hyper-converged systems will be available for shipment later this month within EMEA. List prices start at around $20.000. 

Tuesday 10 March 2015

ARN: DataCore set to invest heavily in Australian channel; Software-defined Storage fuels growth

Expects 40 per cent growth in 2015

Software-defined storage vendor, DataCore, is set to invest heavily in the Australian channel and expects growth of more than 40 per cent in 2015.

DataCore worldwide senior vice president Carlos Carreras told ARN the "window" for software-defined was "now" and that the company was looking to expand its team 20 per cent in the next 12 months.

"Over the course of the next 18 months we believe that the storage and datacentre space is going to be completely transformed from one that has been hardware-centric for decades, to one that will be software driven.
"As a result we are investing. We are investing in our company, we are investing in our people, we are investing in our systems, we are investing in our channel."

He said it was an opportune moment for channel partners to transform their business.
"To lead with their value by understanding customers workloads, by understanding application needs and providing a flexible and dynamic infrastructure that simplifies storage management," he said.
"The boundaries that existed in the past, no longer exist. You are no longer bound to a storage array. You are no longer bound to a disc. With software-defined you have the ability to span, control manage and protect you customers data."

Software-defined storage hides the hardware under a virtualisation layer using abstraction.
But there are two schools of thought on how the hardware underneath should interact.
Traditional storage vendors like HP and EMC use closed ecosystems and specific hardware, where as open vendors like Datacore, Red Hat (open-source) and VMware can have any brand of hardware sitting underneath the hypervisor.

Carreras said he was seeing a shift to customers putting more of their workloads on their servers.
"Now they leverage those servers with their processing capabilities to not just provide the CPU or the processing capability, but also provide networking and that's really bringing around this discussion of converged and hyper-converged.
"The difference for us as we look at hyper-converged is it's all about scale-out in a way that's hardware independent, but still exploits all those underlying assets.
He said 30 per cent of the company's sales last year was on converged, to the extent that it had developed relationships with companies like Fujitsu.
"Fujitsu package a joint hyper-converged bundle powered by Datacore in Europe," Carreras said.
"We are expanding that relationship throughout other geographies."

He said Datacore was looking to replicate what it had done it Europe with Fujitsu all over the world, including Australia.
"Customers are talking applications and workloads," he said.
"They don't really care about the infrastructure. What they do care about is delivering on a service level. The whole conversation has shifted to one that is hardware and infrastructure based to one that is workload-centric."

Carreras said the APAC business was a key emerging growth market.
"We have had a presence around APAC now for well over 13 years," he said.
"Sydney Airport is one of our most recent successes and we are at a point now where we are investing in the business.
"You can expect to see an increase across APAC, you can expect to see an additional sales resources here in Australia, we're looking to add sales leadership within the territory.
"We will grown our team in excess of 20 per cent in the next 12 months and as part of that we will be looking at our investment in the channel.
"We have been channel-centric from day one, we sell with and through our partners, work closely with our distributors.
"You can continue to expect a very strong investment in channel programs, channel incentives, channel training all the things that help us bring this message to the forefront."

The company's Australian distributors include Avnet, IDS and Westcon.

Current customers include Transdev, Cheap as Chips, House of Travel (both on Lenovo), Murdoch university, Jetstar and RMS.

He said the company had done a "tremendous" amount of work with Microsoft, replicating Azure.
"Now we are seeing this as a way bridging workloads into Azure. Tying their on-prem to off-prem.
"We are collaborating with Lenovo and targeting the Lenovo channel through solutions bundles that simplify that customer experience and make it easier for the channel to deliver these converged technologies.
He said the Lenovo partnership had started in the US, but that they were now in early phases of looking at ways to target Lenovo channel partners to help them capitalise on the opportunity.
"You are going to see us do a lot more with server vendors to look at ways to give those servers personalities - in this case it's a converged personality," he said.
"But giving them greater value as part of a software-defined datacentre strategy.

...He said the fact that there was now a software-defined storage category meant people were taking notice.
"The fact that we have major hardware companies talking about their software-defined storage really validates what we have been saying and helping our customers accomplish all along.
"For us this is validation of everything that we have done."

Friday 6 March 2015

DataCore Teams with Cisco to Certify UCS Platform, Expand Enterprise Use Cases and Extend Storage Services Infrastructure-wide

“Cisco UCS has become a leading force in enterprise computing infrastructure, and DataCore is excited to extend its capabilities to include the delivery of Tier-1 enterprise storage services to business customers.” said Steve Houck, COO of DataCore Software. “Software-Defined Storage allows organizations to have greater choice while protecting their existing investments. SANsymphony-V and Cisco UCS combine to deliver a comprehensive, powerful, yet intuitive platform that allows organizations to address their storage needs and derive more value across their complete infrastructure.”
DataCore Achieves Cisco Compatibility Certification
DataCore Software and Cisco announced today that its SANsymphony™-V and Virtual SAN software, version 10.0.1, has successfully achieved Cisco Interoperability Verification Testing (IVT) compatibility certification with Cisco's Unified Computing System, the UCS C-Series Rack-Servers. See today’s latest press release for more details:  DataCore Software Achieves Cisco Compatibility Certification
DataCore and Cisco: New Use Cases + Extends Enterprise Storage Services Infrastructure-wide

DataCore SANsymphony-V combined with Cisco UCS C-Series offers multiple solution scenario highlights, including:
External SAN Pooling via Cisco VIC Connectivity – Modern IT infrastructures often contain a complex mix of incompatible legacy SAN arrays and emerging storage products. Storage systems on the Cisco Virtual Interface Card Hardware Compatibility List (VIC HCL) can be easily connected to a DataCore-powered C-series 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, offers modular scalability with minimal initial investment by allowing capacity to be added efficiently, automatically or on-demand, as needed.
Metro-Clustering of Existing and New Storage for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery – Two or more Cisco UCS 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. Cisco partners can easily enable a broader set of enterprise customers with application availability and mobility, regardless of storage infrastructure, by combining DataCore-powered C-series rack with technologies such as Cisco OTV. Asynchronous replication can be enabled to provide further protection in DR scenarios, including failover to public cloud services.
Extreme Acceleration for Business Applications – Cisco UCS 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 UCS server. DataCore’s write optimization technologies can accelerate random IOPS hard drive performance to match performance associated with Flash SSD media capabilities. 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.
DataCore’s SANsymphony-V is a proven 10th-generation software platform with 25,000+ licenses deployed at more than 10,000 customer production sites globally. To learn more, please see:DataCore Software-Defined Storage
Cisco and DataCore Partners in Action
DataCore and Cisco partners can now provide 100% Cisco hardware solutions, end to end, covering storage, network, and compute needs in order to provide complete datacenter solutions with Tier-1 enterprise storage capabilities. These solutions provide enterprise-class storage features for both self-contained hyper-converged setups as well as architectures that allow independent scaling of storage and compute, all connected by a Cisco-powered network fabric. Optional new or legacy external storage systems from third parties can be easily integrated into these solutions according to business requirements.
The Cisco Solution Partner Program, part of the Cisco Partner Ecosystem, unites Cisco with third-party independent hardware and software vendors to deliver integrated solutions to joint customers. As a Solution Partner, DataCore Software offers a complementary product offering and has started to collaborate with Cisco to meet the needs of joint customers. For more information on DataCore Software, go to:https://marketplace.cisco.com/catalog/companies/datacore-software-corporation.