Monday 23 May 2016

AKD Softwoods Triples Performance and Enhances Business Continuity with DataCore

AKD Softwoods has cost-effectively deployed a DataCore high availability storage software solution to enhance business continuity, accelerate database and business application performance while eliminating hardware platform lock-in.
“Risk reduction and business continuity were the key business drivers in our IT Redundancy and Future Proofing project, and DataCore has been critical to achieving this,” explained James Kruss, IT Manager of AKD Softwoods.
AKD Softwoods is a vertically integrated forest products company based in Colac, a regional town in the Australian state of Victoria. The business manages 8,000 hectares of pine plantations across Victoria and South Australia. It is the largest sawmilling company in Victoria, with state of the art timber processing facilities, export operations, a large transport fleet, and approximately 330 employees.

To reduce business risks and enhance business continuity for their 24 x 7 operations, AKD Softwoods decided to implement additional fault resilience capabilities into their IT infrastructure. It was decided that any new technologies selected should also help improve the flexibility of their infrastructure and reduce the overheads of ongoing IT operations.

“Our IT team needs to be largely self-sufficient, because we are located a distance from the closest major city,” Mr. Kruss added. “If a device fails, we could potentially wait 24 hours or more for a replacement part or an external engineer to arrive, and we cannot rely on Internet connectivity for critical applications.”

As a result, Mr Kruss decided to re-architect their IT systems using server and storage virtualisation technologies to eliminate single points of failure and provide high availability with automated failover.

After examining multiple options for future-proofing their IT systems and improving business continuity, AKD Softwoods selected DataCore’s flagship software-defined storage solution. The solution implementation was carried out by the in-house IT team at AKD Softwoods and encompassed the migration of multiple discrete servers to 13 Hyper-V virtualised servers running on a DataCore SANsymphony virtualised storage infrastructure.

Server platforms with on-board storage were retired during the migration, and these were replaced by new commodity hardware platforms with enterprise grade Intel SSD storage, with all storage managed by DataCore SANsymphony.

Business critical databases, financial management, inventory management systems and custom applications were migrated to the new DataCore software-defined storage infrastructure.

Mr Kruss continued, “We could now potentially lose an entire server room full of equipment – without any of our application users losing data or noticing a disruption. We have had zero storage-related downtime since we went live with DataCore. With the combination of DataCore and Hyper-V, we now have a fully redundant architecture.”

“This has also opened the possibility of scheduled maintenance during business hours. If we need to reboot a physical server for any reason, there is now no impact to our end users. SANsymphony flawlessly handles our critically important storage continuity tasks without us needing to lift a finger.”

AKD Softwoods has also seen a tripling of disk I/O performance, which has dramatically improved application and database performance. These improvements have been achieved through the use of enterprise grade SSDs for storage as well as DataCore’s inbuilt performance optimisation technologies, which include sophisticated data caching.

For more information on AKD Softwood’s implementation of DataCore Software, please refer to the case study.

Thursday 5 May 2016

DataCore at Tasmanian Industry Event: TAS ICT and MPS

ARN: http://www.arnnet.com.au/slideshow/599236/pictures-tas-ict-mps-summit/?image=21

Strategic partners of Staples including Microsoft, DataCore Software, Konica Minolta, Fortinet and The Mastermind Group hosted 60 customers and partners from the Tasmanian industry at its Summit. Representatives from Federal Group, University of TAS, MyState, TAS Sports and Local GOV were present and highly engaged in topics such as new technologies, securing IT networks, and IT asset management​. 

Here are some pictures of DataCore's  Marco Marinelli, Regional Sales Director – Australia & New Zealand presenting at the event. 



Tuesday 3 May 2016

DataCore Adaptive Parallel I/O Technology Lowers Server and Storage Costs


New results of research conducted by Enteprise Management Associates (EMA).

The Industry Impact Brief makes note of several recent benchmarks results that independently quantify the economic and performance capability of parallel I/O technology. The first result referenced is firm's world record for price performance ($0.08/SPC-1 IO/s) achieved with SANsymphony software-defined storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN software featuring Adaptive Parallel I/O technology. The company also recorded the fastest response time ever measured on the SPC-1 benchmark at that time with 0.32 milliseconds at 100% load (459,000 SPC-1 IO/s) on a hyper-converged system running on a compact off-the-shelf 2U Lenovo server, total costs were only $38,400 [i]. That's 3x to 10x faster than competing systems that cost several hundreds to millions of dollars.

Newer results validated on software from the company use parallel I/O technology to enable compact, power and space saving 2U servers to utilize multicores to multiply server performance; firm's parallel server elevated the numbers to 1.5 million SPC-1 IO/s, while setting a new record response time of 0.10 milliseconds at 100% load [ii]. The result of this is a decreased number of physical servers from five to one, offering savings in capital, software licensing, administrative effort, and environmental expense.
DATACORE_virtual-san-detailed

Detailed in a recently-published Industry Impact Brief, Jim Miller, senior analyst, EMA, states: "DataCore has been delivering significant cost savings with comprehensive storage services for heterogeneous environments long before the creation of the term software-defined storage. By putting multi-core servers to work using Adaptive Parallel I/O technology, DataCore has added a capability to save on capital and operational expenses for both storage and servers."

The economic and productivity impact goes beyond the 'consolidation' boom that server virtualization started, but did not finish. More VMs running on the same CPU delivered the first wave of consolidation savings but on today's multi-core systems with dozens to hundreds of CPU cores available, the potential for more savings is greatly multiplied. However as the number of CPU cores has grown, new performance issues have surfaced in virtualized environments as only a single CPU core is typically assigned by the hypervisor to process I/O operations - despite the abundance of CPU cores available. This restriction creates an 'I/O gap' between application processing and I/O processing, and when paired with the aggregation of mixed workloads, a bottleneck in performance arises.

Enterprise application workloads, and especially databases, achieved limited cost saving benefits since they had to resort to larger cluster complexes and utilize many more systems to overcome the 'I/O gap' and serial processing bottlenecks. Counter to consolidation, this led to more server sprawl to process these demanding business workloads.
DATACORE_virtual-san-use-case-2
Company's Adaptive Parallel I/O software solves this problem by multiplying the performance of virtualized and hyper-converged systems by enabling the execution of many independent I/O streams simultaneously across multiple CPU cores, reducing the latency to service and process I/Os. Rather than serializing I/O as competing products do, parallel I/O software automatically allocates the number of core resources needed to eliminate the mismatch between computational and I/O processing. This reduces the I/O limitations and bottlenecks that restrict the number of VMs and workloads that can be consolidated on server and hyper-converged platforms. The impact of harnessing untapped multi-cores with parallel I/O software completely redefines performance and the economics of TCO; it enables the next wave of hyper-consolidation productivity that allows IT shops to 'do far more with less' and lower server and storage costs.

According to EMA, there are two primary benefits of parallel I/O software: it reduces the number of physical servers while achieving faster application response times using lower-cost, commodity-based storage hardware. This reduction in servers increases in importance as the market transitions from traditional enterprise storage (NAS, SAN, DAS) to enterprise server SAN storage, or hyper-converged systems. Next is the savings in storage costs. By treating the root cause of the problem, performance requirements can be met or exceeded with less costly storage resources. As a result, company's Adaptive Parallel I/O software enables IT organizations to reclaim the savings of virtualization that had become diminished due to the I/O gap.
Hyper-converged System

DATACORE_virtual-san-base
The Industry Impact Brief makes note of several recent benchmarks results that independently quantify the economic and performance
capability of parallel I/O technology. The first result referenced is firm's world record for price performance ($0.08/SPC-1 IO/s) achieved withSANsymphony software-defined storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN software featuring Adaptive Parallel I/O technology. The company also recorded the fastest response time ever measured on the SPC-1 benchmark at that time with 0.32 milliseconds at 100% load (459,000 SPC-1 IO/s) on a hyper-converged system running on a compact off-the-shelf 2U Lenovo server, total costs were only $38,400 [i]. That's 3x to 10x faster than competing systems that cost several hundreds to millions of dollars.

Newer results validated on software from the company use parallel I/O technology to enable compact, power and space saving 2U servers to utilize multicores to multiply server performance; firm's parallel server elevated the numbers to 1.5 million SPC-1 IO/s, while setting a new record response time of 0.10 milliseconds at 100% load [ii]. The result of this is a decreased number of physical servers from five to one, offering savings in capital, software licensing, administrative effort, and environmental expense.

EMA stated that the company has long been known for delivering significant cost savings with comprehensive storage services for heterogeneous environments. Lenovo Co., Ltd, Fujitsu, Ltd.,Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and Dell Inc. currently offer solutions that include firm's software with their servers. As Adaptive Parallel I/O technology gains traction, EMA believes that other server vendors will follow suit and offer the company's software. Not to do so would put these vendors at a significant disadvantage.

"EMA applauds DataCore for approaching the virtualized server performance problem in a new, more efficient way," continued Miller. "DataCore was recently awarded Best Enterprise Solution for Software-Defined Storage in the recent EMA Radar Report for Enterprise Software-Defined Storage. For parallel I/O technology, DataCore currently has no competition."