Wednesday, 1 June 2016

The Register: DataCore Parallel IO speed tweak may rewrite benchmark plus more VVol goodness


+Comment DataCore has accelerated its Parallel IO technology's performance by 50 per cent with a v10 PSP5 software release, when run in its SANsymphony and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN software products.
...Previous PSP5 software has given DataCore impressive SPC-1 benchmark results.
V10 PSP5 sees the maximum cache rise from 1TB to 8TB per node. We understand bigger RAM caches accelerate applications such as larger databases, where the amount of data being actively referenced typically exceeds 1TB. Both reads and writes to/from SSDs and disk benefit from larger caches.

DataCore has also added support for QLogic 32 Gbit/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), allowing more concurrent requests to be serviced over the same physical channel.
Server administrators can now create policies and self-provision storage to suit their needs using VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVols) and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).

DataCore says it's the only certified software vendor for VVols, and its capabilities allow VVols to work universally across all types of storage (disk subsystems, flash/SSD arrays, DAS, etc).

PSP5 includes enhanced support for VVols storage policy-based management (SPBM) using multi-tiered storage pools. Virtual disk templates can be tailored to establish different classes of service (storage profiles) that the vSphere administrators can choose from when creating virtual machines (VMs) or adding disks to those VMs.

The product also has richer performance-monitoring, charting and capacity-planning tools, plus finer-grained control over QoS and administrative access privileges at the virtual disk level.

SANsymphony adds support for lower cost, bulk storage for cold and archival data, such as the public cloud. In all, it supports up to 15 storage tiers.

Reg comment

El Reg expects DataCore and hardware partner Lenovo to come out with new SPC-1 benchmark-busting results using the PSP5 v10 software. The string of SPC-1 results by DataCore with its parallelization IO technology, combined with DDN's IME technology, must surely be causing all server SAN and hyper-converged vendors to investigate the technology as a way of getting a sure-fire IO performance boost.

How else can they compete with DataCore's price/performance?

...The PSP5 v10 enhancements will be generally available in June. Current DataCore customers can upgrade at no charge under their existing software update service and support contracts.

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