DataCore - ANZ Storage Virtualization Info Site

DataCore Software Joins Microsoft Partner Solutions Center

2012-02-16T01:55:00.001-08:00

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/datacore-software-joins-microsoft-partner-solutions-center-2012-02-14

DataCore Software announced that it has joined the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center (MPSC). Located on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, the MPSC facility brings together world-class technology companies dedicated to the rapid development of secure, end-to-end business solutions for enterprise customers and partners.

This membership further strengthens DataCore's relationship with Microsoft along with the company's recent joining of the Microsoft System Center Alliance and the introduction of the SANsymphony-V Monitoring Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2008 R2, which provides constant visibility into the health, performance, and availability of virtualized storage resources from within System Center.

"We welcome DataCore to the MPSC and our partner ecosystem," said David Hayes, Senior Director, Microsoft Partner Solutions Center. "As with all of our partners in the MPSC, DataCore brings a unique offering that helps address various infrastructure challenges our customers face today. With DataCore's storage hypervisor, customers can now better monitor and manage their dynamic storage environments, while allowing for increased availability, speed, and utilization."

All Virtual is Not Enough; Managing Physical, Virtual, Old and New is Real World

2012-02-10T01:06:00.000-08:00

Yes, we think the “all or nothing” proposition offered by vendors that can’t address both the virtual and physical world is a mistake, and an expensive one at that. Virtualization and Cloud computing comes with an assumption that it is better to replace your existing investments in servers and storage and start over to meet the higher demands for performance and availability. DataCore sees this as a major obstacle and has thus designed its storage hypervisor to work across existing storage investments; it improves and supplements them with a powerful feature set. Managing both the physical and virtual and the mix of old and new platforms and device types cannot be ignored.

It is interesting to note the large number of new vendors that have jumped on the pure ‘all virtual’ model and have designed their solutions solely to address the virtual world. They do not deal with managing physical devices or support migrating from one device type to another, or support migrating back and forth between physical and virtual environments.

These virtualization-only vendors tend to speak about an IT nirvana in which everyone and everything that is connected to this world is virtual, open and simple - devoid of the messy details of the physical world. Does this sound anything like most IT shops?

Virtualization solutions must work and deliver a unified user experience across both virtual and physical environments. Solutions that can't deal with the physical device world do not work in the real world where flexibility, constant change, and migrations are the norm.

Kaspersky Labs Selects DataCore Storage Virtualization to Safeguard Ten Petabytes of Storage and Accelerate Microsoft Hyper-V

2012-02-08T06:29:00.000-08:00

See Kaspersky Lab and DataCore Case Study:
http://www.datacore.com/Libraries/Case_Study_PDFs/Case_Study_-_Kaspersky_Lab.sflb.ashx
Kaspersky Lab, the world's largest privately-held Internet security and anti-virus company, has chosen DataCore SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor software to virtualise and protect its build-out of 10 petabytes of disk storage located in two, separate Moscow data centres.

Virtualization World Top Story: Kaspersky Lab selects DataCore Storage Hypervisor
http://virtualizationworld365.info/news_full.php?id=21064&title=Kaspersky-Lab-selects-DataCore-Storage-Hypervisor

Kaspersky Lab, has chosen DataCore SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor software. With the SANsymphony-V virtualization layer, Kaspersky Lab has unified the management of its diverse storage systems from IBM, HP and NetApp, added a new level of business continuity safeguards and delivered faster response times by accelerating the performance and flexibility of shared storage in support of its many Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines.

“It was clearly a strategic decision for us to integrate a storage virtualization platform in order for us to benefit from greater flexibility, higher levels of business continuity and unified management,” notes Alexey Ternovsky, Senior Infrastructure Technology Researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “We evaluated a number of different virtualization approaches and found that DataCore was the perfect fit to meet our demands and help us lower the rising costs for managing and extending storage in the long run. The DataCore storage hypervisor gives us the power to manage huge amounts of data and lets us build our own storage infrastructure with our choice of features and performance characteristics.”

Kaspersky Lab’s decision was primarily driven by SANsymphony-V’s ability to leverage existing storage environments and enhance their enterprise functionality by providing a higher level of availability for business continuity; by adding centralized and simplified management over all their storage assets; by increasing performance; by enabling fast remote site disaster recovery capabilities and by maximizing the utilization of their current investments. Strategically, the flexibility to expand the storage infrastructure vendor and hardware independently on an as-needed base were critical requirements.

Over the next year, the two Kaspersky locations plan to virtualize nearly ten petabytes of their data (i.e., ten thousand terabytes, or 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) spread over a mix of storage devices. This will enable the company to offer both centralized IT services for internal requests as well as new services for external customers who rely on Kaspersky Lab’s data center services and solutions. The DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor software will be installed at the two data centers and will synchronously mirror all the production data currently located on diverse storage systems each with different characteristics tied to each vendor’s hardware-based platforms.

High Performance Shared Storage for Microsoft Hyper-V
In the Kaspersky Lab environment, very high performance is critical and the performance demands will continue to grow alongside the ever expanding environment of Microsoft Hyper-V virtual servers and desktops. Ternovsky and his team identified SANsymphony-V to be the most efficient way to provide shared storage for the overall virtualized infrastructure. As the performance needs continue to grow, more memory can be added to boost cache performance and new server technology can be easily inserted without interruption to further scale performance.

SANsymphony-V helps Kaspersky Lab to expand and optimize capacity on an as-needed basis without hardware vendor lock-in or having to acquire huge amounts of unused disk resources. With lots of automated storage capabilities, such as transparent auto-failover, systems can stay up when underlying devices fail. Moreover, powerful “Quick Serve” commands automate the management of storage provisioning. In addition, auto-tiering automates the progression and demotion of data across different storage devices – based on performance and cost criteria. Bottom-line: SANsymphony-V greatly automates and simplifies the administration and storage tasks found in the huge SAN environment of Kaspersky Lab.

“The flexibility, performance and management scalability of the DataCore solution make it an effective shared storage solution for our large number of virtual machines running under Microsoft Hyper-V,” adds Ternovsky. “We now benefit from a better cost infrastructure which allows hardware interchangeability adding a new level of savings and agility to managing our systems and their cost. Our IT administrators have a lot of know-how with Microsoft Windows and virtual machines under Hyper-V, so it was important that SANsymphony-V is not only Microsoft-certified but is intuitive and familiar – with a similar look and feel and many automated features that make storage administration in such a big environment much more practical and easy.”

About Kaspersky Lab
Kaspersky Lab is the world's largest privately-held Internet security and anti-virus company. It delivers some of the world’s most immediate protection against IT security threats, including viruses, spyware, crimeware, hackers, phishing, and spam. The company is ranked among the world’s top four vendors of security solutions for endpoint users. Kaspersky Lab products provide superior detection rates and one of the industry’s fastest outbreak response times for home users, SMBs, large enterprises and the mobile computing environment. Kaspersky® technology is also used worldwide inside the products and services of the industry’s leading IT security solution providers. Learn more at www.kaspersky.com. For the latest on antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-spam and other IT security issues and trends, visit www.securelist.com.

Did Virtualization Begat a Monster?

2012-02-07T06:14:00.000-08:00

As with all disruptive technology changes, virtualization brought tremendous productivity and cost savings gains, but its widespread adoption has also created a new challenge: managing what some have called the “Virtual Machine Sprawl Monster.” The ease of provisioning has increased dramatically the number of virtual machines deployed. As a consequence, even greater performance, availability and administrative management is required to support these sprawling virtual environments. These requirements will only grow as systems (both virtual and physical), platforms and applications continue to proliferate, as they most surely will.

Fundamentally, the main challenge facing IT managers is: “How can I manage and control all this complexity with a tighter budget and fewer skilled resources?” The answer is straight forward: with very smart software, a new mindset focused on architecture versus devices, and the alignment of people and processes to this new reality.

Is the real bottleneck for an IT manager the time required to get things done or the growing infrastructural chaos?

Both the lack of time and the complexity of managing dynamic infrastructures have made IT manager’s job more difficult. Therefore, the IT manager position must evolve from technician to architect. Too many of the current tasks that IT manager must perform or oversee are platform or vendor specific or tied to purpose-built hardware devices and, therefore, require specialized training or tools to properly use them. Also legacy systems and new models don’t work well together.

Instead of simply addressing IT as a set of discreet technologies and platforms, the IT manager must create an environment in which hardware components become pooled and interchangeable and can be managed as a whole. This higher-level viewpoint is needed to cost-effectively meet the demanding and dynamic requirements for more performance, higher availability and greater productivity. For this to succeed, smart management software that works infrastructure-wide and new levels of automation are necessities. Automation is one of the things software can do very well.

The good news is that the smart software required, such as storage hypervisors, are now available. They are easy to use, enable hardware interchangeability, automate difficult repetitive tasks and manage resources as pools.

Also, to be cost-effective today, hardware must become an interchangeable component, so that you can go to the open market and get the best price for the hardware you need. Products like VMware and Hyper-V have already had a major impact in on server hardware selection and solutions like DataCore’s storage hypervisor will do the same for storage devices.

Software is where the intelligence lies and it is the key to better management. DataCore’s storage hypervisor, for instance, offers a comprehensive architecture to control the four main challenges of storage management: meet performance needs, ensure data protection and disaster recovery, cost-effectively pool and tier storage resources and optimize the utilization of infrastructure-wide storage capacity.

How does DataCore address these needs?

The simple answer is we do this by providing an architecture to manage storage – a storage hypervisor. DataCore is smart, easy to use software that delivers powerful automation and hardware interchangeability. It embraces and controls both the virtual and physical worlds and extends the capabilities of both existing and new storage assets.

DataCore’s storage hypervisor pools, auto-tiers and virtualizes existing and new storage devices including the latest high-performance and premium priced memory-based storage technologies (Flash Memory/SSDs) and cost-effective gateways to remotely located Cloud Storage. It provides an architecture that manages the many storage price/performance trade-offs while providing a best fit of storage resources to meet the dynamic workloads and applications of the real world. From a performance standpoint, caching software and self-learning algorithms are in place to boost performance often doubling or tripling response times. Auto-failover and failback software provides the highest levels of availability and continuous access to storage. Auto-tiering manages the I/O traffic to ensure that data is in the right place (SSD, fast storage arrays, capacity storage, Cloud storage) to get the best performance at the lowest possible cost. Automated thin provisioning makes it simple and quick to service application system disk needs and fully optimize the overall utilization of storage capacity.

From a people and process standpoint, DataCore’s storage hypervisor provides a simple and common way to manage, pool, migrate and tier all storage resources. The software accelerates performance and automates many time-consuming tasks including data protection and disk space provisioning.

Enterprise Systems: From Clouds Comes Clarity in 2012

2012-01-30T13:52:00.000-08:00

http://esj.com/articles/2012/01/16/From-Clouds-Comes-Clarity.aspx

By George Teixeira, CEO and President, DataCore Software

What can bridge the state of virtualization today and the unfettered reality we seek from the cloud? A true storage Hypervisor may hold the key.

Some people read palms or tea leaves to predict the future. I'm looking at clouds.

Clouds are what all sorts of people are talking about these days. I was at dinner the other evening and overheard a conversation at the next table between two senior citizens and what was likely a more tech savvy 20-something grandchild and his companion. When one asked the grandmother where she keeps the photographs she was showing them, she confidently answered, "They're in the cloud." Now, I'll bet she wouldn't have been comfortable entrusting her precious photos to me, to you, or to a company that might not be in business in the future. That unease would likely be exacerbated by the complexity of any assurances as to how these photos are stored, made available, or protected.

Yet, she is quite comfortable with "the cloud."

That's how powerful the cloud metaphor has become. It uses a level of abstraction (the picture of a cloud) to represent in a simple, nonthreatening, "I don't need to think about that" way the complex hardware and software components, and internal network connections, that are actually required to provide the services delivered. When people refer to cloud computing, what they are really talking about is the ability to simplify IT by abstracting the complexity of the data center from a bunch of individually managed elements into a service that is offered as part of a holistic "cloud."

This simplification through abstraction is also the cornerstone of virtualization. In fact, the clamor for the cloud is both a compliment to the attributes of virtualization and a criticism of its progress to date. Virtualization is the key to cloud computing because it is the enabling technology allowing the creation of an intelligent abstraction layer that hides the complexity of underlying hardware or software. In the call for clouds, I hear an industry being challenged: "OK, we see what is possible through virtualization, so fill in the missing pieces and deliver on the promise already."

Software is the key to making clouds work because, in the cloud, resources (e.g., server computers, network connections, and desktops) must be dynamic. Simply put, only software can take a collection of static hardware devices that are not flexible and create from them flexible resource pools that can be allocated dynamically. Hypervisor solutions, like those from VMware and Microsoft, demonstrated the benefits of working devices as software abstractions at the server level (and to a lesser degree the desktop) and the importance of interchangeable servers that now have become the norm. It really does not matter whether a Dell, HP, IBM or an Intel server is the resource involved, that is a secondary consideration subject to price or particular vendor preference. From this experience, the market has become familiar with what is possible with virtualization.

Virtualization gives us greater productivity and faster responses to changing needs because software abstracted resources are not static and can be deployed flexibly and dynamically. It also gives us better economies of scale because these resources are pooled and can be easily changed and supplemented "behind the curtain" to keep up with growing and changing user demands. Yes, with a hypervisor we have freed our servers and desktops from their physical binds.

Still, it's just a taste of freedom; a removal of the handcuffs, but not the ankle chains; merely a lengthening of the leash, because eventually you hit the end and get yanked back to reality by the confines of your storage. Even amidst the great, industry-wide, liberation-through-virtualization movement of recent years, the answer when it comes to storage, unfortunately, has been to continue building traditional physical architectures that severely limit and, in fact, contradict the virtual infrastructures they are intended to support. They propagate locked-in, vendor specific hardware "silos" instead of decoupling storage resources from physical devices with a software abstraction layer.

In my view, that is the big hole in the ground that we keep falling into while desperately scanning the skies for clouds and a user experience free from physical architecture and hardware. Just what is it that can bridge the state of virtualization today and that unfettered reality we seek from clouds?

The answer: a Storage Hypervisor. In 2012, this critical piece to the fluffy puzzle will fill that gap in virtualization's march forward, clarifying how to bring that cloud future home to our storage today.

A Storage Hypervisor enables a new level of agility and storage hardware interchangeability. It creates an abstraction layer between applications running on servers and the physical storage used for data. Virtualizing storage and incorporating intelligence for provisioning and protection at the virtualization layer makes it possible to create a new and common level of storage management that works across the spectrum of assets including server attached disks, SSDs, disk systems, and storage in the cloud. Because it abstracts physical storage into virtual pools, any storage can work with any other storage, avoiding vendor hardware lock-in ensuring maximum ROI on existing resources and greater purchasing power in the future.

What is a "true" Storage Hypervisor? It's a portable, centrally managed, software package that enhances the value of multiple and dissimilar disk storage systems. It supplements these systems' individual capabilities with extended provisioning, replication, and performance acceleration services. Its comprehensive set of storage control and monitoring functions operates as a transparent virtual layer across consolidated disk pools to improve their availability and optimize speed and utilization.

A true Storage Hypervisor also provides important advanced storage management and intelligent features. For example, a critical Storage Hypervisor feature is automated tiering. This feature migrates and optimally matches the most cost-effective or performance-oriented hardware resources to application workload needs. Through this automated management capability, less-critical and infrequently accessed data is automatically stored on lower-cost disks, while more mission-critical data is migrated to faster, higher-performance storage and solid-state disks, whether those disks are located on premises or in the cloud. This enables organizations to keep demanding workloads operating at peak speeds while taking advantage of low-priced local storage assets or pay-as-you-go cloud storage. The Storage Hypervisor management layer makes it easy to incorporate new disk devices into existing data centers, providing enterprises, and, a fast and easy on-ramp to cloud resources, among other benefits.

It's clearly time for storage to acquire these cloud-like characteristics. Clouds are, after all, supposed to be pliant and nimble -- and that is what we need our storage to be. The whole point of cloud computing is delivering cost-effective services to users. This requires the highest degree of flexibility and openness, as opposed to being boxed-in to specific hardware that cannot adapt to change over time. That's the goal and it is what is driving such an interest in clouds. Hypervisors for virtual servers and desktops have mapped the way -- illustrating how portable software solutions can virtualize away complexity, constraint, and hardware-vendor lock-in. Only a Storage Hypervisor can do likewise for storage.

That's why 2012 will be the year storage goes virtual and the market learns Storage Hypervisors are the next level in flexible storage management. Already, they are being widely deployed and are enterprise-proven. A true Storage Hypervisor turns multiple, dissimilar, and static disk storage systems into a "what I want, where I need it, when I need it, without complexity" storage infrastructure. It gives our storage today what we've been looking for in the clouds of the future: a highly scalable, flexible infrastructure with real hardware interchangeability and the next level of virtual resource management. This is what is required to create virtual data centers or so-called "private clouds" and make practical the incorporation of external cloud services.

DataCore Software and Hitachi Team Together to Make IT Management Easier; Operations Analyzer for both physical and virtual IT assets

2012-01-30T06:28:00.001-08:00

http://www.storagereview.com/datacore_and_hitachi_team_together_make_it_management_easier

The Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer now integrated with DataCore's storage hypervisor enables detailed monitoring of IT infrastructures including those under control of DataCore SANsymphony-V software. Enterprises will gain a holistic, single-pane view of their entire data center if a tight integration of the software is implemented, including virtualized storage resources, servers, networks and applications. This gives IT administrators the ability to easily maintain high levels of infrastructure availability, performance, as well as conducting fast problem diagnosis and resolution.

By unifying advanced services like provisioning, auto-tiering, replication and performance acceleration through a common storage virtualization layer, the DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor improves the value of diverse storage resources. Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer is an integrated availability and performance monitoring tool that can reduce complexity, streamline operations, and increase IT staff efficiency by monitoring availability and performance of heterogeneous physical and virtual server stacks, applications and network, and storage devices through a single screen.

SANsymphony-V plugs into IT Operations Analyzer through the integrated solution, regularly requesting inventory data and updates from the storage hypervisor. The single monitoring screen of IT Operations Analyzer is then populated with the latest information, keeping IT administrators up-to-date with all relevant changes in resources. It also alerts them to potential problems that require a proactive resolution.

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor overcomes many existing issues by insulating users and applications from the constant upheaval in the underlying storage devices and physical plant where they reside. IT Operations Analyzer monitors all components that make up a dynamic, virtualized data center, while maintaining an inventory and collecting vital status and alerts.

With both the SANsymphony-V and the IT Operations Analyzer, administrators are now able to monitor every device in their data center infrastructure on a single screen, enabling them to quickly identify and resolve issues before they impact productivity.

The following are a few of the key benefits offered through with the integration of SANsymphony and IT Operations Analyzer:

Fast Problem Diagnosis & Resolution: the dashboard of IT Operations Analyzer features proactive alerting and a root cause analysis (RCA) engine, enabling IT administrators to reduce mean time of diagnosing problems by up to 90 percent, and the ability to process large numbers of event alerts in minutes.
Isolating Bottlenecks, Elevating Performance: IT Operations Analyzer allows thresholds to be set on devices to prevent bottlenecks. Congestion points can also be isolated, such as when reduced performance in a set of servers occurs; the single-pane console might show too many competing for the same resource. Administrators can then easily fix the issue by using SANsymphony-V to redistribute tasks.
Ease-of-Use: The integration of SANsymphony-V into IT Operations Analyzer provides visibility into storage assets that enables staff to identify issues without a high level of storage expertise and then resolve these before productivity suffers.

Storage Magazine/SearchStorage.com Storage System Software: 2011 Products of the Year Finalists

2012-01-27T01:44:00.000-08:00

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/Storage-system-software-2011-Products-of-the-Year-finalists

DataCore Software Corp. SANsymphony-V R8.0 Storage Hypervisor

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization product added automated storage tiering, enhanced continuous data production (CDP), faster asynchronous replication and an improved wizard-driven central console. The software runs on physical or virtual Windows servers and allows users to maintain, upgrade and expand their storage without disrupting applications.

Prediction #6: Storage Hypervisors will make storage virtualization and Cloud storage practical.

2012-01-26T01:54:00.000-08:00

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently authored a Market Report that I believe addresses the industry focus for the year ahead. In "The Relevance and Value of a ‘Storage Hypervisor'," it states "...buying and deploying servers is a pretty easy process, while buying and deploying storage is not. It's a mismatch of virtual capabilities on the server side and primarily physical capabilities on the storage side. Storage can be a ball and chain keeping IT shops in the 20th century instead of accommodating the 21rst century."

While enterprises strive to get all they can from their hardware investments in servers, desktops and storage devices, a major problem persists - a data storage bottleneck. Ironically, even as vendors promote and sell software-based, end-to-end virtualization and Cloud solutions, too often the reaction to handling storage is to throw another costly hunk of hardware at the problem in the form of a new storage array or device.

The time has come to resolve the storage crisis, to remove the last bastion of hardware dependency and to allow the final piece of the virtualization puzzle to fall into place. Server hypervisors like VMware and Hyper-V have gone beyond the basics of creating virtual machines and have created an entire platform and management layer to make virtualization practical for servers, desktops and Clouds.

Likewise, it's time to become familiar with a component quickly gaining traction and proving itself in the field: the storage hypervisor.

A storage hypervisor is unique in its ability to provide an architecture that manages, optimizes and spans all the different price-points and performance levels of storage. Only a storage hypervisor enables full hardware interchangeability. It provides important, advanced features such as automated tiering, which relocates disk blocks of data among pools of different storage devices (even into the Cloud) - thereby keeping demanding workloads operating cost-efficiently and at peak speeds. In this way, applications requiring speed and business-critical data protection can get what they need, while less critical, infrequently accessed data blocks gravitate towards lower-cost disks or are transparently pushed to the Cloud for "pay as you go" storage.

I think ESG's Market Report stated it well:

"The concept of a storage hypervisor is not just semantics. It is not just another way to market something that already exists or to ride the wave of a currently trendy IT term...Organizations have now experienced a good taste of the benefits of server virtualization with its hypervisor-based architecture and, in many cases, the results have been truly impressive: dramatic savings in both CAPEX and OPEX, vastly improved flexibility and mobility, faster provisioning of resources and ultimately of services delivered to the business, and advances in data protection.

"The storage hypervisor is a natural next step and it can provide a similar leap forward."

DataCore announced the world's first storage hypervisor in 2011. We built it with feedback gained in the real world over the last decade from thousands of customers. We saw this advance as a natural, but necessary, step forward for an industry that has been fixated on storage hardware solutions for far too long. 2012 will be the year that true hardware interchangeability and auto-tiering will move from "wish list" to "to do list" for many companies ready to break the grip by which storage hardware vendors have long held them.

Prediction #5: "Big Data" will get the Hype, but "Small Data" will continue to be where the action is in 2012.

2012-01-23T01:50:00.000-08:00

Yes, Big Data is getting all the attention and yes Big Data needs "Big Storage," so every storage vendor will make it the buzz for 2012. Big Data has many definitions but what is obvious is that the growth rates and the amount of data being stored continue to grow. This Big Data requires better solutions in order for it to be cost-effectively managed. Analyst firm IDC believes the world's information is doubling every two years. By the end of 2011, according to IDC, the world will create a staggering 1.8 zettabytes of data. By 2020, the world will generate 50 times that amount of data, and IT departments will have to manage 75 times the number of "information containers" housing this data. Clearly, the largest companies managing petabytes, exabytes and beyond are the main focus of the talk, but the small and mid-size businesses that deal in terabytes of data comprise the vast majority of the real world. And it is these small-to-midsize companies that need practical data storage and management solutions TODAY. These business consumers can't afford to wait until tomorrow, nor can they afford to throw out their existing storage investments. Rather, they need solutions that build on what devices they currently have installed and make those more efficient, highly-available and easier to manage.

Software technologies, such as thin provisioning, auto-tiering, storage virtualization and storage hypervisors that empower users to easily manage all the storage assets they require - whether located on-premise, at a remote site or in the Cloud - will be key enablers in 2012. Big Data will be the buzz and will drive many new innovations. Big Data will also benefit greatly from these same software-based enablers, but the Small Data opportunity is extremely large and that is where I'm betting the real action will be in 2012.

Prediction #4: Software will take center stage for storage in 2012 empowering users to a new level of hardware interchangeability and commodity-based "buying power."

2012-01-19T01:45:00.000-08:00

"Throw more hardware at the problem" is still the storage vendor mantra; however, the growth rate and the complexity of managing storage are changing the model. The economics of "more hardware" doesn't work. Virtualization and Clouds are all about software. With the high-growth rates in storage, virtualization and Cloud computing, it is becoming increasingly clear that a hardware-bound scale-up model of storage is impractical. The "hardware mindset" restrains efficiency and productivity, while software that enables hardware interchangeability advances these critical characteristics. The hardware model goes against the IT trends of commoditization, openness and resource pooling, which have driven the IT industry over the last decade. Software is the key to automating and to increasing management productivity, while adding the flexibility and intelligence to harness, pool and leverage the full use of hardware investments.

As the world moves to Cloud-based, to virtualization-based and to "Big Data" environments, software models that allow for hardware interchangeability, open market purchasing and better resource management for storage will be the big winners.

Prediction #3: The real world is not 100% virtual. Going virtual is a "hot topic," but the real world requires software that transcends both the virtual and physical worlds.

2012-01-18T01:44:00.000-08:00

Even VMware, the leading virtualization company in the world, as well as the most ardent virtualization supporters in the analyst community, predict that in 2012 over 50% of x86 architecture server workloads will be virtual. Different reports point out that only 25% of small businesses have been virtualized, and others highlight the many challenges of virtualizing mission critical applications, new special purpose devices and legacy systems. The key point is that the world is not 100% virtual and the physical world cannot be ignored.

I find it interesting to note the large number of new vendors that have jumped squarely on the virtualization trend and have designed their solutions solely to address the virtual world. Most do not, therefore, deal with managing physical devices or support migrating from one device type to another, or support migrating back and forth between physical and virtual environments. Some nouveau virtual vendors go further and make simplifying assumptions akin to theoretical physicists - disregarding real world capabilities like Fibre Channel and assuming the world is tidy because all IT infrastructures operate in a virtual world using virtual IP traffic. These virtualization-only vendors tend to speak about an IT nirvana in which everyone and everything that is connected to this world is virtual, open and tidy - devoid of the messy details of the physical world. Does this sound anything like your IT shop?

Most IT organizations have, and will have for many years to come, a major share of their storage, desktops and a good portion of their server infrastructure running on physical systems or on applications that are not virtualized. This new "virtual is all you need" breed of vendors clearly does not want you to think about your existing base of systems or those strange Fibre Channel-connected, UNIX or NetWare systems running in the shadows. All the virtual upstarts have a simple solution - buy all new and go totally virtual. But this is not the real world most of us live in.

Virtualization solutions must work and deliver a unified user experience across both virtual and physical environments. Solutions that can't deal with the physical device world do not work in the real world where flexibility, constant change, and migrations are the norm. While those solutions that "do" virtual will be "hot," I predict those that can encompass the broad range of physical and virtual worlds will be even "hotter."

Prediction #2: Hybrid data storage environments will need storage virtualization and auto-tiering to combine Cloud storage with existing storage.

2012-01-17T06:43:00.000-08:00

Cloud storage has already become a viable option for businesses that don't have the room to add storage devices or are looking for "pay-as-you-go" storage for less critical storage needs, backups and archiving. Industry analysts have already proclaimed that Cloud gateways and heterogeneous storage virtualization solutions combined with auto-tiering functionality can provide a seamless transition path to the Cloud that preserves existing storage investments.

For most companies, the notion of moving all of their data to the Cloud is inconceivable. However, continuously expanding data storage requirements are fueling a need for more capacity. One way to address this growth is to include Cloud storage in the mix. The benefits of Cloud storage are numerous. Cloud storage can provide virtually limitless access to storage capacity and obviate the need for device upgrades or equipment replacements. Cloud storage can also reduce capital expenses. Look for continued advances in auto-tiering and storage virtualization technologies to seamlessly combine hybrid Cloud and on-premise environments in a way that operates with existing applications.

Prediction #1: SSD cost trade-offs will drive software advances. Auto-tiering software that spans all storage including flash memory devices and SSDs will become a "must-have" in 2012.

2012-01-16T06:48:00.000-08:00

The drop in cost of SSDs (solid state drives) and flash memories has already had a sizable impact on IT organizations and this will continue in 2012. The latest models of storage systems incorporate these innovations and tout high performance and high-availability, but they remain beyond an acceptable price point for most companies. In addition to price, SSDs and flash memory useful lifetimes are impacted by the amount of write traffic and need to be monitored and protected to avoid potential data loss.

However, the big driver for SSDs is the need for greater performance, but performance needs do not apply equally to all data. In fact, the majority of data, on average 90%, can reside on low-cost archives or mid-tier storage. Meanwhile, the major storage vendors continue to implore us to throw new hardware systems and more SSDs at the problem because they want to sell higher priced systems. These innovations are great, but they must be applied wisely. To get the most value out of these expensive devices, software that can protect and optimally manage the utilization of these costly resources as well as minimize write traffic is now a "must-have."

In 2012, businesses will gain a better understanding of why software is needed to expand the range of practical use cases for SSDs and to automate when, where and how best to deploy and manage these devices. Auto-tiering and storage virtualization software is critical to cost-effectively optimize the full utilization of flash memory and SSD-based technologies – as an important element within the larger spectrum of storage devices that need to be fully integrated and managed within today's dynamic storage infrastructures.

DataCore Software 2012 Predictions: Storage Hypervisors, Virtualization, SSDs, "Big Data," Clouds and Their Real World Impacts

2012-01-13T06:39:00.000-08:00

Storage has been slow to adopt change and still remains one of the most static elements of today’s IT infrastructures. I believe this is due to a history of storage being driven from a hardware mindset. The storage industry, for the most part, has been controlled by a few major vendors who have been resistant to disruptive technologies, especially those that can impact their high profit margins. However, the time is ripe for a major shift and some disruption. An understanding of how software liberates resources from devices and a perfect storm of forces – success of server virtualization, new Cloud models, increasing data growth, greater complexity and unsustainable buying practices – are driving a mind-shift and forcing real changes to happen at a much faster pace. Therefore, it is a great time to be at the helm of a storage software company, and I am pleased to share my personal observations and 6 predictions for the New Year in a series of blog posts, the first one will directly follow this post.

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V 8.1 Chosen by Virtualization Review’s Readers as a 2012 Readers Choice Preferred Product Award Winner

2012-01-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2012/01/03/2012-buyers-guide.aspx#StorageVirt

Storage Virtualization
Based on the strength of its storage hypervisor approach, DataCore SANsymphony-V 8.1 was chosen by Virtualization Review as a 2012 Readers Choice a Preferred Product Award Winner for storage virtualization. EMC, NetApp and DataCore Software were the top 3 chosen by the readership.

DataCore Software Celebrates New Year By Offering Free Storage Hypervisor Software To Microsoft Certified And System Center Professionals

2012-01-02T07:03:00.000-08:00

DataCore Software is welcoming the new year by offering free license keys of its SANsymphony™ -V storage hypervisor to Microsoft Certified and System Center professionals. The not-for-resale (NFR) license keys – may be leveraged for non-production uses such as course development, proof-of-concepts, training, lab testing and demonstration purposes – are intended to support virtualization consultants, instructors and architects involved in managing and optimizing storage within private clouds, virtual server and VDI deployments. DataCore is making it easy for these certified professionals to benefit directly and learn for themselves the power of this innovative technology – the storage hypervisor – and its ability to redefine storage management and efficiency.

To receive a free license key, please sign up at: http://pages.datacore.com/nfr-for-experts.html.

The SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor is a portable, centrally-managed software suite capable of enhancing the combined value of multiple disk storage systems, including the many purpose-built storage appliances and solid state disks (SSD) type devices arriving to the market daily. The storage hypervisor supplements the individual capabilities of specialized equipment with a broad range of device-independent, integrated services. The SANsymphony-V software executes on physical and virtual servers or can co-reside with server hypervisors. Other major features include, but are not limited to, “Quick serve” storage provisioning, automated tiering across SSDs, disk devices and different cloud storage providers and continuous data protection (CDP).

The free NFR license keys of SANsymphony-V are available for the new year and this offer will expire on January 31, 2012. The licenses may be used for non-production purposes only and the software can be installed on both physical servers and Hyper-V virtual machines as a virtual storage appliance.

Proof of certification as a Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA), Microsoft Certified Master (MCM), Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP), Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) or Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) is required.

Premier Auto Insurance Company and International Law Firm Turn to DataCore Software

2011-12-28T06:36:00.000-08:00

Direct Line, leading Car Insurance Company, achieves Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Achieved with DataCore's SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor.
http://www.it-director.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=28889

DataCore Software announced that premier German insurance company, Direct Line Versicherung AG, has implemented its business continuity and disaster recovery architecture on a storage infrastructure built on the DataCore storage hypervisor SANsymphony™-V foundation. The high-speed and highly–available synchronous mirroring functionality of the DataCore solution enables Direct Line to set up a backup and disaster recovery data centre located 40 kilometers away in order to minimise downtime and to ensure speedy recovery in case of a failure at the primary data centre. The combination of a storage hypervisor with server hypervisors provides a flexible, high-performance and fail safe IT infrastructure that virtualises storage hardware with SANsymphony-V and server hardware with VMware vSphere.

"DataCore SANsymphony-V provides Direct Line a cost-effective and efficient business continuity solution supporting high-availability and disaster recovery across multiple sites, without neglecting performance or data protection aspects. The DataCore solution is a strategic component in our daily business,” says Heiko Teichmann, managing director at IT service provider Teserco and project manager on behalf of Direct Line Versicherung.

...Thanks to its hardware independence and the efficient caching algorithms of the DataCore solution, Direct Line can not only use its existing and cost-effective HP P2000 disk subsystems, but with DataCore also remove the functional or performance limitations that would have prevented them from future use. Today, around 75 terabytes of data are now managed in the main data centre, located in Teltow and at the remote data center in Berlin, which meets the requirements set by the highest data protection category (Tier 4).

Stikeman Elliott LLP implements DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202535402580&Stikeman_Elliot_Adopts_DataCores_SANsymphonyV&slreturn=1

DataCore Software announced that Stikeman Elliott LLP, one of Canada’s leading business law firms, with offices in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver as well as London, New York and Sydney, has deployed DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor at their Montreal and Toronto hubs – eliminating the need for traditional tape backups and providing much greater business continuity through high availability (HA) and improved disaster recovery (DR).

Stikeman Elliott’s IT team has also made great use of SANsymphony-V’s automated-tiering capability – including utilizing the cloud as yet another data storage tier.

One of the things that Marco Magini, network and systems administrator for Montreal-based Stikeman Elliot LLC, worries most about where storage is concerned is downtime. At one of the largest corporate law firms in the world, it may come as a shock, but the cliché “time is money,” is no joke, said Magini.

“Although we started out looking for a solution to a backup problem, we ended up with far more,” says Magini. “We started slowly, but as we became more familiar with the intelligence and stability of the DataCore storage hypervisor, we put more and more mission-critical systems on top of it and now have almost all of our systems behind it. We have every confidence that SANsymphony-V can handle anything we give it.”

DataCore Software Celebrates Holiday Season By Offering Free Storage Hypervisor To Microsoft Certified And System Center Professionals

2011-12-23T05:44:00.000-08:00

The free NFR license keys of SANsymphony-V are available for the new year and this offer will expire on January 31, 2012. The licenses may be used for non-production purposes only and the software can be installed on both physical servers and Hyper-V virtual machines as a virtual storage appliance.

To receive a free license key, please sign up at: http://pages.datacore.com/nfr-for-experts.html. Proof of certification as a Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA), Microsoft Certified Master (MCM), Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP), Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) or Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) is required.

DataCore Software offers free Storage Hypervisor
http://www.it-director.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=28967&ref=fd_ita_meta

DataCore Software announced that in the spirit of the holiday season it will offer free license keys of its SANsymphony™ -V storage hypervisor to Microsoft Certified and System Center professionals. The not-for-resale (NFR) license keys – may be leveraged for non-production uses such as course development, proof-of-concepts, training, lab testing and demonstration purposes – are intended to support virtualization consultants, instructors and architects involved in managing and optimizing storage within private clouds, virtual server and VDI deployments. DataCore is making it easy for these certified professionals to benefit directly and learn for themselves the power of this innovative technology – the storage hypervisor – and its ability to redefine storage management and efficiency.

To receive a free license key, please sign up at: http://pages.datacore.com/nfr-for-experts.html.

Storage Strategy Magazine 2012 Predictions: DataCore Software

2011-12-22T06:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.storage-strategy.com/2011/12/15/2012-prediction-datacore-software

...The time has come for the storage crisis to be resolved, the last bastion of hardware dependency removed, and the final piece of the virtualization puzzle to fall into place.

It’s also time for all to become familiar with a component fast gaining traction and proving itself in the field: the storage hypervisor. This technology is unique in its ability to provide an architecture that manages, optimizes and spans all the different price-points and performance levels of storage. The storage hypervisor allows hardware interchangeability. It provides important advanced features such as automated tiering that relocates disk blocks among pools of different storage devices - even in the cloud - keeping demanding workloads operating at peak speeds. In this way, applications requiring speed and business-critical data protection can get what they need, while less critical, infrequently accessed data blocks gravitate towards lower costs disks or are transparently pushed to the cloud for “pay as you go” storage.

ESG’s Peters states in the Market Report; “The concept of a storage hypervisor is not just semantics. It is not just another way to market something that already exists or to ride the wave of a currently trendy IT term.” He then goes on to make his main point on the next step forward; “Organizations have now experienced a good taste of the benefits of server virtualization with its hypervisor-based architecture and, in many cases, the results have been truly impressive: dramatic savings in both CAPEX and OPEX, vastly improved flexibility and mobility, faster provisioning of resources and ultimately of services delivered to the business, and advances in data protection.

“The storage hypervisor is a natural next step and it can provide a similar leap forward.”

2012: Virtual Storage Gets Some Love

Mark Peters, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), recently authored a Market Report which I believe addresses the industry focus for the year ahead. In The Relevance and Value of a “Storage Hypervisor,” Peters notes: “…buying and deploying servers is a pretty easy process, while buying and deploying storage is not. It’s a mismatch of virtual capabilities on the server side and primarily physical capabilities on the storage side. Storage can be a ball and chain keeping IT shops in the 20th century instead of accommodating the 21st century.”

Storage Hypervisors Boost Performance without Breaking the Budget

2011-12-12T07:05:00.000-08:00

One of the magical things about virtualization is that it’s really a kind of invisibility cloak. Each virtualization layer hides the details of those beneath it. The result is much more efficient access to lower level resources. Server virtualization has demonstrated this powerfully. Applications don’t need to know about CPU, memory, and other server details to enjoy access to the resources they need.

Unfortunately, this invisibility tends to get a bit patchy when you move down into the storage infrastructure underneath all those virtualized servers, especially when considering performance management. In theory, storage virtualization ought to be able to hide the details of media, protocols, and paths involved in managing the performance of a virtualized storage infrastructure. In reality the machinery still tends to clank away in plain sight.

The problem is not storage virtualization per se, which can boost storage performance in a number of ways. The problem is a balkanized storage infrastructure, where virtualization is supplied by hardware controllers associated with each “chunk” of storage (e.g., array). This means that the top storage virtualization layer is human: the hard-pressed IT personnel who have to make it all work together.

Many IT departments accept the devil’s bargain of vendor lock-in to try to avoid this. But even if you commit your storage fortunes to a single vendor, the pace of innovation guarantees the presence of end-of-life devices that don’t support the latest performance management features. And the expense of this approach puts it beyond the reach of most companies, who can’t afford a forklift upgrade to a single-vendor storage infrastructure and have to deal with the real-world mix of storage devices that result from keeping up with innovation and competitive pressures.

That’s why many companies are turning to storage hypervisors, which, like server hypervisors, are not tied to a particular vendor’s hardware. A storage hypervisor like DataCore’s SANsymphony-V throws the invisibility cloak over the details of all of your storage assets, from the latest high-performance SAN to SATA disks orphaned by the consolidation of a virtualization initiative. Instead of trying to match a bunch of disparate storage devices to the needs of different applications, you can combine devices with similar performance into easily provisioned and managed virtual storage pools that hide all the unnecessary details. And, since you’re not tied to a single vendor, you can look for the best deals in storage, and keep using old storage longer.

SANsymphony-V helps you boost storage performance in three ways: through caching, tiering, and path management.

Caching. SANsymphony-V can use up to a terabyte of RAM on the server that hosts it as a cache for all the storage assets it virtualizes. Advanced write-coalescing and read pre-fetching algorithms deliver significantly faster IO response: up to 10 times faster than the average 200-300 microsecond time delivered by typical high-end cached storage arrays, and orders of magnitude faster than the 6000-8000 microseconds it takes to read and write to the physical disks themselves.

SANsymphony-V also uses its cache to compensate for the widely different traffic levels and peak loads found in virtualized server environments. It smooths out traffic surges and better balances workloads so that applications and users can work more efficiently. In general, you’ll see a 2X or better improvement in the performance of the underlying storage from a storage hypervisor such as DataCore SANsymphony-V.

Tiering. You can also improve performance with data tiering. SANsymphony-V discovers all your storage assets, manages them as a common pool of storage and continually monitors their performance. The auto-tiering technology migrates the most frequently-used data—which generally needs higher performance—onto the fastest devices. Likewise, less frequently-used data typically gets demoted to higher capacity but lower-performance devices.

Auto-tiering uses tiering profiles that dictate both the initial allocation and subsequent migration dynamics. A user can go with the standard set of default profiles or can create custom profiles for specific application access patterns. However you do it, you get the performance and capacity utilization benefits of tiering from all your devices, regardless of manufacturer.

As new generations of devices appear such as Solid State Disks (SSD) and Flash memories and very large capacity disks; these faster or larger capacity devices can simply be added to the available pool of storage devices and assigned a tier. In addition, as devices age, they can be reset to a lower tier often extending their useful life. Many users are interested in deploying SSD technology to gain performance, however due to the high-cost and their limited write traffic life-cycles there is a clear need for auto-tiering and caching architectures to maximize their efficiency. DataCore’s storage hypervisor can absorb a good deal of the write traffic thereby extending the useful life of SSDs and with auto-tiering only that data that needs the benefits of the high-speed SSD tier are directed there, with the storage hypervisor in place the system self tunes and optimizes the use of all the storage devices. Customers have reported upwards of a 20% savings from device independent tiering alone and in combination with the other benefits of a storage hypervisor, savings of 60% or more are also being achieved.

Path management. Finally, SANsymphony-V also greatly reduces the complexity of path management. The software auto-discovers the connections between storage devices and the server(s) it’s running on, and then monitors queue depth to detect congestion and route I/O in a balanced way across all possible routes to the storage in a given virtual pool. There’s a lot of reporting and monitoring data available, but for the most part, once set up, you can just let it run itself and get a level of performance across disparate devices from different vendors that would otherwise take a lot of time and knowledge to get right.

If you would like an in-depth look at how a storage hypervisor can boost storage performance, be sure to check out the third of Jon Toigo’s Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars white papers: Storage in the Fast Lane—Achieving “Off-the-Charts” Performance Management.

Next time I’ll look at how a storage hypervisor boosts storage data security management.

New Videos on DataCore

2011-12-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

Check out the full library at: http://www.youtube.com/user/DataCoreVideos

Dennis Publishing –Why I use DataCore
Video: http://snseurope.info/video/749/Dennis-Publishing---Why-I-Use-DataCore

DataCore Storage Hypervisor
Video: http://snseurope.info/video/756/Datacore-Storage-Hypervisor

New Market Report on The Relevance and Value of a “Storage Hypervisor:” Virtualized Management for More Than Just Servers

2011-12-05T10:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/10/the-relevance-and-value-of-a-%e2%80%9cstorage-hypervisor%e2%80%9d-virtualized-management-for-more-than-just-servers/

A few vendors have already begun to start thinking in these terms; there are the industry giants - IBM with SAN Volume Controller, EMC with VPLEX, HDS with its Universal Storage Platform-V - as well as some smaller software-only players such as DataCore. As the capabilities of these various approached not only expand but become known and understood better, the end-user opportunity for improving efficiency and simplifying operations is simply monumental...

Solve HDD Shortages with DataCore SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor Software

2011-11-18T11:36:00.001-08:00

Amongst the catastrophic flooding in Thailand lie hard drive manufacturing plants that supply about 40% of the world’s hard drives and analysts are expecting an impact on supply well into 2012. This means that prices are rising, supply is falling and you are stuck buying more storage in the midst of the crisis because you can’t afford to run out of space.

But what if there was a different way?

Save Money by Saving Space

DataCore Software Storage Hypervisor enables you to maximize utilization and minimize capacity consumption. It thinly provisions capacity from the virtual storage pool to hosts only as needed. No longer do you strand capacity by pre-allocating space to applications that may never use it.

New disk shelves and disk arrays can be added to the virtual storage pool without disrupting applications or users, even in the middle of peak workloads. You won’t need to worry about backwards compatibility with your other storage devices. DataCore overcomes those differences, allowing you to mix and match different models and even different brands within the same virtual pool.

This unique capability allows you to shop around for the best value and defer purchases until you really need the capacity.

Interested in reducing costs by getting the most utilization out of your storage? Contact us now.

DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Lowers Cost of Ownership and Accelerates Performance at HARTING Technology Group

2011-11-14T07:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.dabcc.com/channel.aspx?id=208

DataCore Software, the industry’s premier provider of storage virtualization software, announced today that HARTING Technology Group has deployed its SANsymphony storage virtualization software to realize greater cost efficiency, high-performance and a high-availability enterprise storage environment. A complete case study on the storage challenges that HARTING overcame with DataCore Software is available here: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/Harting-Technology-Group.aspx.

HARTING runs on DataCore’s SANsymphony and hardware from Hitachi. The storage solution supports the delivery of business critical applications, such as SAP, MS Exchange, as well as CAD and product lifecycle management software.

HARTING Technology Group is a large global manufacturer and services company specializing in electrical, electronic and optical connection, transmission and networking. It produces technology products and solutions for industries including high-speed rail, automotive and renewable energy such as wind. With over 3,300 employees in 36 countries relying on being able to access the company’s data at all hours of the night and day, a high performance storage environment is paramount.

The company chose a joint solution proposed by solution provider ISO Dataentechnik, which included Hitachi storage hardware and DataCore’s SANsymphony storage virtualization software. By moving from a less-flexible legacy hardware infrastructure to a cost-effective midrange hardware storage system and managing all their storage environment with a DataCore-powered virtualized SAN, HARTING was able to overcome three key challenges:

Reduce the overall costs of storage and provide greater options and flexibility for adding storage systems in the future.
Improve reliability through the addition of DataCore’s high availability for critical business systems.
Substantially increase enterprise application performance.

A Compelling Combination: High Performance and Low Cost
"Our expectations of the combination of HDS hardware and DataCore software have been exceeded,” said Rudolf Laxa, operations and data center team leader at HARTING Technology Group. “The new HDS midrange systems and the DataCore virtual storage layer have allowed us to lower costs and achieve a significant increase in fail-safety and performance. The excellent interaction between DataCore software and VMware is another reason why we are more than satisfied with the current solution."

According to Laxa, there was initial hesitation to move business-critical SAP applications to the virtualized storage environment – as it represented a significant break from HARTING’s past practices. However, examples of success with similar moves with other DataCore customers and the opportunity to significantly enhance current capabilities ultimately prevailed. Laxa continued, "The benefits of central administration finally provided the impetus for implementation -- a decision we have not had a reason to regret so far.”

In particular, HARTING credits DataCore’s SANsymphony software for an unprecedented level of performance and business agility, especially when combined with the company’s existing VMware-based server virtualization deployment throughout its data center.

"The technical capabilities of DataCore virtualized storage appealed to us almost immediately; it creates high availability, gives us independence from the hardware and makes flexible migration scenarios possible,” said Laxa “The software has proven to be a meaningful extension of our VMware environment and guarantees the highest levels of availability we require from our storage solution."

Arizona State University Selects DataCore to Manage Data Storage Growth

2011-11-11T06:54:00.000-08:00

Ensures higher performance and availability

http://www.datamation.com/storage/managing-data-storage-growth-buyers-guide-1.html

Vincent Boragina, Manager System Administration, W. P. Carey School of Business IT Arizona State University, aimed to reach a 100% in server virtualization. Performance from IT assets was imperative. The advance in server virtualisation over the years, alongside desktop virtualization, led the school to dabble in high-end storage I/O needs with sequel databases and file servers (initially kept off the server virtualisation layer as the products were yet to mature). But when they started to virtualize these platforms, they faced a higher degree of latency. The need for I/O had advanced.

Boragina explains, “The issues with virtualization rests not so much with the storage capacity, as much as with how fast and the low latency it requires, to get the data on and off the disc. What is key, are the controllers and the fiber connectivity, etc., that run the disc, which impact the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and the latency of that disc. This is where complexity rises, as it is harder to measure latency. Performance was my key criteria.”

The school implemented DataCore’s SANsymphony-V and XIO storage, where XIO was the disk sub system and DataCore was the hypervisor for the storage and the storage I/O controllers. As a result, the school achieved a 50% reduction in latency time and a 25-30% increase in the overall I/O. With the redundancy and I/O requirements met, the school was able to virtualize any platform.

Importantly, to address issues like high performance, one need not overhaul the existing storage stack, added George Teixeira, CEO at DataCore. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor, for instance, utilizes existing storage assets to boost performance with the adaptive caching. Its auto-tiering enables optimal use of SSDs/Flash, and high-availability for business continuity. “This precludes the investments of purchasing additional IT assets and pre-mature hardware obsolescence,” says Teixeira.

Business continuity was the added benefit for the school, as it came built-in within the DataCore solution. An added effect of this implementation: speedier backup due to a faster I/O.

Storage Hypervisor Delivers Just-in-Time Capacity Management

2011-11-09T06:52:00.000-08:00

Just-in-time (JIT) production practices, which view inventory not as an asset but a cost, have accelerated the delivery and reduced the cost of products in a wide range of industries. But perhaps the biggest benefit to the companies that adopted them was the exposure of widespread manufacturing inefficiencies that were holding them back. Without the cushion of a large inventory, every little mechanical or personnel hiccup in the assembly line had an immediate effect on output.

Virtualization technology is playing a similar role for IT, and nowhere is this more visible than in storage. Server virtualization has been incredibly successful in reducing the processor “inventory” needed to provide agile response to business demands for more and better application performance. Average processor utilization often zooms from the 10% range to 60-70% in successful implementations. But this success exposed serious storage capacity management inefficiencies.

As Jon Toigo of the Data Management Institute points out in the first of his Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars white papers, Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency, between 33 and 70 cents of every IT dollar expended goes for storage, and the TCO of storage is estimated to be as much as 5 to 8 times the cost of acquisition on an annualized basis. However, as illustrated in that paper, on average only 30% of that expenditure is actually used for working data. This isn’t due to carelessness on the part of IT managers. They are doing the same sort of thing manufacturers did before JIT: in this case using large storage inventories to compensate for inefficiencies in storage capacity management that make it impossible to provision storage as fast as they can provision virtual servers.

This is a major factor driving the adoption of storage virtualization, which can abstract storage resources into a single virtual pool to make capacity management far more efficient. (It can do the same for performance management and data protection management, as well—I’ll look at them in future posts.) I say “can” because, given the diverse storage infrastructures that are the reality for most organizations, full exploitation of the benefits of storage virtualization requires the use of a storage hypervisor. This is a portable software program, running on interchangeable servers, that virtualizes all your disk storage resources—SAN, server direct-attached storage (DAS) and even those disks orphaned by the transition to server virtualization—not just the disks controlled by the firmware within a proprietary SAN or disk storage system.

With a storage hypervisor such as DataCore’s SANsymphony-V, the storage capacity management inefficiencies exposed by server virtualization are truly a thing of the past. Rather than laboriously matching up individual storage sources with applications—and likely over-provisioning them just to be sure of having enough, you can draw on a single virtual pool of storage for just the right amount. Thin provisioning permits allocating an amount of storage to an application or end user that is far larger than the actual physical storage behind it, and then provisioning real capacity only as needed based on actual usage patterns. Auto-tiering largely automates the task of matching the right storage resource to applications based on performance level needs.

The result is true just-in-time storage: capacity when, where, and how it’s needed. And, because the capacity management capabilities reside in the storage hypervisor, not the underlying devices, they’re available for existing and future storage purchases, regardless of vendor. You can choose the storage brands and models needed to match your specific price/performance requirements, and when new features and capabilities are added to the hypervisor, they’re available to every storage device.

For more information on how a storage hypervisor can enable effective capacity management from an architectural, operational, and financial standpoint, check out Jon’s second Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars white paper: Capacity Management’s Sweet Notes – Dynamic Storage Pooling, Thin-Provisioning & More.

Next time I’ll look at how a storage hypervisor boosts storage performance management.

ESG reports 59% Have not Deployed Virtualization on Tier-1 Windows Apps

2011-11-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

Respondents to a recent ESG survey indicated that increasing the use of virtualization was their number one IT priority over the last two years and will continue to be the top priority for the next 12-18 months. While server virtualization penetration continues to gain momentum, IT organizations still have numerous hurdles to overcome in order to deploy it more widely and move closer to a 100% virtualized data center. ESG found that 59% have yet to employ virtualization where it will provide the most benefit: their mission-critical tier-1 applications. These tier-1 application workloads include Microsoft Exchange 2010, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, and SharePoint 2010. For IT organizations supporting large numbers of users, hesitation to implement virtualization stems from the perception that it adds performance overhead and unpredictable scalability and availability to the tier-1, multi-user, business-critical applications relied upon by the majority of their users.

http://www.enterpriseittools.com/sites/default/files/ESG%20-%20Hyper-V%20R2%20SP1%20Application%20Workload%20Performance%20-%20March%202011.pdf

DataCore STAR HA Solution Adds Resiliency and Performance to Microsoft Hyper-V Environments
http://www.it-analysis.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=28058

The DataCore STAR HA (high availability) solution is primarily aimed at the large installed base of Microsoft servers running lines of business applications as well as Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint, eager for better data protection and performance.

Many of these IT organisations realise they must move their data from internal server disks to shared storage area network (SAN) to meet growth needs, improve uptime, and enhance productivity. However, some have concluded that this migration could add more risk, disruption, and cost than they can currently afford. Thus, they seek a solution that minimizes these obstacles. They need a simple way to enhance the performance and resiliency of their application servers, while providing easy access and a transition path to the compelling advantages of shared SAN.

The DataCore STAR HA solution is tailored for these IT organisations seeking the benefits of a SAN, while allowing their data to remain safely stored on their servers.

The new business continuity solution enhances the resiliency and performance of Windows server farms enabling those systems to stay up longer, their applications to run faster, and shorten the time to recover from unexpected situations. It is most appealing for customers wishing to keep their data distributed across their server disk drives, while at the same time gaining many of the centralised and advanced services made possible by a SAN.

STAR Topology Leverages Central Server for Faster Recovery from Failures
Rather than migrate server data to an external SAN, the DataCore STAR HA software automatically mirrors the data drives on each Windows server to a central DataCore STAR server for safekeeping. In addition, the Window’s host-resident software speeds up applications by caching repeated disk requests locally from high-speed server memory.

If an application server in the farm goes down, another server can resume its operations by retrieving a current copy of its data drive from the central DataCore STAR server. The DataCore STAR server also offloads replication requests across the farm. It can take centralised snapshots of the data drives and remotely replicate all critical data to a remote disaster recovery site. The solution has the added benefit of automatically redirecting requests to the central DataCore STAR server when a local server data drive is inaccessible.

DataCore Software Offers SAN Alternative for Windows Server Farms; Targets Microsoft Servers Running Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint

2011-11-02T07:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/110111_DataCore_Software_Offers_SAN_Alternative_for_Windows_Server_Farms

DataCore Software Introduces a New Business Continuity Solution for Windows Microsoft servers running Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint, eager for better data protection and performance.

The DataCore STAR high availability solution is primarily aimed at the large installed base of Microsoft servers running lines of business applications as well as Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint, looking for better data protection and performance.

The DataCore STAR HA solution is designed for IT organizations that are seeking the benefits of a SAN, while allowing their data to remain safely stored on their servers.

DataCore also offers alternative, high-availability, high performance packages for architecting solutions using redundant, two node configurations, and scale-out grid designs.

The new business continuity solution improves on the resiliency and performance of Windows server farms enabling those systems to stay up longer, their applications to run faster, and shorten the time to recover from unexpected situations.

It is most ideal for customers that want to keep their data distributed across their server disk drives, while accessing many of the centralized and advanced services made possible by a SAN.

Instead of migrating server data to an external SAN, the DataCore STAR HA software automatically mirrors the data drives on each Windows server to a central DataCore STAR server for safekeeping.

In addition, the Window's host-resident software speeds up applications by caching repeated disk requests locally from high-speed server memory.

If an application server in the farm goes down, another server can resume its operations by retrieving a current copy of its data drive from the central DataCore STAR server.

The DataCore STAR server also offloads replication requests across the farm. It can take centralized snapshots of the data drives and remotely replicate all critical data to a remote disaster recovery site, as well as automatically redirect requests to the central DataCore STAR server when a local server data drive is inaccessible.

Physical machines hosting standalone applications under Windows Server 2008 R2 as well as systems hosting multiple virtual machines under Microsoft Hyper-V can take advantage of the data protection and performance enhancement benefits.

The DataCore STAR HA software is compatible with Windows server applications including Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and line of business applications.

SAN-Averse Customers Can Take Advantage of Business & Financial Benefits
http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/11/01/datacore-software-introduces-a-new-business-continuity-solution-for-windows-server-farms.aspx
“While many IT managers are eager to exploit the benefits of centralized and shared data that SANs deliver, they also often worry that migrating to a central storage system could prove to be risky and disruptive,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “The STAR HA software from DataCore provides a solution to this conundrum by combining the comfort and familiarity of distributed data with the attractive attributes of a central SAN in an efficient manner that is both unobtrusive and cost-effective.”

Storage Hypervisors and the Technology of Freedom: No Automation without Virtualization

2011-10-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

Two political movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street (OWS), have been in the headlines lately. Although they come from very different corners of the political ring, they seem to share a perception that there’s a group of people, however defined, that have more than their fair share of power and influence.

They also have in common a debt to what the brilliant communications scholar Ithiel de Sola Pool called “the technologies of freedom.” When he wrote the seminal book by that name in 1983, that phrase referred to the printing press, radio, television, and the telephone, but he clearly foresaw the transformation of these technologies by the computer, a process he called “convergence.” Both the Tea Party and OWS (not to mention the Arab Spring and similar movements) would have been impossible without the new technologies of freedom that resulted from this convergence: email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like, which enable those who can’t afford a printing press or a broadcast station to make their voices heard with a volume unlikely or impossible with earlier technologies.

What’s interesting to me is that the computing industry has its own “technology of freedom,” which has proved just as corrosive of vendor control as applications like Twitter have of political control. I’m talking about virtualization, a technique that pervades computing from top to bottom, forever abstracting function away from hardware into software. The abstraction furnished by communications protocols gave us the Internet, and helped blow up telecomm monopolies in the process. The abstraction of processors gave us server and desktop virtualization, making computing power a commodity and undermining the power of hardware vendors.

Now storage virtualization is eroding the power and influence of storage vendors. The 99%--the IT professionals down in the trenches suffering with the complications of managing a balkanized storage infrastructure—are fed up. They’re ready to throw their growing collection of storage devices into the harbor—any harbor. They’ve seen the promise of storage virtualization: better capacity management, better performance management, and better data protection management. But they don’t see why they shouldn’t be able to get these benefits across all their storage assets. After all, hypervisors like VMware, Hyper-V, and Xen work with any server hardware.

That’s why the “big iron” vendors haven’t been able to keep virtualization safely locked up in their disk arrays. The genie is out of the bottle with the rise of hardware-independent storage hypervisors like DataCore’s SANsymphony-V. A storage hypervisor unifying all your storage assets—from SANs to NAS boxes to SCSI disks orphaned by server virtualization consolidation—into an easily managed, high-performance virtual storage pool. By automating many of the tasks involved in efficient storage management, a storage hypervisor frees IT for more strategic operations and transforms storage from a business cost into a business advantage.

I’ll be looking at each of the management advantages a storage hypervisor delivers in posts to come, and outlining the business benefits they deliver: risk reduction, improved productivity, and cost containment.

For a head start on these topics, and more, please plan to attend a complimentary webcast on October 27, 2011 titled “The Storage Hypervisor: Taking Storage to the Next Level.” This webcast starts at 2:00 PM Eastern Time. Get to know DataCore – and take your storage to the next level. Register today.

Jack Spencer Saves Big Bucks with DataCore SANsymphony-V; CIO of American Society Health-System Pharmacists

2011-10-18T07:21:00.000-07:00

http://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/the-hoard-facts/2011/10/jack-spencer-datacore-san-symphony-v.aspx

Spencer's IBM storage was failing, but DataCore came to the rescue and saved him some money in the process.

Jack Spencer is VP of operations and CIO of the non-profit American Society Health-System Pharmacists. Last Fall, his IBM Fast T 700 storage server, which had been in place for about five years and upgraded numerous times, started to fail during the registration period of one of the organization's national meetings that produce a large portion of its yearly operating budget.

"We had a lot of pain with IBM trying to get something done with that, and of course it turned into more of a sales call than any kind of a support thing, so it came to the point where we knew there had to be a better way," Spencer said.

Fortunately, he was able to stabilize the Fast T 700--which had a controller that was failing and several bad drives that were being masked by the controller's symptoms--it could complete the meeting's registration duties. He then immediately went to work on crafting a new system, which involved implementing a SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software system that used HP EVA disk arrays. DataCore refers to SANsymphony as a "storage hypervisor."

Even though his new storage configuration was up and running, Spencer didn't want to throw out the Fast T 700 because it was still usable, and DataCore told him he could put that plus some Dell MD series disk arrays behind SANsymphony-V.

"DataCore gave me a solution that allowed me to keep all those resources, and not get them out of the architecture, but still use them, maybe not in production, but in a test environment," he said. "So now we don't see the new system as an individual piece of equipment that has storage--we just see storage, and I'll tell you, the training curve for my LAN crew who manages that has decreased by 80 percent at least."

...ROI-wise, Spencer said he saved between $50,000 and $100,000 alone by being able to keep using his legacy storage systems. He claimed to have saved another $20,000 to $30,000 by slashing his training requirements.

Does he go along with the "storage hypervisor" characterization of SAN Symphony-V?

"Oh absolutely. I can go out and look at whatever storage I want and just throw it in behind," he stated. "It's pretty straight-forward, pretty simple, and pretty elegant.

Stikeman Elliott Streamlined its Data with DataCore

2011-10-17T08:38:00.001-07:00

ComputerWorld and IT World Canada: http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/stikeman-elliott-streamlined-its-data-with-datacore/144114

Using DataCore’s SANSymphony-V, corporate law firm Stikeman Elliott was able to re-purpose valuable storage devices and add new units into the chain without risking downtime

One of the things that Marco Magini, network and systems administrator for Montreal-based Stikeman Elliot LLC, worries most about where storage is concerned is downtime. At one of the largest corporate law firms in the world, it may come as a shock, but the cliché “time is money,” is no joke, Magini said.

“In terms of business continuity or flow, here, time is money, so data has to be available 24/7. I know everywhere it’s the same, but here, downtime costs a lot. When you do the math for the lawyers’ fee and the legal assistant and everything, we need to keep the data up and running all the time. No disruption at all,” he said.

After using a few bandaid fixes and constantly shopping for storage upgrades, Magini was introduced to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based DataCore Software by TH Consultants.

He’d looked at other products before, but the fact that DataCore was a software implementation with a real emphasis on interchangeability really sold him on it. He and the IT team found themselves asking, “why can’t we pull or stretch the actual hardware that we have (instead of constantly upgrading)? (That’s) why we love the DataCore product; it’s not manufacturer binded. You can throw any type of arrays or storage at it.”

George Teixeira, CEO of DataCore, said that this is one of the key principles his company is known for. “We started off pioneering a lot of the key things that are, today, taken for granted in the whole storage/virtualization space; things like thin provisioning and so forth. The difference is we’ve always done it in software and it’s software that allows hardware interchangeability.”

Teixeira said that DataCore is well positioned because storage isn’t something you can mess around with. You need to utilize whatever you have to keep budgets and downtime from spinning out of control. “As time goes on, people are using different kinds of storage depending on what they need and the cost for these things differ dramatically and the performance differs dramatically. One of the big advantages of DataCore is it’s software that works across all of these,” he said.

He also said it uses “auto-tiering” to intelligently move data between devices by cost and availability. “What (auto-tiering) does is allow you to have a mix of any kind of these purpose-built devices that you already have in your sight or add new ones and we will move the data to where it makes the most economic and pricepoint for your needs.”

Besides this unique take on interchangeability, Magini said his satisfaction in the transition to DataCore’s SANSymphony-V Hypervisor came from the added benefits he hadn’t considered before implementation. “This is a little jewel. Not only does it answer our backup issue, but we can move forward with our disaster recovery and especially high availability.”

My Kingdom for a Storage Hypervisor!... The Latest Woes of Research in Motion (RIM)

2011-10-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

The old saying “for want of a nail a kingdom was lost” comes to mind while watching the latest woes of Research in Motion (RIM) and their consumer-focused Blackberry Internet Services (BIS), which apparently went down twice this week. Consumers in EMEA and South America were particularly hard hit, and the outages spread to North America. Early reports indicate that the first outage, at least, may have originated in the company’s data center in Slough, England—network carriers are denying any responsibility.

These outages come less than a month after the company’s stock hit a five-year low, due to investor worries about competition from Apple and Android phones and other concerns. Since consumers aren’t subject to the same lock-in pressures as corporations who have adopted the Blackberry Enterprise Server, this outage could well prompt more consumers to switch, especially with the introduction of the iPhone 4s.

Obviously, until RIM comes clean on the cause of these outages, we can only speculate about how they could have been prevented. But if preliminary reports of them being server-related are true, our customers’ experience suggests that a storage hypervisor might have helped. Storage is the foundation of server operations, so high-availability storage is a must-have for utterly-reliable operation. A storage hypervisor such as DataCore SANsymphony-V can create an easily-provisioned virtual pool of storage that is replicated both synchronously, for immediate, no-interruption failover, and, if desired, asynchronously, for disaster recovery. No change is required to the application servers, making a storage hypervisor an easy and cost-effective way to prevent outages.

For instance, the Ports of Auckland, through which passes 13% of New Zealand’s GDP and almost 40% of its container trade, depends on SANsympony-V to support cargo handling and logistics services on a 24x7, 365-day-a-year basis. As Lead Systems Engineer Craig Beetlestone notes, DataCore let the Ports of Auckland “design out the panic” so that while the port may run 24X7, IT doesn’t have to. “We can suffer a complete site failure and have the systems carry on running without any manual intervention, which is a huge benefit for us,” he says. “Our return to operation is literally only minutes.”

How many customers could RIM have retained if the recent outages had been only minutes? And, would nervous investors even have noticed? The costs of these outages will be nearly incalculable, but one thing seems sure: if a storage hypervisor could have prevented them, it would have paid for itself the moment it was turned on.

DataCore: Storage Virtualization for the Rest of Us

2011-10-11T01:46:00.000-07:00

http://juku.it/en/articles/datacore-storage-virtualization-for-the-rest-of-us.html

I’ve been playing around with many storage platforms in the last ten years but I admittedly never had first hand experience with Datacore before now.

Datacore is a private company hailing from sunny Ft. Lauderdale, FL. They sport worldwide presence and 13 years in the competitive storage industry with more than 6000 customers.

Their sole product is called SANsymphony-V and it’s a software-based storage virtualization solution which runs on physical or virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 machines. The product can virtualize whatever storage is connected to itself (both direct attached or connected via SAN) and then export it using iSCSI, FC and FCoE.

SANsymphony-V approach to HA is an interesting one, they’re maintaining synchronous copies between nodes to guarantee high availability, with this approach you can separate the nodes as far as 100 KMs apart and still access them as a single entity (a scenario that vaguely resemble NetApp’s metrocluster)...

SANsymphony-V really struck my interest so I decided to give it a spin in our Juku lab.

During my tests I’ve put SANsymphony-V under stress in two different scenarios: physical (with async replication to virtual) and fully virtual (on vSphere 5 beta), I used both direct attached storage (local disks on Dell servers) and SAN attached storage (running on a trusty HDS AMS500 connected via FC to a Brocade fabric) as backend and VMware ESXi5 servers as clients.

The tests were performed with IOmeter inside virtual machines and performances were consistent across all the tests performed, the aggressive caching that Datacore provides (up to 1TB per node can be used for caching purposes) pushed IOps up to 4x in the tests performed (comparing SANsymphony-V performance against the native backend storage) a metric that is definitely interesting if your workload is cache friendly, especially because Datacore uses standard server RAM as caching platform that is usually cheaper than purpose-built cache modules for storage arrays.

...The product is solid, during my tests I had no issue whatsoever with the Datacore software: no install shenanigans, no strange quirks and no unexpected behaviors, everything went as smooth as it can get and performance were always consistent, even when Datacore nodes were virtualized under VMware.

...Even if I’m not too fond of Windows as a storage platform (even if EMC proved me wrong) I must admit that if the storage layer is solid you can achieve great results, as it’s the case with Datacore and even if I’d really like to see the products bundled with a stripped-down version of Windows server (to maximize physical resource utilization) if you’re in the market for a good software-based storage virtualization solution, Datacore is definitely something to put on your shortlist.

Cloud Storage Partnership: DataCore and TwinStrata

2011-10-10T05:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.mspmentor.net/2011/10/05/cloud-storage-patnership-datacore-and-twinstrata/

DataCore Software and TwinStrata are connecting the dots between storage virtualization and cloud storage. Specifically, DataCore’s storage virtualization software will now come bundled with a free TwinStrata CloudArray virtual appliance. How do managed service providers potentially benifit? Here are some thoughts.

The new solution allows enterprises to optimize their on-site data and leverage a pay-as-you-go storage center in a cloud environment, the companies say. DataCore and TwinStrata have been strategic partners for a number of years, according to DataCore Director of Product Marketing Augie Gonzalez. And according to DataCore President, CEO and Co-Founder George Teixeira, the partnership with TwinStrata is really the secondary news here.

“This announcement is not so much about TwinStrata. The bigger picture is that DataCore has been focused on managing and tiering diverse devices,” explained Teixeira. “We are allowing the consumer to have hardware interchangeability. And on a higher level, our architecture lets you get the most out of each level and get better performance out of any device.”

According to Teixeira, the DataCore-TwinStrata solution will “feel” like you’re using on-premise iSCSI disks. But the storage will actually occur in a cloud provider of their choice. That means less critical tiered storage, data backups and archives that can grow on pay-as-you-go-tiers and savings when it comes to space, power, cooling, and ultimately, money, the companies claim.

“Our auto-tiering function lets you promote or demote the storage or data to whatever makes sense economically or whatever meets storage needs,” Teixeira continued. “The one thing that was missing was a low cost storage from a cloud provider that you can get pretty simply today as a pay-as-you-go storage model. So we’ve added a function.”

According to Gonzalez, DataCore reviewed more than 100 different cloud solutions on the market before deciding on TwinStrata’s CloudArray. “They have an outstanding engineering and support staff,” Gonzalez said. “MSPs are trying to offer a complete on-premise and off-premise cloud model. To do that today, they would have to go to a fragmented approach. We are bringing to market a uniform way to do this.”

The Boss Just Asked Me – “Why aren't we using Cloud Storage?”

2011-10-07T06:47:00.000-07:00

The US government (the big boss) has enacted a 'Cloud First' policy, which is easy to state but has proven more difficult to do. Likewise CIOs (IT bosses) and businesses of all types are dealing with the challenge of how to effectively use “pay to go” Cloud capabilities to save money and improve productivity.

One especially critical pain point in IT is the growth of storing data and its cost (upfront capital expenditures, space, power, cooling, maintenance, etc.). IT managers who have too much work and too little time are being forced to look for new ways to get the most out of their on-premise storage assets while exploring ways to integrate new Cloud models. The bosses want more...

What to do? Recently, Gartner Group’s Gene Ruth, Research Director and Senior Storage Analyst, published a set of key findings and recommendations on Cloud storage in a recent report titled: Use heterogeneous storage virtualization as a bridge to the cloud. The opening page to the report makes an interesting statement: “Moving a storage infrastructure into a cloud paradigm can be a struggle for data center operators. The use of a heterogeneous storage virtualization solution provides a transition path that preserves investments and adds cloud operating semantics."

Storage virtualization and bridges all sound good, but how can we do it practically is the real question?

The simple answer to the question being asked is…it has to be easy, non-disruptive to operations and cost-effective. DataCore just announced it has extended its storage hypervisor tiering to Cloud storage and of course we believe the combination of storage virtualization and a Cloud gateway makes for a practical and compelling answer. The solution empowers users to manage, offload and augment on-premise storage environments with space and power saving storage located in the cloud.

For more background on the issue, the article in Cloud Computing by Nicos Vekiarides, a real Cloud expert, is a good read and does a good job of outlining how storage virtualization software, smart management to tier storage, and a seamless Cloud gateway can let companies gain the advantages of Cloud storage. You can read the full article here –

Cloud Computing: Combining Storage Virtualization with Unprecedented Cloud Storage Flexibility

The business case for storage virtualization software isn’t new. System administrators have always sought best-of-breed data storage from a choice of storage vendors and a centralized management framework. However, the business case for storage virtualization is currently even more profound for several key reasons.

Now, with a variety of data storage devices available today, ranging from high-performance SSD and Flash cards to low-cost SATA arrays, a seamless way to automatically tier data across the diversity of storage devices and purpose-built arrays can maximize utilization and cost-efficiency.
Moreover, hardware interchangeability and auto-tiering empower consumers with greater cost controls and buying power.
In addition, there are numerous benefits to an enterprise-class software stack that includes data replication and disaster recovery in a footprint that persists across storage system upgrades – with no need to ever change data management interfaces and policies.

Read the full article.

More Coverage on DataCore Extends Storage Hypervisor Tiering to Cloud Storage

2011-10-06T01:39:00.000-07:00

Combining Storage Virtualization with Unprecedented Cloud Storage Flexibility
http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2007782

The business case for storage virtualization software isn’t new. System administrators have always sought best of breed data storage from a choice of storage vendors and a centralized management framework. With a variety of data storage devices available today, ranging from high-performance SSD and Flash cards to low-cost SATA arrays, a seamless way to automatically tier data across the diversity of storage devices and purpose-built arrays can maximize utilization and cost-efficiency. Hardware interchangeability and auto-tiering empower consumers with greater cost controls and buying power. In addition, there are numerous benefits to an enterprise-class software stack that includes data replication and disaster recovery in a footprint that persists across storage system upgrades, with no need to ever change data management interfaces and policies.

DataCore SANsymphony-V is offered by the pioneer and established leader in the storage virtualization segment and is the industry’s first storage hypervisor that provides all of the above benefits and much more. This week, DataCore’s storage virtualization software added the flexibility of Cloud Storage to its list of features with the announcement that every copy of SANsymphony-V now bundles a TwinStrata Cloudarray virtual appliance. The combination enables companies to achieve true ‘open market’ buying power across their portfolio of storage investments; TwinStrata extends the cost-saving value propostion to a broad and impressive selection of public and private cloud storage providers. Read More...

InfoStor:DataCore Extends SANsymphony-V to the Cloud
http://www.infostor.com/backup-and_recovery/cloud-storage/datacore-extends-sansymphony-v-to-the-cloud.html

DataCore Software announced Tuesday that it has enhanced its SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor product to enable users to store less-important data to be automatically in the cloud, leaving more space on local storage infrastructure for high-priority data.

SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor provides a comprehensive set of storage control and monitoring functions that provide a transparent, virtual layer across consolidated disk pools.

It manages and optimizes different levels of storage, including memory, solid-state drives (SSD), and hard-disk drives (HDD) so that the most appropriate data is stored in the most appropriate tiers -- and now SANsymphony-V also works with cloud storage tiers, according to DataCore.

"Basically, DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor has a function called auto-tiering which can set and prioritize data storage tiers ... "The problem, until now, [has been the lack of] the ease in doing this and storage costs ... The cloud is an ideal option because of its low storage costs"...

Enterprise Systems: DataCore Extends Storage Hypervisor Tiering to Cloud Storage
http://esj.com/articles/2011/10/04/datacore-storage-hypervisor.aspx

Architecture manages, optimizes tiers of storage; provides cloud gateway for backup, archive, and low-cost, off-premise tiered cloud storage.

DataCore Software has extended its storage hypervisor architecture with functionality that empowers enterprise customers to optimize the utilization and performance of their on-site assets and take full advantage of low cost, virtually unlimited “pay-as-you-go” storage in the cloud. The DataCore SANsymphony -V storage hypervisor now integrates seamlessly with the CloudArray cloud storage gateway from TwinStrata, a cloud-based data storage provider, allowing a simple, transparent, and cost-effective way to manage, offload, and augment on-premise storage environments with space- and power-saving storage located in the cloud.

Computer Technology Review: DataCore extends storage hypervisor tiering to provide enterprises with cloud storage
http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13750:datacore-extends-storage-hypervisor-tiering-to-provide-enterprises-with-cloud-storage&catid=320:breaking-news&Itemid=2701739

WebHost: Storage Virtualization Provider DataCore Adds TwinStrata CloudArray to Software Package
http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/100411_Storage_Virtualization_Provider_DataCore_Adds_TwinStrata_CloudArray_to_Software_Package

“SANsymphony-V was designed to help customers get the maximum performance, availability and utilization from the storage devices in their data centers,” Carlos Carreras, VP of alliances at DataCore said in a statement. “By bundling the TwinStrata CloudArray appliance with our SANsymphony-V, we give our customers even more flexibility and greater cost control by enabling them to include cloud storage in their virtual storage architecture.”

According to the press release, the bundle includes 1TB TwinStrata Cloud Array Virtual Appliance (a $2995 value), data compression/deduplication, at-rest/in-flight encryption, snapshotting, disaster recovery, bandwidth optimization and scheduling and choice of cloud service providers.

The package is also upgradable to handle perabytes of data and includes 30 days free cloud storage.

SNSeurope: TwinStrata and DataCore deliver industry-first storage virtualization to incorporate Cloud storage

DataCore, the premier provider of storage virtualization software, is bundling a free, one-terabyte TwinStrata CloudArray virtual appliance with the DataCore SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor software to provide a fast and secure way for organizations to scale their storage infrastructure more cost effectively using cloud storage.

http://www.snseurope.com/news_full.php?id=19700

“TwinStrata and DataCore are making it possible for users to easily include cloud storage as a transparent extension of their existing data center storage environment,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “This gives companies greater control over storage performance and helps control costs by making it easy to tier their storage across the absolute widest range of resources, from high-performance SSD arrays and legacy disk arrays, to scalable, cost-effective cloud storage.”

ChannelEMEA: DataCore provides seamless access to cost effective Cloud Storage

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor is unique in its ability to provide an architecture that manages, optimises and spans all the different price-points and performance levels of electronic and mechanical storage, including electronic memory, SSDs, disk devices and cloud storage tiers. Amongst its comprehensive features is advanced automated tiering of disks. This option automatically relocates disk blocks among pools of different storage devices, keeping demanding workloads operating at peak speeds. Less critical and infrequently accessed disk blocks naturally gravitate towards lower cost disks.

With the transparent integration of CloudArray, DataCore customers use what they believe are on-premise iSCSI disks whose contents are located remotely on a cloud storage provider of their choice. This allows less critical tiered storage, backups and archive data to be cost-effectively placed in cloud storage that can grow almost limitlessly and with pay-as-you-go tiers, while offering additional savings in space, power and cooling.

Additional features include:

Seamless integration between Cloud Array and SANsymphony-V in minutes;
Easily downloadable virtual software appliance;
Data deduplication and compression;
Data backup and recovery - on-site, off-site or in the cloud;
Secure AES 256-bit advanced encryption standard for both at-rest and in-flight data protection;
Disk caching to boost performance and enhance speed-matching to off-site cloud storage;
Bandwidth optimisation and scheduling controls;
Snapshotting;
and Choice of cloud storage providers, including such leaders as Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Windstream Hosted Solutions, PEER 1 Hosting, Nirvanix and OpenStack.

Blog Posts:

Combining Storage Virtualization with Unprecedented Cloud Storage Flexibility

DataCore Extends Storage Hypervisor Tiering to Provide Enterprises With Seamless Access to Cost Effective Cloud Storage

DataCore adds support for cloud as storage tier

DataCore Extends Storage Hypervisor Tiering to Provide Enterprises With Seamless Access to Cost Effective Cloud Storage

2011-10-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.enterprisecommunicate.com/datacore-extends-storage-hypervisor-tiering-to-provide-enterprises-with-seamless-access-to-cost-effective-cloud-storage/

Offers Comprehensive Architecture to Manage and Optimize All Tiers of Storage. Partnership with TwinStrata Integrates Cloud Gateway for Backup, Archive and Low Cost Off-Premise Tiered Cloud Storage.

DataCore Software today announced it has extended its storage hypervisor architecture with functionality that empowers enterprise customers to optimize the utilization and performance of their on-site assets and take full advantage of low cost, virtually unlimited ‘pay as you go’ storage in the cloud. The DataCore™SANsymphony™ -V storage hypervisor now integrates seamlessly with the CloudArray® cloud storage gateway from TwinStrata, the leading innovator of cloud-based data storage, allowing a simple, transparent and cost-effective way to manage, offload and augment on-premise storage environments with space and power saving storage located in the cloud.

“Moving a storage infrastructure into a cloud paradigm can be a struggle for data center operators. The use of a heterogeneous storage virtualization solution provides a transition path that preserves investments and adds cloud operating semantics,” said Gene Ruth, research director and senior storage analyst for Gartner. “This particular solution combines storage virtualization, tiering of diverse devices and a bridge capability, allowing organizations to choose and offload less critical storage, backup and archive data onto cloud storage providers.”

TwinStrata and DataCore Deliver Industry-First Storage Virtualization Solution to Incorporate Cloud Storage

2011-10-04T08:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.stockrants.com/2011/10/04/twinstrata-and-datacore-deliver-industry-first-storage-virtualization-solution-to-incorporate-cloud-storage.html

“TwinStrata and DataCore are making it possible for users to easily include cloud storage as a transparent extension of their existing data center storage environment,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “This gives companies greater control over storage performance and helps control costs by making it easy to tier their storage across the absolute widest range of resources, from high-performance SSD arrays and legacy disk arrays, to scalable, cost-effective cloud storage.”

“SANsymphony-V was designed to help customers get the maximum performance, availability and utilization from the storage devices in their data centers,” said Carlos Carreras, VP of alliances at DataCore. “By bundling the TwinStrata CloudArray appliance with our SANsymphony-V, we give our customers even more flexibility and greater cost control by enabling them to include cloud storage in their virtual storage architecture.”

“DataCore storage virtualization software enables us to maximize storage pool resource utilization to ensure high performance and availability for our clients,” said Jason Schuerhoff, vice president of sales at Sublime Solution, a global IT reseller and services company specializing in virtualization solutions. “Using it with CloudArray to integrate cloud storage into the mix will enable us to create some exciting new storage configurations that further reduce costs and increase storage scalability for customers.”

Storage Hypervisor Coverage in IT Business Edge: Is Storage Virtualization for Real? DataCore Says Yes

2011-09-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/community/features/interviews/blog/is-storage-virtualization-for-real-datacore-says-yes/?cs=48680

by Arthur Cole, IT Business Edge

Arthur Cole spoke with Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing for DataCore.

The concept of storage virtualization has been drawing a lot of heat lately. Can you, in fact, virtualize a resource that can only accommodate a finite amount of data at any given time? Server virtualization proved so successful because most enterprises were sitting on a lot of untapped capability. A storage cell is either occupied or it's not. End of story. Yet many firms continue to tout storage virtualization, with DataCore even going so far as describe itself as a "storage hypervisor company." The company's Augie Gonzalez explains the meaning behind the phrase.

“Many of the bottlenecks encountered in virtual environments today can be directly attributed to the mechanical characteristics of spinning disk drives. We’ve found two effective ways to address the performance and resulting cost problems that they create.” - Augie Gonzalez

Cole: Storage has always been the slow-poke in the modern data environment, a problem that only seems to have accelerated now that everything is going virtual. What are some of the best ways to improve storage performance in virtual environments short of a wholesale rebuild?
Gonzalez: Many of the bottlenecks encountered in virtual environments today can be directly attributed to the mechanical characteristics of spinning disk drives. We’ve found two effective ways to address the performance and resulting cost problems that they create. Both are made possible by having our storage hypervisor intercept disk requests in an infrastructure-wide software layer slotted between the server hypervisors and the disk subsystems. From that unique vantage point we have visibility to all read-and-write requests generated by the cluster of virtual machines across the pool of disks. We can then adaptively cache the requests in very fast electronic memories to yield a many-fold performance boost.

The second turbo-charging benefit comes from sensing the most demanding disk block requests and automatically directing them to the fastest tier in the pool according to priorities established by the customer. The tiers range from high-speed Solid State Disk (SSD) flash cards all the way down to inexpensive internal Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives. The pool incorporates the diverse set of storage resources available to the data center, rather than what a manufacturer may have chosen to package in a disk array enclosure.

Cole: Some people have questioned your use of the term "storage hypervisor" to describe the new SANsymphony-V platform. What's your take?
Gonzalez: Controversy generates awareness, so we encourage the IT community to weigh in. Such healthy dialogues help expand the lexicon of technologists to encompass inventions while drawing parallels from familiar concepts.

Visualize a stack of rich, hardware-independent services spread across the IT environment. You’ll immediately spot three hypervisor layers. Most IT pros are well-versed with the server hypervisor floating above server-class machines. Those with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) slant will clearly pick out the desktop hypervisor atop a collection of thin clients and thick PCs. The DataCore storage hypervisor soars above the diverse disk infrastructure to supplement device-level capabilities with extended provisioning, automated storage tiering, replication and performance acceleration services. It even offers a seamless ramp to the cloud for low price storage of less critical data.

Cole: Is it possible, then, for storage architectures to gain the same degree of fluidity and dynamism that virtualization brings to servers and networking?
Gonzalez: It’s not just possible; that’s exactly what SANsymphony-V customers experience day in and day out. As importantly, they realize the collective value of their storage resources in ways that they could not when used in isolation. The results can be more concretely measured in terms of higher availability, faster performance and maximum disk utilization.

The storage hypervisor also removes device-specific compatibility constraints, which had tied the buyer’s hands. Their newfound interchangeability grants customers the clout to negotiate the best value from among competing suppliers at every capacity expansion, hardware refresh and maintenance renewal event. Pretty compelling, don’t you think?

Storage Hypervisors Mean High Availability for Virtual Desktops

2011-09-29T06:42:00.000-07:00

Back in March I wrote about VMware’s conviction that 2011 is the year when desktop virtualization gets real, and Jon Toigo’s assertion that the big roadblock for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is the cost of the storage needed. Our partner Pano Logic found a related one: high availability. How they cleared this roadblock and boosted performance at the same time is a good illustration of how DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor works as a team player to solve virtualization problems.

Pano Logic offers a Zero Client Computing desktop virtualization infrastructure for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenDesktop, and other hypervisors. Figure 1 shows the Pano Logic endpoint: just attach a keyboard, one or two monitors, and a mouse, connect to a back-end server running the Pano Logic software, and up comes your desktop.

Of course, that assumes you have a back-end infrastructure to connect to, and the expertise to configure and run it. Pano Logic found that for many customers, such as small businesses and even enterprise branch offices and departments, this wasn’t a given. So the company packaged up a complete virtual desktop infrastructure, from servers to endpoints, and offered it as Pano Express. All the user has to do is unpack some boxes, follow the color-coded instructions, and push a button. It’s easier than most home theater setups.

Pano Express, which supports up to thirty users, is a hit, especially in the SMB and educational markets. But the company found that enterprise branch office and departmental customers more often demanded 100% 24X7 operation as well. Downtime would have serious financial consequences.

Pano Logic knew that storage virtualization was the key to high availability. Storage is the heart of a VDI. In fact, Toigo describes a virtual desktop as the ability to “call a desktop image up on demand, do some work, and then park it back on disk.” If your storage is highly-available, your virtual desktops are as well. That’s one role of a storage hypervisor, whether built into a SAN or furnished as software for heterogeneous storage infrastructures.

Rather than ask its customers to amortize an expensive SAN across thirty desktops to supply that high availability, Pano Logic partnered with DataCore Software. Their new Pano Express HA virtual desktop infrastructure incorporates the DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor along with VMware software to provide real-time virtual machine replication, assuring that server failure causes no downtime. SANsymphony-V also increased virtual desktop performance for Pano Logic. With the storage hypervisor’s high-speed cache, Pano Express HA can support up to 60 users.

SANsymphony-V’s synchronous replication capabilities can unite any combination of disk storage devices into a single virtual storage pool maintained across two active mirrored servers. If either half of the storage infrastructure is taken down for maintenance or fails, the other server picks up the load without any user impact. Resynchronization is automatic, non-disruptive, and requires no special host scripts.

This is just one example of how DataCore’s storage hypervisor is helping a growing number of partners solve specific virtualization problems and deliver greater value to their customers. In future posts, I’ll share more such stories, to illustrate the wide range of benefits available from storage virtualization delivered by a software solution that works with any storage hardware.

DataCore Storage Hypervisor [Video Interview]

2011-09-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCGp2wtqSFM

GeorgeTexeira, CEO of Datacore, explains why DataCore "created" a storage hypervisor, and why auto tiering, the latest feature, is better in a software layer.

Pano Logic Incorporates DataCore Storage Hypervisor in its 'one step VDI' Pano Express HA solution

2011-09-19T07:33:00.000-07:00

Pano Logic Hits SMB Sweet Spot with Two Zero-Client Packages

Virtualization and zero-client company Pano Logic is hitting the scene with two new all-inclusive virtualization packages: servers, clients and software, all pre-packaged, pre-configured, bundled and ready to go right out of the box. They represent the next evolution of Pano Logic’s Pano Express, specifically geared for the SMB and remote offices. Both Pano Express SMB and Pano Express HA are built to support 30 and 60 power users respectively, in addition to the zero-client endpoints. Pano Logic calls them a “one-step VDI solution” since all the software and servers are preloaded with VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows Sever 2008. But the HA version stands out in that it will allow for a storage protection layer via DataCore Software for VDI failover.

Based on Pano Zero Clients with VMware vSphere Essentials and DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor software running in a redundant fault-tolerant configuration on enterprise-grade servers.

More info at: http://www.panologic.com/pano-express-ha

Pano Logic Simplifies VDI Deployments

...The HA version includes a Fujitsu blade server and also includes Datacore Software's SAN Symphony V storage management software and a redundant storage array to handle failovers and high availability situations.

"While a number of joint partners have deployed our solutions in the past, the new bundle simplifies the process for both the partner and the customer," said Carlos Carreras, the VP of alliances at Datacore. "By delivering the HA bundle as an appliance, the user experience is simplified and they are able to immediately take advantage of the benefits offered."

Pano Logic woos SMBs with 'one-step' VDI

...The company introduced Pano Express SMB and Pano Express HA, servers that arrive with all the software you need to operate those little silver cubes, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and VMware vSphere 4 virtualization. The HA incarnation – that's "high availability" – also offers virtual storage software from DataCore that provides replication and failover.

Defining a Storage Hypervisor

2011-09-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

After reading Sid Herron's recent blog post (see below), I thought it would be useful to share his post and additional information links on the topic.

Storage Hypervisor Defintions:

Wikipedia: Wikipedia entry on Storage Hypervisor
Wiktionary: Wiktionary entry on Storage Hypervisor
DataCore: Introducing the DataCore Storage Hypervisor and the Benefits of Hardware Interchangeability
DataCore's Storage Hypervisor Definition and Features-at-a-glance
Mooselogic's Sid Herron post:

What the Heck Is a “Storage Hypervisor?”

DataCore has recently issued a press release positioning their new software release (v8.1) of SANsymphony-V as a “storage hypervisor.” On the surface, that may just sound like some nice marketing spin, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made – because it highlights one of the major differences between DataCore’s products and most other SAN products out there.

To understand what I mean, let’s think for a moment about what a “hypervisor” is in the server virtualization world. Whether you’re talking about VSphere, Hyper-V, or XenServer, you’re talking about software that provides an abstraction layer between hardware resources and operating system instances. An individual VM doesn’t know – or care – whether it’s running on an HP Server, a Dell, an IBM, or a “white box.” It doesn’t care whether it’s running on an Intel or an AMD processor. You can move a VM from one host to another without worrying about changes in the underlying hardware, bios, drivers, etc. (Not talking about “live motion” – that’s a little different.) The hypervisor presents the VM with a consistent execution platform that hides the underlying complexity of the hardware.

So, back to DataCore. Remember that SANsymphony-V is a software application that runs on top of Windows Server 2008 R2. In most cases, people buy a couple of servers that contain a bunch of local storage, install 2008 R2 on them, install SANsymphony-V on them, and turn that bunch of local storage into full-featured iSCSI SAN nodes. (We typically run them in pairs so that we can do synchronous mirroring of the data across the two nodes, such that if one node completely fails, the data is still accessible.) But that’s not all we can do.

Because it’s running on a 2008 R2 platform, it can aggregate and present any kind of storage the underlying Server OS can access at the block level. Got a fibre channel SAN that you want to throw into the mix? Great! Put fiber channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) in your DataCore nodes, present that storage to the servers that SANsymphony-V is running on, and now you can manage the fibre channel storage right along with the local storage in your DataCore nodes. Got some other iSCSI SAN that you’d like to leverage? No problem. Just make sure you’ve got a couple of extra NICs in the DataCore nodes (or install iSCSI HBAs if you want even better performance), present that iSCSI storage to the DataCore nodes, and you can manage it as well. You can even create a storage pool that crosses resource boundaries! And now, with the new auto-tiering functionality of SANsymphony-V v8.1, you can let DataCore automatically migrate the most frequently accessed data to the highest-performing storage subsystems.

Or how about this: You just bought a brand new storage system from Vendor A to replace the system from Vendor B that you’ve been using for the past few years. You’d really like to move Vendor B’s system to your disaster-recovery site, but Vendor A’s product doesn’t know how to replicate data to Vendor B’s product. If you front-end both vendors’ products with DataCore nodes, the DataCore nodes can handle the asynchronous replication to your DR site. Alternately, maybe you bought Vendor A’s system because it offered higher performance than Vendor B’s system. Instead of using Vendor B’s product for DR, you can present both systems to SANsymphony-V and leverage its auto-tiering feature to automatically insure that the data that needs the highest performance gets migrated to Vendor A’s platform.

So, on the back end, you can have disparate SAN products (iSCSI, fibre channel, or both) and local storage (including “JBOD” expansion shelves), and a mixture of SSD, SAS, and SATA drives. The SANsymphony-V software masks all of that complexity, and presents a consistent resource – in the form of iSCSI virtual volumes – to the systems that need to consume storage, e.g., physical or virtual servers.

That really is analogous to what a traditional hypervisor does in the server virtualization world. So it is not unreasonable at all to call SANsymphony-V a “storage hypervisor.” In fact, it’s pretty darned clever positioning, and I take my hat off to the person who crafted the campaign.

DataCore to Offer Free Storage Hypervisor to VMware Experts

2011-09-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/08/25/vmworld-2011-datacore-to-offer-free-storage-hypervisor-to-vmware-vexperts-vmware-certified-design-experts-vmware-certified-professionals-and-vmware-certified-instructors.aspx

DataCore Software, the industry’s premier provider of storage virtualization software, announced today that during VMworld 2011 it will offer free license keys of its breakthrough SANsymphony™ - V 8.1 storage hypervisor to VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX), VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) and VMware Certified Instructors (VCI). The not-for-resale (NFR) license keys – available for non-production uses such as course development, training, lab testing and demonstration purposes – are intended to support virtualization consultants, instructors and architects involved in efforts aimed at managing and fully leveraging storage assets.

“Storage has been the forgotten tier of virtualization, routinely stalling projects and adding unforeseen complications and costs,” said Linda Haury, vice president worldwide marketing at DataCore Software. “By providing the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor to these experts for home and office labs, they’ll be able to educate others about the most effective means for leveraging storage assets, a move which will advance virtualization adoption and benefit the industry as a whole.”

The free NFR license keys of SANsymphony-V 8.1 are available during VMworld, being held August 29 – September 1 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. The licenses may be used for non-production purposes only.

To receive a free license key, please visit the DataCore’s booth (#1321) or sign up next week at: www.datacore.com/freeNFR; proof of VMware vExpert, VCDX, VCP and VCI certification is required.

DataCore to offer free storage hypervisor to VMware Experts

http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13600:datacore-to-offer-free-storage-hypervisor-to-vmware-vexperts&catid=320:breaking-news&Itemid=2701739

DataCore introduces SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

http://www.virtualizationworld365.net/news_full.php?id=19287&title=DataCore-introduces-SANsymphony-V-Storage-Hypervisor

DataCore Software has announced major enhancements to its centrally-managed SANsymphony™- V solution. Combined, these new features elevate SANsymphony-V to the role of storage hypervisor, placing customers in the unique position to fully leverage their existing storage assets, including direct-attached storage (DAS), storage area networks (SAN) and solid state disks (SSD), and negotiate the best deals among competing storage manufacturers without concern for long-standing hardware vendor lock-ins.

http://www.snseurope.com/news_full.php?id=19287&title=DataCore-introduces-SANsymphony-V-Storage-Hypervisor

“The sprawl and multiplication of storage systems and the rising number of specialty devices are now the norm. The intelligence of a storage hypervisor provides a strategic advantage to managing the many as one,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “SANsymphony-V enables users to take control of how their storage infrastructure evolves versus being subject to the dictates of tactical point-in-time decisions.”

What the Heck Is a “Storage Hypervisor?”

2011-08-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

http://www.mooselogic.com/blog/what-the-heck-is-a-storage-hypervisor

Our friends at DataCore ran a press release yesterday positioning the new release (v8.1) of SANsymphony-V as a “storage hypervisor.” On the surface, that may just sound like some nice marketing spin, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made – because it highlights one of the major differences between DataCore’s products and most other SAN products out there.

To understand what I mean, let’s think for a moment about what a “hypervisor” is in the server virtualization world. Whether you’re talking about VSphere, Hyper-V, or XenServer, you’re talking about software that provides an abstraction layer between hardware resources and operating system instances. An individual VM doesn’t know – or care – whether it’s running on an HP Server, a Dell, an IBM, or a “white box.” It doesn’t care whether it’s running on an Intel or an AMD processor. You can move a VM from one host to another without worrying about changes in the underlying hardware, bios, drivers, etc. (Not talking about “live motion” – that’s a little different.) The hypervisor presents the VM with a consistent execution platform that hides the underlying complexity of the hardware.

So, back to DataCore. Remember that SANsymphony-V is a software application that runs on top of Windows Server 2008 R2. In most cases, people buy a couple of servers that contain a bunch of local storage, install 2008 R2 on them, install SANsymphony-V on them, and turn that bunch of local storage into full-featured iSCSI SAN nodes. (We typically run them in pairs so that we can do synchronous mirroring of the data across the two nodes, such that if one node completely fails, the data is still accessible.) But that’s not all we can do.

Because it’s running on a 2008 R2 platform, it can aggregate and present any kind of storage the underlying Server OS can access at the block level. Got a fibre channel SAN that you want to throw into the mix? Great! Put fiber channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) in your DataCore nodes, present that storage to the servers that SANsymphony-V is running on, and now you can manage the fibre channel storage right along with the local storage in your DataCore nodes. Got some other iSCSI SAN that you’d like to leverage? No problem. Just make sure you’ve got a couple of extra NICs in the DataCore nodes (or install iSCSI HBAs if you want even better performance), present that iSCSI storage to the DataCore nodes, and you can manage it as well. You can even create a storage pool that crosses resource boundaries! And now, with the new auto-tiering functionality of SANsymphony-V v8.1, you can let DataCore automatically migrate the most frequently accessed data to the highest-performing storage subsystems.

Or how about this: You just bought a brand new storage system from Vendor A to replace the system from Vendor B that you’ve been using for the past few years. You’d really like to move Vendor B’s system to your disaster-recovery site, but Vendor A’s product doesn’t know how to replicate data to Vendor B’s product. If you front-end both vendors’ products with DataCore nodes, the DataCore nodes can handle the asynchronous replication to your DR site. Alternately, maybe you bought Vendor A’s system because it offered higher performance than Vendor B’s system. Instead of using Vendor B’s product for DR, you can present both systems to SANsymphony-V and leverage its auto-tiering feature to automatically insure that the data that needs the highest performance gets migrated to Vendor A’s platform.

So, on the back end, you can have disparate SAN products (iSCSI, fibre channel, or both) and local storage (including “JBOD” expansion shelves), and a mixture of SSD, SAS, and SATA drives. The SANsymphony-V software masks all of that complexity, and presents a consistent resource – in the form of iSCSI virtual volumes – to the systems that need to consume storage, e.g., physical or virtual servers.

That really is analogous to what a traditional hypervisor does in the server virtualization world. So it is not unreasonable at all to call SANsymphony-V a “storage hypervisor.” In fact, it’s pretty darned clever positioning, and I take my hat off to the person who crafted the campaign.

DataCore Announces SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

2011-08-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

Virtual Strategy Magazine: DataCore Introduces SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2011/08/24/datacore-introduces-sansymphony-v-storage-hypervisor

“The sprawl and multiplication of storage systems and the rising number of specialty devices are now the norm. The intelligence of a storage hypervisor provides a strategic advantage to managing the many as one,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “SANsymphony-V enables users to take control of how their storage infrastructure evolves versus being subject to the dictates of tactical point-in-time decisions.”

“DataCore’s storage hypervisor significantly improves system performance and extends the life of our existing storage investments. The infrastructure-wide features fill in for missing device level functionality while efficiently automating and simplifying administration,” said Dave Patel, chief operating officer, CompuTech City. “From the standpoint of future hardware expansion and refreshes, DataCore gives us a powerful bargaining chip to shop for the best value without being locked in by choices we made in the past.”

“Server hypervisors from the likes of VMware and Microsoft have changed the game for users in their selection and exploitation of computing platforms by making them simultaneously more flexible and practically interchangeable. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor brings those same advantages to storage infrastructures by leveraging the full potential of – and often adding extra capabilities to – the collective strength of existing storage devices, without relying on some unlikely level of co-operation among the storage vendors,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

DataCore Adds Storage Hypervisor to Speed Storage Virtualization

http://www.mspmentor.net/2011/08/24/datacore-adds-storage-hypervisor-for-storage-virtualization/

DataCore Software, which specializes in storage virtualization and iSCSI SAN software, has launched the DataCore Storage Hypervisor. The move builds upon DataCore’s auto-tiering offering, according to President, CEO and Co-Founder George Teixeira. DataCore says channel partners are embracing the company’s software to (1) head off storage-related obstacles that stall virtualization deals, (2) speed adoption and standardization of virtual infrastructure and (3) increase share of wallet across storage and virtualization.

In this latest move, DataCore is “bringing out more openness in auto-tiering and its ability to integrate with other features,” said Teixeira. He said the DataCore Storage Hypervisor’s greatest feature is that it can “play across many different platforms,” because today’s data centers require specialized equipment to meet the different nuances of various customer workloads.

“From an MSP standpoint, they have two kinds of storage cases,” added DataCore Software Director of Product and Channel Marketing Augie Gonzalez. “They either buy the same type of storage and have multiples of it, or they have different storage levels because they support a lot of different systems. People are throwing purpose-built storage solutions at the problem.” Gonzalez claims the DataCore Storage Hypervisor can support both scenarios.

Among the challenges facing DataCore: Making sure the company’s storage virtualization strategy stands apart from all the different storage and virtualization claims floating around the IT industry. “The term [storage virtualization] has become so diluted. We are trying to make it clearer,” Teixeira said. Both Teixeira and Gonzalez said DataCore’s definition is more in line with Microsoft, Citrix Systems and VMware, meaning a rich set of features across many platforms.

DataCore has made multiple moves in recent months. In late July 2011, the company was promoting a virtualized storage solution for its SMB and MSP clients. A week later DataCore launched an auto-tiering solution for MSPs, a technology normally reserved for high-end storage needs.

DataCore Introduces SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

http://www.istockanalyst.com/business/news/5375989/datacore-introduces-sansymphony-v-storage-hypervisor

DataCore Software, the industry’s premier provider of storage virtualization software, announced today major enhancements to its centrally-managed SANsymphony™- V solution. Combined, these new features elevate SANsymphony-V to the role of storage hypervisor, placing customers in the unique position to fully leverage their existing storage assets, including direct-attached storage (DAS), storage area networks (SAN) and solid state disks (SSD), and negotiate the best deals among competing storage manufacturers without concern for long-standing hardware vendor lock-ins.

More Coverage on SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor announcement:

IT Briefing: DataCore introduces SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor
http://itbriefing.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=196704&newlang=eng&topic=15&catid=37

Computer Technology Review: DataCore announces SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor
http://wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13591:datacore-announces-sansymphony-v-storage-hypervisor&catid=335:breaking-news&Itemid=2701755

eChannelLine: DataCore introduces SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor
http://www.echannelline.com/usa/brief.cfm?item=18520

TechnologyShore: DataCore Adds Storage Hypervisor to Speed Storage Virtualization
http://technologyshore.com/?p=111739

Data Storage Connection: DataCore announces Storage Hypervisor
http://www.datastorageconnection.com/article.mvc/DataCore-Introduces-SANsymphony-V-Storage-0001

Scottish Agricultural College selects DataCore SANsymphony-V and Microsoft for Unified Storage; Adds Performance and HA to NAS Clustered File Sharing

2011-08-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

Virtualization World 365 - Top Story: Scottish Agricultural College selects DataCore SANsymphony-V and Microsoft for Unified Storage

Scotland’s Leading Agricultural College announces it has settled on SANsymphony-V to add performance and safeguard the NAS Clustered File Sharing capabilities inbuilt within their Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Platform.

Scottish Agricultural College selects DataCore

http://www.snseurope.com/news_full.php?id=19250&title=Scottish-Agricultural-College-selects-DataCore-SANsymphony-V-and-Microsoft-for-Unified-Storage-to-optimise-and-harves...

DataCore Software says that its SANsymphony™-V software has been deployed at the Scottish Agricultural College (SAC) to fully utilize the Cluster File shares and Network Attached Storage capabilities included within their Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 platform.

The next generation of DataCore’s software, SANsymphony-V, was recommended and configured by a leading Scottish solution provider, Tecnica Ltd. This DataCore authorized partner designed the system to manage both NAS file sharing and SAN or directly attached storage (DAS).The system now spans across 3 nodes; one within SAC’s main Edinburgh campus and the other two some 8 miles away within the College’s Research and data center campus. While operational for less than a month, immediately the integrated combination of DataCore and Microsoft has decreased the College’s reliance on costly hardware solutions and added a new level of fault tolerance and data protection to its clustered NFS/CIFS file sharing.

The key driver for change for the College came in Autumn 2010 when their existing environment came to end of life; moving from a complex and costly SUN infrastructure in favor of a Microsoft Windows based platform, while consolidating storage and eliminating bottlenecks and disruptions. They commenced the search for alternatives and Tecnica Ltd responded with a DataCore software based solution that significantly lowered cost and ongoing capital outlays and stressed the importance of being device independent with a software based solution:-

“The DataCore unified storage software layer provides the performance and functionality we require to effectively manage our current and future data requirements and has removed complexity, cost and support skills exposure from our storage infrastructure” - Ronnie McIntyre, IS Infrastructure & Operations Manager, SAC

“Some of the features that attracted us to DataCore’s SANsymphony-V were the transparency and ease of management which it offered along with the flexibility of design configuration to allow us to build a solution that would match our performance and resilience requirements. As with many organizations we required an agile solution to be able to meet the demands of the business whether generated through strategic / legislative requirements or market opportunities.” - Peter Gowler, Infrastructure Systems Architect, SAC

Unified Storage with No Costly Specialty NAS Hardware Required:

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, DataCore Software, commented, “What the SAC IT team, working closely with Tecnica have achieved here is what data center managers have long been seeking – a simple, cost effective way to easily manage their disk resources and address potential single points of failures in their vital NFS/CIFS files shares. Previously, SAC’s choice would have been restricted to either picking from a few specialty devices that provided the needed redundancy at a steep price, or take the risk that a storage-related disruption would cripple their entire infrastructure.”

DataCore’s design at SAC employs dual copies of the SANsymphony-V software providing high-availability mirroring and performance acceleration layered beneath clustered file shares (NAS) integral to Windows Servers 2008 Enterprise. SAC can now employ and reutilize any standard storage device for disk space, ranging from standard hard drives to existing external disk arrays offered by the popular storage systems vendors. With the solution, splitting the file share cluster remains across two machines, while the DataCore software runs on two separate servers dedicated to managing the block storage virtualization.

New DataCore White Paper: Automated Storage Tiering

2011-08-19T01:12:00.000-07:00

http://searchnetworking.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1313432538_596.htm

http://www.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1313432538_596.html

Like they say in the housing market, the top 3 factors that determine price are location, location, and location. The same can be said for storage real estate. Poor choices placing data will cost you dearly. Unlike home buying habits, user access patterns change very frequently. Content that was driving interest one day becomes old news the next. There’s no way you could possibly take the time to shuffle information around to keep up with their fickle ways. That’s where insider knowledge and a little automation come in handy.

Read on to learn more about how to save space and money.

AWO Workers' Welfare Association has Implemented a Flexible and Scalable IT Infrastructure with Virtualization Software from DataCore Software and Citrix

2011-08-18T07:10:00.001-07:00

http://news.yahoo.com/awo-workers-welfare-association-implemented-flexible-scalable-infrastructure-070827080.html

“Conventional SAN hardware without DataCore storage virtualization would not have offered us the necessary scalability and flexibility,” states Karsten Frommolt, the IT manager at AWO Düsseldorf. “With DataCore, we were able to resolve our roadblocks in regards to performance bottlenecks, easily providing capacity and reducing costs. We needed to cost-effectively build a redundant and therefore highly available storage environment within our budget constraints. DataCore Software convinced us with the flexibility and scalability of its software solution. It also gave us independence from hardware manufacturers so we have greater control going forward.”

AWO Düsseldorf Case Study - http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/AWO-Dsseldorf.aspx

DataCore Software Customers Showcase Why Software-Based Solutions Can Lower Total Cost of Storage and Empower the Full Business Value of Virtualization

2011-08-10T01:14:00.000-07:00

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/08/08/datacore-software-showcases-why-software-based-solutions-can-lower-total-cost-of-storage-and-empower-the-full-business-value-of-virtualization.aspx

DataCore Software today showcased customer examples and announced the availability of a new white paper titled “Achieving the Full Business Value of Virtualization with a Scalable Software-Based Virtualization Solution” authored by International Data Corp (IDC), the premier global provider of market intelligence. The paper details storage efficiency increases due to heterogeneous storage virtualization. It highlights key IDC recommendations for improving utilization and productivity by consolidating assets, automating provisioning, leveraging storage tiers and combining server and storage virtualization to significantly reduce capital and operational expenses associated with facilities and infrastructure.

The paper, combined with DataCore’s growing base of customer testimonials, highlights how the company’s virtualization software solutions overcome budget, performance and business continuity challenges impacting the transition and broader adoption of virtualization. In particular it uncovers how to make “better use of ‘in place’ storage assets while also ensuring that IT organizations can fully achieve a return on their investments.”

Compelling Economic Benefits

“A key business value of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V technology is its device-independent approach: the software removes hardware dependencies that can limit customers’ purchasing power and flexibility by locking them into specific vendor technologies and price points,” said Peter Dobler, assistant vice president, Corporate MIS Dept., Northeast Health. “DataCore brings a rich set of features, including auto-tiering and thin provisioning which can significantly impact cost savings. These features work across many flavors and brands; therefore, they can spread the benefits across the entire infrastructure and not to just a single device. They extend the useful life of past storage investments, and provide more competitive choices when shopping for new equipment resulting in greater ROI, lower total cost of ownership and reduced business risk.”

As noted in the white paper:

The DataCore SANsymphony-V solution allows organizations to leverage the amazing processing power of today's multicore x86 server platforms to virtualize installed storage systems while also tuning them to meet specific needs for performance, capacity, availability and cost-effectiveness.
The DataCore productivity and cost-saving software solutions:
- Improve utilization of existing storage assets (in many cases doubling useful capacity), thereby delaying the need to buy new storage systems;
- Enable more modular and seamless storage expansion, thereby reducing the need to pre-buy capacity that may not be needed for several years;
- Optimize and automate storage provisioning, tiering storage resources for optimal performance and capacity, and managing data protection and auto-recovery across installed heterogeneous storage systems, thereby reducing management complexity; and
- Enable seamless cross-system data movement, enabling easy and intelligent migration or replication of data between storage classes.

“We help organizations virtualize in half the time and half the expense without wasting either on the need to replace or write off their storage investments,” said Linda Haury, vice president of marketing at DataCore Software. “DataCore customers routinely report 200 percent or more gains in performance, a doubling in administrative productivity, no downtime due to storage failures, and cost savings of 60 percent or more. This is accomplished through greater ‘open market’ purchasing power, better use of storage via auto-tiering and from greatly improving efficiencies of storage capacity utilization and provisioning from 30 percent typical usage rates to as much as 90 percent. Bottom line: DataCore can remove inefficiencies and fully maximize your IT investments.”

A few recent examples of customer gains realized through DataCore include:

AcXess: This cloud services provider enables on-demand sales demos, proof-of-concept labs and training sessions in virtualized environments for thousands of employees, partners and customers worldwide. Through the combined use of DataCore and Microsoft Hyper-V, the organization has doubled its number of client users year-over-year and grown their business 300 percent. AcXess also reports a number of economic benefits from the solution that includes a savings of $5 million in hardware costs.

Hemer Pulmonary Clinic: A Center for Pneumology and Thoracic Surgery, the German clinic implemented DataCore SANsymphony-V and realized a $425,000 cost savings. More than this, it has seen an increase in performance and greater efficiency in supporting over 50 VMware virtualized database and application servers all while adding a new level of high availability to its hospital operations.

ISCO Industries: This worldwide manufacturing and piping distributor has saved at least $100,000 by re-purposing existing equipment and prior investments using DataCore and VMware. For the first time, ISCO’s UNIX system, regarded as its “bread and butter,” is fully redundant and synchronized in real-time to a disaster recovery site. In the past, when ISCO lost data, the main accounting and sales system took 16-24 hours to recover – a process which now takes only minutes.

Scottsdale Community College: Based on technology from DataCore and Citrix, the College created an end-to-end virtualization solution that now provides access to more than 220 applications, serving 11,000 students and 1,000 employees. It is now saving $250,000 annually that would have been spent on hardware, accompanied by a marked improvement in storage performance.

To read the full IDC white paper sponsored by DataCore, please visit “Achieving the Full Business Value of Virtualization with a Scalable Software-Based Virtualization Solution.”

Virtual-Strategy Magazine: Q&A with Augie Gonzalez of DataCore Software

2011-08-08T06:55:00.000-07:00

VSM: What are the biggest surprises organizations today are encountering in their server and desktop virtualization projects?

AG: From where I’m standing, lack of attention to storage-related matters generates the most turmoil and angst. You see this especially as customers struggle to migrate their line of business applications to virtualized environments. The storage provisioning, maintenance, and tuning practices that they mastered in segregated server configurations largely break down. This collapse ripples across to business continuity procedures and data protection techniques, upsetting even their hardware refresh and purchasing rhythm.

This is understandably so. Versatile virtual machines and virtual desktops lure concentration away from the mundane, seemingly stiff realities of physical storage devices. But today, we can harness a close relative of server virtualization, storage virtualization software, for an operationally and economically attractive solution – if we plan ahead.

VSM: What are the consequences of neglecting storage-related problems?

AG: There’s no turning your back on these issues. Unanticipated storage costs, availability concerns, and performance bottlenecks are the most critical factors bringing server consolidation and desktop virtualization projects to a standstill.

In fact, in DataCore’s recent survey, “The State of Virtualization”, we found that a majority of medium- and large-enterprise IT organizations mistakenly overlook storage when implementing a virtualized operating environment. The data revealed that nearly half of the respondents (43 percent) had not anticipated the impact that storage would have on their server and desktop virtualization costs or had not started a virtualization project because the storage-related costs “seem too high.”

This has moved the storage issue – its high cost, inadequate performance, inflexibility, and vendor lock in – to the front burner in virtualization discussions.

VSM: How does the rise of “Big Data” compound the concern for data center managers? How can they better deal with this issue?

AG: Whereas server and desktop virtualization help consolidate and concentrate storage in common pools, Big Data has the opposite effect. It's widespread – “a lot here, a lot more there” – and there are too many places to keep track of. Add to the location problem, different brands and generations of storage devices that house it, and you can see the predicament.

Some pundits suggest standardizing on specific hardware storage blocks to retain some sanity. But they ignore the insanely fast rate at which hardware becomes obsolete, which leads to healthy storage diversity in the first place. Not to mention the outrageous costs to forklift upgrade everything already in use.

My advice is don’t even try to solve the hardware problem by confining yourself to one piece of gear, it doesn’t stand a chance. Instead, steal a play from the desktop virtualization handbook. Accept and encourage equipment diversity while taking measures to uniformly manage it. In the world of disks, you do this by layering a common control plane across central and scattered storage assets using storage virtualization software.

The software lets you take advantage of the many nuances that help differentiate one disk array from another as well as the extra safeguard that separate sites afford you, without burying you in minutia.

VSM: What additional benefits does device-independent storage virtualization bring to virtualized IT environments and how does it enable those who have approached it properly?

AG: There’s just too much to cover here. Think about how hypervisors liberate you from the constraints of physical server cabinets and you can quickly grasp the beneficial operational and financial impact of storage virtualization. The storage enclosures no longer define you, nor limit your choice or mobility. When one box or one site is out of service, another one seamlessly takes over for it. Achieving cost-effective, highly-available, and fault tolerant disks that traverse hardware boundaries would be on the top of the list.

With regard to economics, enhanced capital asset utilization, increased efficiency, and lower operational costs always get the most praise from DataCore customers. The benefits touch nearly every part of their IT infrastructure. As a result, organizations rapidly expand the scope of their storage virtualization program following the initial rollout to encompass conventional physical servers as well.

VSM: Given the urgency, how does DataCore expedite the successful transition to a fully virtualized storage infrastructure?

AG: First and foremost, DataCore leverages storage and server assets already on the data center floor to get you going right away. There is no waiting to “rip and replace” equipment before you get started. It’s like moving right into the house remodeling project without going through the arduous and dusty demolition phase. None of that uneasy feeling that you may be way over your head.

Instead, the conversion occurs in self-paced stages, with small incremental investments, rather than large upfront capital expenditures. I’d say it’s a very pragmatic cutover matched to your priorities and windows of opportunity. Really, nobody wants to take a big leap and you don’t have to with DataCore.

Enterprise Systems Journal: DataCore - The Switzerland of Storage Virtualization Solutions Providers?

2011-08-02T07:03:00.000-07:00

http://esj.com/blogs/enterprise-insights/2011/07/datacore-storage-virtualization.aspx

Storage managers are often pressured to buy storage from a single vendor. That, in turns, leads to being pinned down to a particular vendor’s virtualization management solution.

I hate having my options limited. I want to pick best-of-breed hardware and solution. Mix-and-match is my motto. When it comes to storage virtualization software, DataCore seems to share my values. It’s new SANsymphony-V dynamically relocates workloads across pools of any type of storage equipment -- including SSDs -- and from any vendor. Because it sits high-enough up on the interface ladder, DataCore’s director of product marketing Augie Gonzalez told me, any new storage device you add can work instantly with SANsymphony -- no updates needed.

“We apply the same device-independent approach to auto-tiering as we do with all our high-value services, including thin provisioning, caching, synchronous mirroring, asynchronous replication, snapshots and CDP. Let’s just say it arms you with a lot more bargaining muscle when the next disk hardware purchase comes around.”

DataCore’s President and CEO, George Teixeira, told me recently that his company’s product neutrality is what gives IT the greatest flexibility to move seldom-used sections of files to a slower tier of storage (read: cheaper disk) and most-in-demand or most-important sections to more expensive (read: faster) storage devices. Although the product’s chief benefit is that it handles all the messy details in the background automatically, there are rules (“policies”) you can define to override its decisions (for example, you can exclude some workloads from auto-tiering). Furthermore, if you no longer have enough capacity in a tier to to meet your requirements, it will tell you so.

The approach has two advantages -- both economic -- and both explained succinctly in their press release:

“This expanded choice gives customers the opportunity to shop for the best value at each tier from competing sources without having to discard what they purchased last year.”

Keeping legacy equipment alive is critical -- so is shopping for the best deal on new equipment.

Hardware-based approaches restrict tiers “to premium-priced trays within a single storage enclosure or frame, DataCore says. Its infrastructure-wide software “spans multiple storage systems from potentially different suppliers.”

Flexibility is paramount. Tiers can be made up of high-capacity but lower-priced SATA drives from Company A (or Company A and B and C) or consist of multiple SAS midrange disk systems from the same or different vendors. You can mix and match capacity, technology, and manufacturers in the same tier -- it all appears as a pool from your control panel. SSDs, which cost up to 10 times more than conventional drives, are likewise supported in a tier.

The company says that more than 50 percent of stored data turns to “inactive” status within just 60 days of its creation. If you’re using high-priced storage for it, you’re wasting precious IT budget dollars.

In its press release, the company says its customers “have reported up to 60 percent cost savings with SANsymphony-V alone, and now with the ability to automate and dynamically optimize tiered storage capacity, incremental savings of 20 percent or more are now possible. The final result is an extremely cost effecting, self-tuning system.” Not to mention one that doesn’t pin you down.

DataCore Software Adds Device-Independent Auto-Tiering to Its Storage Virtualisation Software

2011-07-29T01:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.it-director.com/technology/data_mgmt/news_release.php?rel=26231

DataCore Software today announced a state of the art advance in automated tiering of disks. The new option for its comprehensive SANsymphony-V product automatically relocates disk blocks among pools of different storage devices, keeping the most demanding workloads operating at peak speeds. Less critical and infrequently accessed disk blocks naturally gravitate towards lower cost disks.

New Infrastructure-Wide Advance Opens up Customer ‘Purchasing Power’ for Greater Cost Savings
Unlike hardware-embedded schemes that confine tiers to premium-priced trays within a single storage enclosure or frame, DataCore’s infrastructure-wide software spans multiple storage systems from potentially different suppliers. This expanded choice gives customers the opportunity to shop for the best value at each tier from competing sources without having to discard what they purchased last year.

“SANsymphony-V customers can immediately take advantage of auto-tiering using whatever equipment they have on the floor,” notes Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing at DataCore. “We apply the same device-independent approach to auto-tiering as we do with all our high-value services, including thin provisioning, caching, synchronous mirroring, asynchronous replication, snapshots and CDP. Let’s just say it arms you with a lot more bargaining muscle when the next disk hardware purchase comes around.”

For example, tiers may consist of high-capacity, low-priced Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives from one vendor, a set ofSerial Attached SCSI (SAS) midrange disk systems from another, and a new collection of high-speed Solid State Disk (SSD) cards from yet a third vendor. DataCore manages these independent racks as a diverse virtual pool under a common administrative interface. Of course, the software works just as well if all tiers happen to carry the same brand.

Addressing the Cost Optimization Challenge through Automation and Transparency
The drivers, challenges and trends impacting tiered storage management are well known:

Data Growth: The amount of data in most organisations is doubling every 12 to 24 months.
Cost Deltas: Performance and high-availability oriented storage devices and SSDs typically cost 3 to 10 times more than lower tier capacity oriented storage.
Access Frequency: Over 50 percent of stored data becomes inactive within 60 days of creation.
Hidden Costs: The effort to constantly classify tiers by access frequency rates and manually move data between tiers can quickly add up to costs that eliminate any potential savings.

DataCore customers have reported up to 60 percent cost savings with SANsymphony-V alone, and now with the ability to automate and dynamically optimise tiered storage capacity, incremental savings of 20 percent or more are now possible. The final result is an extremely cost effecting, self-tuning system.

“Device independent auto-tiering is a major addition to SANsymphony-V,” said Randy Kerns, senior strategist at Evaluator Group. “Beyond the obvious cost savings, it also simplifiesinfrastructure-wide storage management by optimising the promotion and demotion of disk blocks transparently in background operations. Automation eases theadministration tasks and allows users to benefit from the performance gained with tiering.”

Choice of Auto-Tiering Policies
Customers govern DataCore’s auto-tiering behavior by choosing among a set of pre-defined rules. For simple, hands-off operations, the software tracks which disk blocks are most active and promotes them to the top-performing tier. The most frequently used blocks gravitate towards the faster, higher-performing devices. By auto-tiering at the disk block level, rather than at the file level, hot spots on file systems enjoy the best response compared to seldom-used areas.

System administrators can be more selective as well. They may designate from which tier a virtual disk is allocated. This option ensures that the most pressing information can be retrieved and updated faster, regardless of access frequency. Similarly, less important volumes may be relegated to lower cost, slower performing tiers, to prevent them from competing for more precious disks.

Still other virtual disks may bypass auto-tiering altogether. They can just as easily be allocated from pools with devices ofsimilar price/performance attributes.

Infrastructure-wide caching extends high-performance tiers
The quick ascent of SSDs into mainstream IT hasmade auto-tiering a necessity. Specifically, it helps reserve these premium storage resources for the most demanding applications.

In addition, DataCore adaptive caching techniques boost the native performance of SSDs and conventional hard drives, while reducing the duty cycle on these more costly resources. That translates into better utilisation and a longer life for these exceptional assets.

Pricing and Availability
Auto-tiering is included at no charge for SANsymphony-V node licenses supporting over 100TBs or can be added as an optional feature for the midrange of the SANsymphony-V product line, priced at $2,000 U.S.D. per DataCore node.

Dethleffs Triples its SAN Performance and Speeds up ERP applications with DataCore, HP and FusionIO

2011-07-27T02:12:00.000-07:00

DataCore performance acceleration software in combination with HP servers and Fusion-IO SSDs puts Dethleff’s ERP system into the fast lane

“The combination of HP hardware and DataCore software was ideal; the cost / performance ratio met our needs and since we have implemented, we are not looking back we do not regret this decision at all.”

"In comparison to the previous systems we have seen a significant enhancement in performance with the combination of standard HP hardware and DataCore’s virtualization software for storage. With DataCore installed, the phone calls to our IT department complaining about slow response times have suddenly stopped”, confirms IT-director Michael Fleschhut.

Read the full case study: Dethleffs Triples its SAN Performance and Speeds up ERP applications with DataCore, HP and FusionIO

ISCO Industries Utilizes DataCore Software and Xiotech to Take Its Virtualization Infrastructure and VDI to the Next Level

2011-07-26T07:22:00.000-07:00

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/07/21/isco-industries-utilizes-datacore-software-to-take-its-virtualization-infrastructure-and-vdi-to-the-next-level.aspx

Blazing Fast Performance

“Our performance has gone through the roof,” continued Duncan. “It was not unusual to see 10, 15, or 20 milliseconds of latency on a read prior to DataCore and Xiotech. And that was on volumes that were dedicated to Tier 1 storage only. Now it is one or two milliseconds, tops, on most of our transactions. Moreover, reports from the ERP system are literally blazing through – they hardly take any time at all compared to what we were used to.”

With DataCore’s caching software and the high-speed Xiotech running in tandem, system administrators have seen more than a 35 percent increase in speed and responsiveness from the company’s terminal and mail servers.

ISCO Industries, a worldwide polyethylene pipe distributor, has implemented DataCore’s newest software release, SANsymphony-V. The company is running nearly fully virtual after implementing DataCore and VMware to virtualize the majority of its desktops, servers and storage infrastructure. Deployed in combination with Xiotech storage, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V added a new level of flexibility and productivity and most importantly it addressed the persistent performance problems as well as the capacity management issues that ISCO Industries faced with its previously existing storage area network (SAN).

“Prior to implementing SANsymphony-V, the performance and latency issues we faced were hurting our efficiency in many different areas,” stated Kim Byram, director of business and information systems at ISCO Industries. “Now, with DataCore and Xiotech running in tandem, we have seen our latency issues completely disappear. Plus our speed of backups and response time in generating reports has been cut drastically. More efficiency means more systems uptime and no more systems slowdown because you no longer have processes and backups running during somebody’s working hours.”

Four years ago, ISCO deployed a SAN from Compellent (acquired by Dell) to cope with the storage growth the company was experiencing as it virtualized its entire network. However, ISCO kept hitting a proverbial performance “wall” and system administrators would have to scramble to add storage space because the Compellent SAN was falsely reporting that it had maxed-out its capacity.

When DataCore was deployed on Xiotech, the IT team migrated data over to the new system, which was thin-provisioned through DataCore storage virtualization software. “We went from nine or ten terabytes of used space down to six terabytes of available space just by doing the migration,” notes T.J. Duncan, system administrator at ISCO. “In terms of capacity management and higher utilization rates, we have seen enormous benefits and now we have means of recovering disk space without having to create new volumes all the time.”

Today, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V serves as ISCO’s de facto SAN, and is responsible for managing and serving storage across the entire infrastructure. This enables the company to get the most out of its infrastructure with its software-based storage virtualization approach. “With our existing SAN, things were coming to a creeping halt on our network,” explained Byram. “And when we moved everything over to the very reliable Xiotech platform, we learned that we actually had a lot less data than what was being reported by our previous SAN.”

Blazing Fast Performance
“Our performance has gone through the roof,” continued Duncan. “It was not unusual to see 10, 15, or 20 milliseconds of latency on a read prior to DataCore and Xiotech. And that was on volumes that were dedicated to Tier 1 storage only. Now it is one or two milliseconds, tops, on most of our transactions. Moreover, reports from the ERP system are literally blazing through – they hardly take any time at all compared to what we were used to.”

With DataCore’s caching software and the high-speed Xiotech running in tandem, system administrators have seen more than a 35 percent increase in speed and responsiveness from the company’s terminal and mail servers. Now that the DataCore-Xiotech solution now manages 13 terabytes of total data, ISCO started seeing the following benefits:

Cost containment – DataCore has saved ISCO at least $100,000 because they were able to re-purpose six existing servers supporting VMware ESX and use them to create the DataCore disaster recovery SAN server, as well as ESX servers for disaster recovery, and the DataCore VDI server.
Risk reduction – For the first time, the UNIX system which is the company’s “bread and butter,” is now fully redundant. The entire system and all of the data is synchronized in real-time to the disaster recovery site, where a second UNIX server is maintained. Before, if ISCO lost its data, it would have taken the company 16-24 hours to get the main accounting and sales system back up and running. Now, the company can do this in minutes.
Improved productivity – Productivity improvements are tied to the better responsiveness of the terminal servers and virtual desktops being supported. All servers have had 10-20 percent improvement in performance just by putting in the SANsymphony-V and Xiotech solution.

VDI, Servers, and Storage: End-to-End Virtualization Reduces Costs and Risks
According to ISCO, the company is nearly fully virtualized. It uses terminal servers as well as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), depending on the users and their needs. VMware vSphere is used both for servers and desktops. Four VMware hosts run VMware ESX 4.1 at the production data center. There are 32 VMs running from that. The VMs comprise servers dealing with ISCO’s phone system, terminal servers, a web monitoring server (NIMBUS), and file sharing servers.

DataCore storage virtualization software runs both on both the production SAN and the disaster recovery SAN. Asynchronous replication is used to replicate UNIX system data remotely, and the company plans to embrace synchronous replication in the near future for added business continuity. DataCore’s newest release, SANsymphony-V, is deployed on another server to support the VDI environment. VDI consists of two hosts and 20 VMs. Ten virtual desktops are supported as well as 8 terminal servers in a load-balanced pool. Between 15 and 18 people per server are using VDI at any given point in time.

New Case Study additions: n|Frame, Harting Technology Group, The WIŚNIOWSKI Company and Municipality of Casalecchio di Reno

2011-07-25T02:23:00.000-07:00

n|Frame and DataCore: Empowering Cloud and IT services for Web and mission-critical applications to perform without fail

http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/nFrame.aspx

Harting Technology Group: DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Lowers Cost of Ownership and Accelerates Performance for SAP and Critical Enterprise Applications

http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/Harting-Technology-Group.aspx

For the SAP environment specifically, this meant up to 30 percent faster server response times.

Additionally, the DataCore environment enabled the integrity testing of the SAP R3 databases, which once took eight hours, to now be completed in just two hours –a 400% speed-up.

The WIŚNIOWSKI Company: Large manufacturer of garage doors and fences selects DataCore SANsymphony-V

http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/WISNIOWSKI.aspx

"Thanks to DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software our production is more efficient. The malfunction of a disk array does not disrupt or cause a stoppage of the whole company."

Municipality of Casalecchio di Reno Deploys DataCore’s Virtualization Sofware

http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/Municipality-of-Casalecchio-di-Reno.aspx

“The DataCore solution fully answered all our needs, offering features and performance that were beyond our expectations. The DataCore virtualization software helped us cut down considerably both our hardware and energy costs,” states Andrea Ventura, IT manager for the Casalecchio di Reno Municipality.

HP and DataCore Alliance Solution Brief

2011-07-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

Check out the recently released Solution Brief which highlights how the combination of DataCore and HP can "Accelerate your virtualization plans" http://www.datacore.com/Libraries/Document_Library/DataCore-HP_Joint_Solution_Brief.sflb.ashx

DataCore Software’s Storage Virtualization Webcast Series Continues With Part Three: “Achieving Off-the-Charts Performance Management”

2011-07-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

Storage virtualization is becoming a must-have in contemporary IT – Webcast series educates the storage industry on key aspects and challenges of managing storage

DataCore Software announced the upcoming, third installment of its “Storage Virtualization” webcast series with “Storage in the Fast Lane -- Achieving Off-the-Charts Performance Management.” This webcast will take place on Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 11:30 a.m. (EDT). To register, please visit: “Storage in the Fast Lane -- Achieving Off-the-Charts Performance Management.”

Part Three: Storage in the Fast Lane -- Achieving Off-the-Charts Performance Management

This third installment of the webcast series will investigate the following:

What is performance management?
What are the challenges to performance efficiency?
How can storage virtualization help you to get the best performance from your infrastructure?

Join host and moderator Jon Toigo for Part Three of the 'Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars' webcast series. To register, please visit: “Storage in the Fast Lane -- Achieving Off-the-Charts Performance Management.”

Link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/804452936

Storage Virtualization WhitePapers and Reference Materials
To access the two previous webcasts and the tutorial guides from Part One and Part Two of the “For Rock Stars” webcast series – “Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency” and “Capacity Management’s Sweet Notes” – please visit:
http://www.datacore.com/Software/Closer-Look/webcasts.aspx

How Many Tiers Do You Want?

2011-06-28T02:48:00.000-07:00

Two recent articles got me thinking about the current limitations of tiered storage, and where it’s going. Ellen Messmer at Network World reported on some comments by Gartner analyst Stanley Zaffos about the chaos in the public cloud storage market. Some vendors, such as Amazon and Nirvanix, are gung-ho on public cloud storage, while others, like Iron Mountain and EMC, have pulled out of the business. While the cost comparison looks more than favorable—Gartner’s estimates is about 75 cents to a dollar per gigabyte per month for in-house storage vs. as low as 3 cents for cloud storage—Zaffos rightly points out the many variables IT needs to consider, among them latency, limited bandwidth, and security. In his remarks, He called out a couple of alternatives to public cloud storage, including a hybrid approach mixing public and private storage—in effect, making public cloud storage just another tier.

At CTOEdge, Mike Vizard has been talking for some time about the rising importance of data management and storage systems to deal with a world in which “multiple tiers of storage are soon going to be the rule rather than the exception.” In a recent blog post, he discusses building a new tier of storage for what he calls “warm data,” which requires access speeds somewhere between production applications and everything else (e.g., backup, archive, DR). He noted IBM’s new Netezza High Capacity Appliance, which isn’t so much a storage tier as a packaged storage application that gives quicker access to petabyte-sized data warehouses to satisfy compliance requirements.

These are two extremes of the storage spectrum, and a good illustration of some of the drivers behind the evolution of tiered storage, which is all about matching networked storage capabilities to application and business needs (e.g., speed, capacity, availability, security). In an ideal world, every application would have exactly the right kind of storage (i.e., infinite tiering granularity). In the real world, differences among technologies, vendors, protocols, and the like make this impractical, and the actual granularity possible with tiered storage is very low, which means that each tier is a compromise.

Like Mike Vizard, I’m convinced that the evolution of storage is taking us in the direction of more and more tiers to deliver a better match to application requirements. We’re going to see low-cost cloud storage treated as just another tier, for services like archiving and long-term backup. We’re going to see increasingly capable private cloud solutions with an increasing variety of tiers within them. And we’re going to see the “fragmentation” of what today we call “managed services” into an increasingly granular menu of capabilities like high availability, disaster recovery, compliance support, and similar “tiers” of storage-based services.

Storage virtualization software, with its ability to abolish storage silos, is going to be a major part of this evolution. The key will be its adoption by more and more service providers like Host.net and External IT who will use it in their own data centers and their customers’ data centers to provide seamless access to storage that matches application and business needs at a very fine granularity, whether in-house or out in the cloud. The result will be a storage environment in which IT can basically dial in as many tiers as they need, without worrying about the cake collapsing on them.

Photo by Pink Cake Box.

Are Storage Costs Driving You Crazy?

2011-06-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

Almost thirty years ago novelist and screenwriter Rita Mae Brown defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” I’m quite certain she didn’t have storage hardware purchasing in mind when she wrote that, but it’s a perfect description of the usual IT strategy in this regard: buy more.

To be fair, I’ll admit that it’s not like IT has a lot of choice. Factors like server and desktop virtualization (Gartner predicts a 600% growth in storage capacity over the next three years due to these technologies alone), increasingly onerous data retention regulatory requirements, and the growth of rich media are driving an ever-increasing demand for storage. But the situation is definitely one in which “business as usual” is simply insane. It’s time for an intervention.

To explain, I’m going to turn to Jon Toigo, Chairman of The Data Management Institute LLC, who is a master of the “picture worth a thousand words.”
Even a cursory glance at his infographic shows the primary reasons why storage hardware is driving IT crazy.

First off, storage accounts for between one-third and three-quarters of IT hardware spending.

Second, the annualized total cost of ownership for storage is four to five times the initial acquisition expense. Putting in the boxes is just the start of your adventure: now you have to manage the storage, protect the data (e.g., backup, mirroring, etc.), and pay for power and cooling.

Third—and this is definitely crazy-making—once you’ve got all this wonderful storage in place, you find that you can’t use it efficiently: only about 30% of your storage ends up doing anything really useful. The rest is inert, allocated but unused, orphaned, or used to store stuff that’s of no use to your business.

That means you have to buy three times as much storage as you need just to make sure you don’t run out. But that just puts you back in the same insane loop, and you won’t get different results no matter how much storage you throw at the problem.

So you need to stage an intervention. And it can’t be a half-way effort, either.

The solution to this craziness is storage virtualization, which can boost your storage efficiency dramatically, make data protection easier, and reduce your storage management burden, all of which will drive down your storage costs as a percentage of IT spend. (You can get more details on storage virtualization and storage efficiency in Jon’s new white paper, Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars.)

But you have to take it all the way. Leaving storage virtualization capabilities locked up in proprietary array vendor controllers will leave you with islands of storage and put you right back in the inefficiency loop, albeit at a higher level. You’ll be hostage to your storage hardware vendor when it comes to expanding your storage infrastructure, and find it difficult to eke the maximum useful life out of your arrays as they reach end-of-support.

Better to declare your entire independence from storage craziness with storage virtualization software that’s vendor-agnostic and endures over multiple generations of hardware. That way you can squeeze the maximum efficiency out of your existing storage infrastructure and be free to add new storage from any source, on your schedule and within your budget, while your storage virtualization software continues to handle the details of efficiency, data protection, and management as it always has.

Now that’s sanity.

Graphic Source: Toigo Partners International, LLC

New IDC White Paper on DataCore ROI/TCO, New Jon Toigo Paper on Storage Efficiency

2011-06-15T06:39:00.001-07:00

Check out the Updated Industry Analyst and Expert Opinions Page on the DataCore Website
Recently updated with the latest reports and the analysts like those at Gartner Group who are briefed and cover DataCore Software
http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/What-Others-are-Saying/Analyst-Reports.aspx

White Paper on Storage Virtualization Software and Storage Efficiency
Download the latest 'Must Read' white paper on Storage Efficiency by Jon Toigo: STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION FOR ROCK STARS Part 1: Storage Efficiency
It does a great job of overviewing the benefits of Storage Virtualization Software and covering the compelling economics.

IDC White Paper on DataCore: Achieving the Full Business Value of Virtualization with a Scalable Software-Based Storage Virtualization Solution
An excellent paper on the value proposition of virtualization software for storage by IDCs Rick Villars, the top expert on virtualization and storage virtualization: http://www.datacore.com/Libraries/Document_Library/The_Business_Value_of_Software-based_Storage_Virtualization.sflb.ashx

IDC Opinion & Summary

Today's information-based economy demands that IT managers enhance the business value of existing and planned IT investments while simultaneously reducing the costs of IT operations. Server consolidation and broader adoption of server virtualization are some of the key strategies IT teams are counting on to meet these goals.

Dealing with storage, however, is one of the most critical technical and economic roadblocks to broad adoption of virtualization in many of these organizations. Limits include the up-front direct cost associated with replacing storage with complex networked storage systems, the added operational cost of managing networked storage systems, and the inherent inefficiencies of many of these storage systems.

Storage virtualization software such as DataCore's SANsymphony-V addresses many of these challenges. It allows organizations to make better use of "in place" storage assets while also ensuring that IT organizations can fully achieve a return on their investments in a virtualized server environment. They can achieve these goals by quickly taking advantage of the rapid cost declines and performance increases available in today's standard server platforms. IDC finds that the use of virtualized storage with solutions such as DataCore's makes it possible for companies to:

Consolidate storage and server assets
Increase the number of virtualized servers running on individual physical servers while doubling storage utilization rates for installed storage
Leverage lower-cost/higher-capacity storage tiers that can significantly cut the cost of acquiring new storage assets
Improve application and information availability while shrinking backup times
Significantly reduce the cost to meet the performance and business continuity objectives of virtualized IT organizations

DataCore Software Names Former Citrix Executive as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, More...

2011-06-14T08:42:00.000-07:00

Linda Haury to direct DataCore's strategic marketing efforts

“DataCore is positioned to become a powerhouse in one of the industry’s fastest growing software segments,” said Haury. “Coming out of the desktop and server virtualization space, I can tell you firsthand how essential they are to virtualization projects. Needless to say, I’m eager to commence this exciting role.”

Virtual Strategy Magazine:
http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2011/06/09/datacore-software-names-former-citrix-executive-vice-president-worldwide-marketing

Sandhill.com:
http://www.sandhill.com/news/exec_moves.php?id=569

IT Director:
http://www.it-director.com/business/change/news_release.php?rel=25506

SNSeurope:
http://www.snseurope.com/news_full.php?id=18505&title=DataCore-Software-names-former-Citrix-executive-as-Vice-President-of-Worldwide-Marketing

VirtualizationWorld:
http://www.virtualizationworld365.net/news_full.php?id=18505&title=DataCore-Software-names-former-Citrix-executive-as-Vice-President-of-Worldwide-Marketing

VMblog:
http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/06/09/datacore-software-names-former-citrix-executive-as-vice-president-of-worldwide-marketing.aspx

ChannelEMEA:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/09/2258385/datacore-software-names-former.html

Big Data: The Time is Now for Managing It and Leveraging the Advantages
http://www.dbta.com/Articles/Editorial/Trends-and-Applications/Big-Data-The-Time-is-Now-for-Managing-It-and-Leveraging-the-Advantages-75883.aspx

Big Data Storage

Leveraging the advantages big data has to offer in terms of global insight and better customer understanding requires smarter data management practices. Consider the storage side of the issue, another matter that makes big data perplexing to many organizations and administrators. A sizable segment of companies with fast-growing data stores in the IOUG survey spend more than one-fourth of their IT budgets on storage requirements.

Data growth is quickly becoming out of control and drives over-spending when it comes to data storage. Despite increasing IT budgets, the growing costs associated with storing more data create a data affordability gap that cannot be ignored. The response to this growth has been to continue funding expansion and add hardware. Technology advances have enabled us to gather more data faster than at any other time in our history which has been beneficial in many ways. Unfortunately, in order to keep pace with data growth, businesses have to provision more storage capacity which drives costs.

While there has been a relentless push in recent years to store multiplatform data on ever-larger disk arrays, big data demands moving in a different direction. "In contrast to years past, where information was neatly compartmentalized, big data has become widely distributed, scattered across many sites on different generations of storage devices and equipment brands-some up in the clouds, others down in the basement," George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software, tells DBTA.

As result, centralized storage is "both impractical and flawed," Teixeira says. "It's impractical because it's incredibly difficult to lump all that gargantuan data in one neat little bucket. It's flawed because doing so would expose you to catastrophic single points of failure and disruption." To address widely distributed data storage, he recommends approaches such as storage virtualization software, backed up by mirror images of data which are kept updated in at least two different locations. "This allows organizations to harness big data in a manner that reduces operational costs, improves efficiency, and non-disruptively swap hardware in and out as it ages," he says.

CIO update: The Pros and Cons of SSD in the Enterprise
http://www.cioupdate.com/trends/article.php/11047_3933741_2/The-Pros-and-Cons-of-SSD-in-the-Enterprise.htm

Storage virtualization software helps shape the shared storage infrastructure required by virtual IT environments and takes good advantage of SSDs where appropriate, reducing the write duty-cycle by caching upstream of the cards to minimize actual writes to media. This effectively extends the useful life of these premium-priced assets.

"It can also make modest sized SSDs appear to have much larger logical capacity by thin provisioning its resources," said Augie Gonzalez, director of Product Marketing at DataCore Software. "The sage advice is consider SSDs as one element of the physical storage configuration, but put your money on device-independent storage virtualization software to take full advantage of them."

TechNet Radio: IT Time - The “Caring and Feeding” for Shared Storage in Clustered Hyper-V Environments
http://64.4.11.252/en-us/edge/technet-radio-it-time-the-caring-and-feeding-for-shared-storage-in-clustered-hyper-v-environments.aspx?query=1

Its IT Time, and in today’s episode Blain Barton interviews Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing at DataCore Software. Tune in for this lively conversation as they discuss how DataCore’s SANsymphony-V can help solve potential storage related issues in Hyper-V clusters.

'Virtualizing' disparate storage resources
http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Virtualizing-disparate-storage-resources

Would you like to get a point-in-time snapshot of your disparate storage resources regardless of which disk array supplier houses your data? Would you like to create a universal storage pool out of your Fibre Channel, SCSI, EIDE, and IBM SSA drives? Would you like to substantially improve performance yields from equipment already on your floor?

According to DataCore Software, these are just a few of the advantages that network storage pools powered by the company's SANsymphony are providing - without shutting down, rewiring, or overloading application servers.

"Currently, anyone who has legacy SCSI disk arrays alongside Fibre Channel and EMC boxes are having to use various, vendor-specific utilities to monitor and control their storage resources," says Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing for DataCore Software. "With SANsymphony, a central administrator can take overall custody of disparate storage resources in a homogeneous way. No longer do they have to be overwhelmed by each particular disk vendor's administrative nuances."

Gonzalez says SANsymphony's built-in caching algorithms are adding new value to existing storage assets. "Many people have equipment on the floor that doesn't live up to its performance potential," he says. "Now you can come in after the fact and accelerate their I/O response time..."

DataCore Software Helping New Zealand's Leading Port Company to Build Virtualized Storage Infrastructure

2011-06-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

http://virtualization.tmcnet.com/topics/virtualization/articles/183063-datacore-software-helping-new-zealands-leading-port-company.htm

A key player in storage virtualization and iSCSI SAN software, DataCore Software Corporation recently announced the deployment of its DataCore SANsymphony storage virtualization software by Ports of Auckland, New Zealand’s leading port company.

Ports of Auckland is going to use the software to create a dynamic and resilient virtual storage infrastructure. In order to deploy SANsymphony advanced storage virtualization software, the company will not require to make changes in hardware. Thus the investment is expected to help cost-effectively support the port company’s server virtualization environment as well as its business model.

One of the largest in New Zealand, Ports of Auckland supports the international trade on a 24/7 basis by providing a broad range of cargo handling and logistics services. Although the server infrastructure at Ports of Auckland is extensively virtualized, its aging Storage Area Network (SAN) was disrupting IT processing at critical hours, the company revealed in a press release. But upgrade was difficult as it would have disrupted its operations. By deploying DataCore SANsymphony, the IT team is now able to keep applications running while switching out equipment with just a few minutes’ notice, officials at DataCore explained in the release.

According to managing director of APAC at DataCore Software Peter Thompson (News - Alert), DataCore’s storage virtualization software allows Ports of Auckland to move to a shared pool of storage and realize greater efficiency and business continuity as well as the ability to quickly react to new and expanding workloads placed on its systems.

“With DataCore, we have seen the benefits first-hand of improved uptime and being able to do operational maintenance without affecting our business. This gives us peace of mind. We’re also getting better utilization out of our storage hardware, and need less of it to achieve greater performance. With DataCore in place, our performance has been nothing short of phenomenan,” lead systems engineer at Ports of Auckland Craig Beetlestone commented in a statement.

The deployment of DataCore SANsymphony storage virtualization software has given Ports of Auckland and the IT team confidence that they are now in control of the company’s infrastructure.

“Looking forward, it’s good knowing that SANsymphony’s advanced storage virtualization features stay in place even as the hardware underneath changes. There’s none of the throw away we’ve experienced in the past when the functional intelligence was buried in the devices,” Beetlestone further explained.

The Port of Aukland Case Study and more info are available at: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/Ports-of-Auckland.aspx

Ports of Auckland is New Zealand’s leading port company, serving the country’s vital international trade with a broad range of cargo handling and logistics services on a 24x7, 365-day-a-year basis. Ports of Auckland is responsible for running two maritime ports and an inland port in the Auckland region.

In 2010, the ports handled cargo equivalent to 13 percent of the country’s total GDP, twice as much as any other New Zealand port. Its east-coast Auckland seaport accounts for 37 percent of New Zealand’s total container trade. Ports of Auckland connects New Zealand’s importers and exporters with more than 165 international ports in nearly 70 countries.

Ports of Auckland Embarks on Storage Virtualization with DataCore Software to Keep Business Processes Flowing Smoothly and Reduce IT Costs
http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2011/06/02/ports-auckland-embarks-storage-virtualization-datacore-software-keep-business-processes-f

http://virtualization.sys-con.com/node/1858216

Computer Technology Review: Ports of Auckland deploys DataCore Software to keep business processes smooth and reduce IT cost
http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12833:ports-of-auckland-deploys-datacore-software-to-keep-business-processes-smooth-and-reduce-it-costs-&catid=231:storage-software&Itemid=2701181

DataCenter Journal: Storage Virtualization for Ports of Auckland
http://www.datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4742:storage-virtualization-for-ports-of-auckland&catid=142:the-daily-buzz&Itemid=100366

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/06/02/ports-of-auckland-embarks-on-storage-virtualization-with-datacore-software-to-keep-business-processes-flowing-smoothly-and-reduce-it-costs.aspx

DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V Takes Industry by Storm

2011-06-07T06:16:00.000-07:00

Solving the "Big Challenges" Stalling Today's Server and Desktop Virtualization Projects, Brings DataCore Widespread Industry Accolades

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/06/01/datacore-software-s-sansymphony-v-takes-industry-by-storm.aspx

“We implemented DataCore software to protect our VMware environment from glitches in our storage infrastructure,” states Warren D. Nisbett, senior assistant managing director, Management Information Systems Unit, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank Ltd. “SANsymphony-V automatically replicates our virtual machine images and their data in real-time to our other hot site. Moreover, our system performance has greatly improved. We stand behind our selection of SANsymphony-V because it performs as advertised.”

DataCore Software announced broad praises and widespread momentum for its newest software release, SANsymphony- V. This next-generation solution eliminates storage-related barriers that prevent IT organizations from realizing the financial and operational goals of their virtualization initiatives.

“We have large data storage needs and found the flexibility we were seeking in SANsymphony-V,” states Peter Dobler, assistant vice president, Corporate MIS Dept., Northeast Health. “Moreover, SANsymphony-V’s interface is head and shoulders above what I am used to for storage management. It is very intuitive and easy to use. SANsymphony-V has made our end-to-end virtualization initiatives a reality. We virtualized our core network with Cisco and our servers with both VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. SANsymphony-V was the final piece. Storage virtualization with SANsymphony-V rounded the whole thing out and it has worked really well.”

According to George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software, “The industry accolades and positive customer feedback speaks to the timeliness, relevance and value implicit in SANsymphony-V. While many had looked at virtualization from the narrow perspective of servers and desktops, they now recognize how our storage virtualization software forms the critical third dimension to a hardware-independent strategy.”

Announced in January 2011, SANsymphony-V software enables data centers to use existing equipment and conventional storage devices to achieve the robust and responsive shared storage environment necessary to support highly dynamic virtual IT environments. This contrasts sharply with the expensive “rip and replace” approaches being proposed to support desktop and server virtualization projects.

“We deployed SANsymphony-V at all of our global affiliate locations,” says Jane Cebula, director, Global Infrastructure, SI Group. “We needed to protect our VMware environment by ensuring that data was synchronously mirrored and highly available. Now our data is secure because with SANsymphony-V we can replicate data in real-time to a secondary location, rather than contracting out for our D/R needs.”

In recent weeks, many independent assessments of DataCore’s impact to the virtualization segment have been conducted. These include:

Industry Analyst Recognition:

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lab Validation Report – Results of comprehensive hands-on testing and performance benchmarking validated key value propositions of SANsymphony-V. The ESG Lab team summarized its test conclusions by stating: “ESG Lab firmly believes that it would benefit any organization considering or implementing an IT virtualization project to take a long look at DataCore SANsymphony-V R8 storage virtualization software. It is robust, flexible, and responsive and delivers major value in terms of utilization, economics, improved response times, high-availability, and easy administration.”
Taneja Group Profile – “Building the Virtual Infrastructure with DataCore SANsymphony-V” was released earlier this year by leading industry analyst firm, Taneja Group. As part of the profile, Taneja highlights DataCore’s solutions and use cases in Microsoft’s environment and touts that “For Hyper-V users that would like to build an enterprise-capable virtual infrastructure, DataCore SANsymphony-V is an ideal fit.”

To download the full ESG Lab Validation Report and Taneja Group Profile, please visit: DataCore Software – Featured Analyst Reports.

Product Reviews:

eWEEK “Product to Watch” – eWEEK, the industry leader for strategic technology information, named SANsymphony-V one of its “Products to Watch” for 2011. Editors distinguished DataCore for using “software to reshape server and disk resources already in use in order to meet the unpredictable workloads that virtual machines and virtual desktops throw at newly consolidated data centers.” The “Products to Watch” article appears in the February 21, 2011 print edition of eWEEK.
IAIT Independently Validates SANsymphony-V – After closely examining SANsymphony-V newly-added features and capabilities, independent IT analysis experts at the Institute for the Analysis of IT components (IAIT) concluded that the product “offers an extremely efficient central administration tool for storage virtualization with synchronous mirroring for high availability, asynchronous replication for disaster recovery and further important function like virtual disk pooling, thin provisioning, snapshots for backups and restores as well as CDP for Continuous Data Protection.” To download the full IAIT SANsymphony-V product review, please visit: DataCore Software – Product Reviews.

Awards:

Everything Channel’s CRN 2011 Partner Programs Guide / 5-Star Partner Rating – DataCore was named to the Everything Channel CRN 2011 Partner Program Guide and was awarded a 5-Star Partner rating for the second straight year. As the definitive authority on vendors who have robust partner programs or products that service solution providers offer directly to the IT channel, Everything Channel recognized the DataCore Partner Program as offering a program that provides the best possible partnering elements for channel success.
2011 Network Computing Award – DataCore gained additional recognition in Europe by winning one of the the UK’s top networking accolades by scooping the Data Center Product of the Year Award at the prestigious 2011 Network Computing Awards. Established in 2005 to recognize best-of-breed, easy to use solutions that make the lives of network administrators and managers easier and more effective, readers had the opportunity to vote across a two month time period across several categories. The “DataCore Tackles Storage Virtualization Barrier” review appeared in the February issue of Network Computing.

“We implemented DataCore software to protect our VMware environment from glitches in our storage infrastructure,” states Warren D. Nisbett, senior assistant managing director, Management Information Systems Unit, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank Ltd. “SANsymphony-V automatically replicates our virtual machine images and their data in real-time to our other hot site. Moreover, our system performance has greatly improved. We stand behind our selection of SANsymphony-V because it performs as advertised.”

More Information
Extensive reference material and supporting videos of SANsymphony-V may be found at the SANsymphony-V launch page: http://www.datacore.com/Software/Products/SANsymphony-V.aspx.

DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V Garners Widespread Momentum

http://it.tmcnet.com/topics/it/articles/181706-datacore-softwares-sansymphony-v-garners-widespread-momentum.htm

SANsymphony-V has garnered widespread momentum and praise. It is designed to remove the storage-related barriers that prevent IT organizations from realizing the financial and operational goals of their virtualization initiatives.

SANsymphony-V is a version of DataCore’s SANsymphony storage virtualization software that is tuned specifically for virtual server and virtual desktop environments. It can also be used in physical environments, as well as a mix of virtual and physical.

TMCnet recently reported that the solution is capable of solving difficult storage-related challenges introduced by server and desktop virtualization, cloud computing and more general expansion, business continuity, and disaster recovery initiatives.

127 Million and Counting

2011-06-06T01:36:00.000-07:00

That’s the number of person-hours lost each year to IT outages in North America and Europe, according to a new survey commissioned by CA Technologies. It’s an eye-catching number, equivalent to almost 64,000 people unemployed for a year, but there were other numbers in the survey that caught my attention.

For instance, a third of the organizations surveyed didn’t have a disaster-recovery policy in place, despite the fact that most them understood that downtime can damage their reputation, staff morale, and customer loyalty, and almost a fourth of the companies said that failure to recover data would be disastrous. The numbers also revealed that employee productivity suffered almost as much during data recovery as it did during the downtime itself.

Even more interesting was the fact that something like 95% of those lost hours come from small businesses with less than 500 employees. Of course, that’s mostly due to the fact that there are so many small businesses compared to larger firms, but I’m sure there’s also a “we can’t afford disaster recovery or high availability” mentality at work. How many of those lost hours could be reclaimed if businesses realized that in the era of virtualization, DR and HA no longer require specialized hardware and expensive duplication of resources?

Server virtualization combined with storage virtualization software makes it possible to use standard server hardware and disks—fancy arrays entirely optional—to make disaster recovery what it should always be—a last resort—by assuring business continuity and zero-downtime recovery with synchronous replication. It works if you have 200 TB of data spread across multiple metro clusters, and it works if you’re a small business dependent on a private cloud. Adding storage virtualization software to your virtualization playbook means you can put all your hardware to work, all the time, and stop worrying about being a downtime statistic.

Photo by Justin Marty

Videos from Citrix Synergy 2011; Latest Whitepaper and Webcast - The Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars Webcast Series Part 1: Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency

2011-06-03T01:28:00.000-07:00

Check out the latest Webcast: The Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars Webcast Series Part 1: Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency
http://www.datacore.com/Software/Closer-Look/webcasts.aspx

Brian Madden at Citrix Synergy 2011: A video demo of DataCore
In this video from Citrix Synergy 2011 San Francisco, Datacore's Rob Griffin shows off SANsymphony-V and how it can be used to virtualize storage for VDI environments.
http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/morevideos/archive/2011/05/31/citrix-synergy-2011-a-video-demo-of-datacore.aspx

VMblog interviews Matt Zucker on DataCore at Citrix Synergy 2011
http://events.vmblog.com/video-interviews/interview-datacore
and at:
http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/05/26/citrix-synergy-2011-datacore.aspx

Sabrina Gelado Interview at the Citrix Synergy Both
http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/4035

DailyMotion creates a DataCore Video Playlist
http://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x1kne2_datacorevideos_datacore-playlist-english/1#videoId=xhuyri

Are You Getting Storage Efficiency Backwards?
http://www.datacore.com/storage-virtualization-viewpoint-blog/11-05-31/Are_You_Getting_Storage_Efficiency_Backwards.aspx

SNSeurope DataCore Customer Video
http://www.snseurope.com/tv_full.php?id=322&title=DataCore-Software---Customer-Testimonial

Are You Getting Storage Efficiency Backwards?

2011-06-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

Private cloud storage has been much in the news lately: it’s well up along the “hype cycle.” So it was refreshing to see some cautionary words from IBM the other day at the company’s Storage Innovation Executive Summit. Although Big Blue is one of the biggest players in cloud computing—they have a stake in every aspect of it—VP Dan Galvan warned attendees about a common misconception that’s fueling a lot of the private cloud storage hype.

“Cloud computing isn't about storage efficiency. It’s backward, because storage efficiency is how you enable the private cloud.” He went on to recommend implementing technologies such as storage virtualization, automated tiering, and thin provisioning as first steps towards the efficiency needed for private cloud storage.

Exactly right. Couldn’t have said it better myself, even though I’ve had years of practice talking about just those technologies. Talking, and listening to the customers who have used them to increase their storage efficiency.

Along the way I’ve learned that storage efficiency has multiple dimensions, and you have to take them all into account in solving your storage equation. There’s the technical dimension, which involves parameters like storage utilization, performance, power consumption, and the like. There’s the business dimension, where the numbers are about total cost of ownership and ROI. And there’s the operational dimension, which, due to the rapid proliferation of data, is straight out of the Red Queen’s race in Through the Looking Glass: running as fast as you can just to stay in one place.

The only way to optimize all three of these storage efficiency dimensions is to follow the logic of virtualization all the way to the end. Just as you wouldn’t lock your server virtualization capabilities up in a single server box, you shouldn’t lock your storage virtualization capabilities up in a single array. With storage virtualization software that can run on the same standard server hardware you use for application virtualization, and which can virtualize all your storage, regardless of vendor, you’ll not only nail the technical numbers, but extend your existing storage investment for an even better ROI. And being able to manage all your storage assets from a single point, creating virtual disks with a few mouse clicks, means that IT will be doing a lot less running around.

Doing it any other way is just backwards.

Photo by Ross Berteig

Why be a Dummy, When You Can Be a Rock Star?

2011-05-24T07:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=3393

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like those “For Dummies” books. Maybe I am put off by the idea of being seen carrying a book around that casts aspersions on what my detractors might call my already questionable skills and knowledge. Or maybe it is because a number of titles I have perused over the past couple of years — thin tomes passed out at trade show booths — seem to be more like vendor brochures than sources of meaningful information about technology.

In any case, when DataCore Software approached me to write a “For Dummies” guide to storage virtualization, my initial inclination was to pass on the project. For one thing, I had seen at least two other “Storage Virtualization for Dummies” books in that series, which has become a cottage industry for its publisher, neither of which I had found particularly insightful or probative — unless you just wanted to learn about a particular vendor’s gear.

Then there was that negative title. ”…For Dummies.”

Heck, I might be a dummy. But I don’t want to go around advertising it.

Then, they came back to me with a new idea that changed my mind.

Instead of the familiar black-and-yellow “For Dummies” book, why not do things differently: write a “For Rock Stars” guide. Heck, everyone wants to be a rock star (or did once, before their teeth started falling out of their heads).

As we discussed the project, I grew more and more comfortable with it. I didn’t need to focus on the capabilities and limitations of any one vendor’s product in the guide. Nor did I have to explore the minutiae of differences between one product or another (especially not in a way that was calculated to stilt the discussion in favor of DataCore or any other vendor). DataCore was already quite secure about their technology and the overall superiority and value of their product.

The idea was to articulate the concepts and implementation alternatives available to any IT professional who wanted to get his or her head around the technology.

Moreover, the concept was settled upon to make the entire project a kind of mixed media adventure. I would help to develop the book as a series of white papers, each delivered in concert with a webcast in which I will do the “lead riff” followed by experts from DataCore.

That sounded cool, prompting me to hit PhotoShop hard to develop some seminal art. Here’s the cover:

Intro slide for webcast series Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars

Get ready to rock and roll this Thursday, assuming I can still talk. I will post the invite details shortly.

I should add that this will not only cover the errata of storage virtualization technology, but also the business value case for those of you who have the practical challenge of cost-justifying all expenditures to the bean counters in the front office — (a category that includes most of us today!)

Fact is, I am having a lot of fun helping to develop this program and hope it will get a lot of interest and attendance.

Special thanks to DataCore Software for sponsoring this endeavor. They are all true rock stars in my book.

Invitation to Would-Be Rock Stars

http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=3397

Per my previous post, it is my pleasure to pass along this invitation to participate in Thursday’s introductory installment of the Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars Webinar Series.

Greetings.

You are receiving this because I consider you part of the DataCore Software ecosystem — meaning that I have communicated with you either regularly, routinely, or for a specific purpose in the past. I wanted to “waive a flag” on behalf of a NEW webcast series we are doing in the hopes that you will attend the first one – Part 1: Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency — this Thursday, May 26th. For those who have not already done so, please register at your earliest convenience.

The Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars Webcast Series

Starting this week, DataCore will offer one webcast a month, running from May through October. Different topics under the storage virtualization umbrella will be tackled each time.

Please join us on Thursday, May 26th at 11:30 AM EDT for the first webcast in this series — Part 1: Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency. The webcast will last between 30 and 40 minutes and then we will conduct a Q&A at the end (hence the one-hour “duration” on the registration form). IT industry analyst and data storage luminary Jon Toigo will serve as host and moderator for the entire “For Rock Stars” webcast series.

Also please consider forwarding (or posting on your web site/blog) this short text to encourage any others in your organization to attend –

The Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars Webcast Series: Part 1: Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency
Thursday, May 26, 2011. 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM EDT.

While I don’t know how luminescent I will be given the condition of my dentata, I will give my solo everything I’ve got and will be delighted to hear George Teixeira, President and CEO of DataCore, and Tim Warden, Director of Systems Engineers, contribute their “tasty riffs.” And of course, I will moderate what I hope will be an energetic panel discussion at the end of the presos.

Be there or be square. (Did I say that?)

Don’t Build Your Cloud with Iron!

2011-05-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

I suppose almost everyone remembers cloud-watching as a child: lying on your back outdoors watching them morph from horse to dragon to spaceship to—well, you could find almost anything in those solid-seeming billows drifting overhead. And if someone had asked you then what clouds are made of, I can imagine any number of answers, and not one of them would have involved iron.

But that’s precisely what big-iron storage vendors like EMC, NetApp, and others would like you to think. The hoopla at EMC World last week in Las Vegas got me thinking about this, such as this quote from EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s keynote: “virtualization is the key to the cloud. This is the year when most, if not all, mission critical applications get virtualized and run on cloud topologies. This will be the year when all IT professionals will understand the opportunities [presented by the cloud].”

I couldn’t agree more with the first sentence: virtualization is the key to the cloud. And I hope this is the year when everyone understands cloud opportunities: especially the opportunity to get out from under the iron clouds that storage hardware vendors are pushing. (That image that makes me want to cover my head and run for cover!)

Virtualization software like VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V makes it easy to create virtual machines from a cloud of common CPU and memory resources without worrying about the iron behind the scenes. That’s a huge productivity boost for IT, so why not do the same with storage? Point-and-click creation of virtual disks—no matter whose storage hardware is behind them—would sure beat pushing heavy iron around.

Not surprisingly, private cloud providers like External IT, Host.net, and iomart hosting have been quick to recognize this opportunity. The single point of failure, hardware lock-in, and expense of big-iron storage solutions made it hard for them to provide the agile, cost-effective, highly-reliable infrastructure that their customers demand. So they’ve moved on to storage virtualization software that runs in the cloud like everything else and transforms all their storage assets into a single pool of storage that can very rapidly be “carved up” into virtual disks for customer applications or servers.

The benefits they talk about include:

High availability with synchronous mirroring of all storage resources
Disaster recovery with asynchronous replication
Zero-downtime SAN hardware refreshes
Improved storage performance from intelligent software cache
No hardware lock-in and easy migration of older storage hardware to lower tiers

So forget the rivets and virtualize all the way down to keep your cloud soft and agile.

(Photograph taken by Karin Dalziel)

It Ain’t Easy Being ‘Green’ … Or Is It? Virtualization software makes an impact on waste.

2011-05-20T12:37:00.000-07:00

Since Earth Day was proclaimed in 1970, protecting the environment has advanced from a grassroots effort to a global cause. We’ve all pitched in and taken steps to ensure the planet will be a healthy place to live for generations to come. From recycling to alternative sources of energy, the pursuit for a green future is on.

With the daily power consumption of a typical data center equivalent to the monthly power consumption of thousands of homes, it’s no surprise that a major focus of the green movement has turned to the data center. In fact, just this week The Green Grid Association announced new steps organizations can take to transform their data centers from an operational burden to a source of prosperity and sustainability.

But most of the hype around green data centers has focused on data center architecture, server consolidation, and new cooling strategies – and somehow ...

Full story

Photos from DataCore at Microsoft TechEd 2011; Dancing DataCore GoBots ‘Hot’ item at the Show

2011-05-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

Check out the photos and click on the video links to see the DataCore Dancing GoBots…

Dancing GoBots:
Jousting GoBot
Hula GoBot
Flava Flav GoBot

Also, check out the latest releases from the show:
DataCore Showcases Use Cases and Next-Generation Storage Virtualization Software, SANsymphony-V at Microsoft TechEd

Microsoft Tech-Ed 2011: DataCore Software Adds Extra Data Protection, Flexibility and Speed to Windows Home Server with DriveHarmony

DataCore Showcases WW User Testimonials and New Software at Microsoft Tech-Ed

2011-05-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.it-director.com/technology/sys_mgmt/news_release.php?rel=24964&ref=fd_info

“Microsoft’s full range of virtualization solutions provide partners and customers with an effective way to save costs, increase availability, and improve agility within their business infrastructure,” said Mike Schutz, senior director of product management for the Server and Cloud division at Microsoft Corp. “By using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 and Microsoft System Center, customers can also take advantage of DataCore SANsymphony-V and explore ways to reducethe cost of storage while delivering improved performance and availability.”

Enterprise-class Solution Purpose-Built for Windows Server 2008 R2

Cloud services provider AcXess, for example, is using DataCore’s SANsymphony™ software to create a dynamic, resilient virtual storage infrastructure that cost-effectively supports the company’s Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtualization environment and its business model.

AcXess has built its business around flexible virtualisation technologies designed to meet the needs of key customers who rely on AcXess to provide reasonably priced services such as on-demand sales demos, proof-of-concept (POC) labs, and training sessions in virtualised environments to thousands of employees, partners, and customers. Using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and DataCore, AcXess has doubled the number of users year over year and has grown its business 300 percent, while saving $5 million in hardware costs.

A full case study is available on Microsoft’s website.

DataCore Showcases Use Cases And Next-Generation Storage Virtualization Software, SANsymphony-V At Microsoft TechEd

2011-05-17T09:03:00.001-07:00

http://www.bsminfo.com/article.mvc/DataCore-Showcases-Use-Cases-And-Next-0001

DataCore Software is showcasing its SANsymphony™-V solution at this week’s Microsoft Tech•Ed North America 2011 conference. SANsymphony-V is DataCore’s next-generation storage virtualization software solution that enables IT organizations to eliminate storage-related barriers preventing them from realizing the financial and operational goals of their virtualization initiatives.

“By using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 and Microsoft System Center, customers can also take advantage of DataCore SANsymphony-V and explore ways to reduce the cost of storage while delivering improved performance and availability.”-Mike Schutz, senior director of product management for the Server and Cloud division at Microsoft Corp.

Tech•Ed 2011 takes place at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta from Monday, May 16 until Thursday, May 19, 2011. DataCore is a Silver Sponsor and is exhibiting in Booth 1629.

To read more about DataCore’s solutions and use cases in Microsoft environments, download the Taneja Group profile, “Building the Virtual Infrastructure with DataCore SANsymphony-V.”

DataCore™ SANsymphony-V enables data centers to use existing equipment and conventional storage devices to satisfy shared storage requirements introduced by highly dynamic, virtual IT environments. It provides a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 based set of advanced storage virtualization functions to provision, share, reconfigure, migrate, replicate, expand, and upgrade storage. This cost-effectively speeds up applications, delivers uninterrupted data access, and extends the useful life of storage devices, contrasting sharply with the expensive “rip and replace” approaches being proposed to support desktop and server virtualization projects.

“Microsoft’s full range of virtualization solutions provide partners and customers with an effective way to save costs, increase availability, and improve agility within their business infrastructure,” said Mike Schutz, senior director of product management for the Server and Cloud division at Microsoft Corp. “By using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 and Microsoft System Center, customers can also take advantage of DataCore SANsymphony-V and explore ways to reduce the cost of storage while delivering improved performance and availability.”

Enterprise-class Solution Purpose-Built for Windows Server 2008 R2
Two years in development, DataCore designed SANsymphony-V to meet the needs of midmarket end-users and solution-providers, especially those familiar with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 administration eager to adapt their IT operations to accommodate the many variables that server and desktop virtualization introduce. It is interoperable with Microsoft’s virtualization infrastructure, including Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1, System Center, and Failover Clustering.

While some vendors in the virtualization field recommend that customers lock themselves into specific storage hardware configurations and exotic purpose-built appliances, SANsymphony-V frees customers from hardware lock-in by decoupling the virtual infrastructure from the underlying disks. It also optimizes the I/O response obtained from standard storage devices that would have otherwise needed to be replaced. Then when customers need to expand capacity, they can simply choose the best deal at the time from a number of suppliers rather than be limited to one specific vendor’s hardware.

“Shared storage is often the ‘weak link’ in server and desktop virtualization initiatives; first as a performance bottleneck and then as a single point-of-failure. Many times, virtualization projects intended to reduce server or desktop costs hit the storage wall,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “We employ sophisticated software portable and scalable across Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V SP1 to overcome the storage-related roadblocks standing between IT organizations and their virtualization objectives.”

Real-world Successes Built on Virtualization Software
At Tech•Ed 2011, DataCore is also highlighting a number of customers that deploy Microsoft solutions in conjunction with a virtualized storage infrastructure powered by DataCore Software.

Cloud services provider AcXess, for example, is using DataCore’s SANsymphony™ software to create a dynamic, resilient virtual storage infrastructure that cost-effectively supports the company’s Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtualization environment and its business model.

AcXess has built its business around flexible virtualization technologies designed to meet the needs of key customers who rely on AcXess to provide reasonably priced services such as on-demand sales demos, proof-of-concept (POC) labs, and training sessions in virtualized environments to thousands of employees, partners, and customers. Using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and DataCore, AcXess has doubled the number of users year over year and has grown its business 300 percent, while saving $5 million in hardware costs. A full case study is available on Microsoft’s website.

More Information
Extensive reference material and supporting videos for SANsymphony-V may be found at on DataCore’s website: http://www.datacore.com/SANsymphony-V.

Additional resources, solution overviews, and product documents may be found on the DataCore website: http://www.datacore.com/Solutions/storage-virtualization-and-virtual-server-desktop/Microsoft/Resources.aspx and find out why the Taneja Group profile states, “For Hyper-V users that would like to build an enterprise-capable virtual infrastructure, DataCore SANsymphony-V is an ideal fit.”

Microsoft Tech-Ed 2011: DataCore Software Adds Extra Data Protection, Flexibility and Speed to Windows Home Server with DriveHarmony

2011-05-17T01:34:00.000-07:00

http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2011/05/17/datacore-driveharmony-public-beta-announced/

Welcomes beta testers to trial DriveHarmony’s new pooling, mirroring and caching features that boost performance and sidestep hard disk drive limitations

DataCore Software today announced the Beta release of DriveHarmony™, a simple to use add-on software package for Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS). Users who are eager to protect, pool, accelerate, and easily expand storage capacity are welcome to request an early version of DriveHarmony for their personal beta testing by visiting DataCore’s booth (#1629) at this week’s Microsoft Tech•Ed 2011 or by sending a request to WHS@DataCore.com.

“With more and more content going digital, people increasingly want a simple way to access, store, and enjoy the wide range of photos, personal videos, music, and films they save at home”

Easily Pool and Expand Storage to Simplify File Sharing and Folder Management
Leveraging techniques learned from a decade of experience in large data centers across the globe, DataCore™ DriveHarmony maximizes the value home users get from their hard disk drives. The software integrates into the familiar WHS dashboard with a simple, easy-to-use control panel. From there, users can combine one or more physical disks of variable sizes and types into one “Virtual Big Disk” pool. When this virtual drive is created, it is automatically initialized, formatted, assigned a drive letter, and selectively mirrored for data protection. The virtual drive is then ready for use by any application running on the WHS 2011 operating system.

Growing with the Needs of Today’s Digital Lifestyle
As families and small businesses gather more digital assets, their disk space consumption naturally grows. DriveHarmony delivers the right combination of power, capacity, and ease-of-use for today’s home consumers. It allows them to expand appropriately by adding more drives to virtual disks without having to split up or re-organize their files. The rest is done behind the scenes without any need for intervention.

“With more and more content going digital, people increasingly want a simple way to access, store, and enjoy the wide range of photos, personal videos, music, and films they save at home,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development, DataCore Software. “Through the gathering of feedback during the beta process, we look forward to working closely with Microsoft and the Windows Home Server Community to bring to market a powerful solution to help home users easily protect, organize, and manage their growing disk requirements in a digital age.”

Availability
DriveHarmony is currently in Beta release and will be rolled out via select OEMs later this year. Visitors to DataCore’s booth (#1629) at Microsoft Tech•Ed 2011 can request an early version of DriveHarmony for their personal beta testing. Tech•Ed takes place at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta from Monday, May 16 until Thursday, May 19, 2011.

DataCore Attending Tech•Ed 2011

2011-05-16T07:44:00.000-07:00

If you are in the Atlanta, GA area from May 16 through May 19, stop by Tech•Ed 2011 at the Georgia World Congress Center. Visit DataCore’s booth (#1629) where we’ll be “unlocking the mysteries” of storage virtualization and showcasing SANsymphony-V.

As part of a new initiative to extend our product line across the Microsoft Windows Server family, we will also be using Tech•Ed to highlight our newest software product, DriveHarmony, an easy to use add-on software application for Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS). Due for general release in June, DriveHarmony offer WHS users pooling, mirroring and caching features that boost performance and sidestep hard disk drive limitations, functionality long familiar to DataCore enterprise customers. All visitors to our booth will be encouraged to sign up for the beta version for personal testing. We hope to see you there!

Visit our website for more information:
http://www.datacore.com/teched2011

See related blog post:
http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2011/05/12/datacore-at-tech-ed/

Guess Who’s Back, Back Again? … External Storage Fights the Hard Fight

2011-05-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

It’s official. According to Gartner, external controller-based disk storage has recovered from the global recession, exceeding the record sales figure from 2008 with revenue in 2010 of more than $19.4 billion (US). Analyst Roger Cox commented that “enterprises and service providers alike are investing more in external storage as they virtualize servers and build cloud-based services.”

Here’s my prediction: the storage required to support the Clouds will remain too expensive until Clouds move to a hardware independent software-based storage virtualization model.

As with virtual desktops, potential private cloud customers are experiencing “sticker shock” due to demanding storage requirements. This has slowed commercial interest. Clouds by definition are software constructs that provide services as needed when needed. To do so, the combination of virtual servers, virtual storage and virtual networks working together as a combined virtualization layer is the obvious choice.

From our perspective, a cloud computing platform ...

Full story

New Case Study on Ports of Auckland

2011-05-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

“Performance has been nothing short of phenomenal.”

Read the complete Case Study

The IT infrastructure at Ports of Auckland is extensively virtualized, but its aging Storage Area Network (SAN) was limiting critical application performance, required too much downtime for physical maintenance or upgrades, and could not furnish the high availability demanded by port operations. By deploying DataCore SANsymphony storage virtualization software, the IT team was able to guarantee a failover time of mere minutes, increase storage performance and utilization, and greatly reduce their storage infrastructure costs and management burden.

“With SANsymphony, we have seen the benefits first-hand of improved uptime and being able to do operational maintenance without affecting the business. We’re getting better utilization out of our storage hardware, and need less of it to get the same performance. 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.”
- Craig Beetlestone, Lead System

It’s Not Rocket Science: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

2011-05-09T02:09:00.000-07:00

After the space shuttle Atlantis lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in June, an era of NASA’s manned space exploration will come to a close. Nearly 50 years to the day after President John F. Kennedy called for a brave new era of space exploration, and 30 years after the launch of Columbia, NASA is bringing its three-decade-long Space Shuttle Program to a close. This is at a time when 2011 marks such a significant, historic year for the U.S. space program.

After completing 135 missions, the space shuttle – the workhorse and pride of the American space program – has finally outlived its benefit. It was originally devised because, at the time, a reusable spacecraft seemed much more economical than its one-and-done predecessors. And for 30 years, the space shuttle fulfilled its mission objectives thanks in part to one critical component: its design.

That’s right; the space shuttle’s main design has been unchanged for 30 years. Certainly, upgrades have been made here and there, but to the casual observer, it appears very much the same vehicle as it did in 1981. The “software” has been updated, but the hardware remains much the same. We see instances of this still to this day, where the life of hardware can be extended with smarter software.

How fitting that we see one example in an area that was born from NASA and the space program – storage virtualization. When converting to a virtualized environment, many will tell you that you need to make a costly upgrade investment to the storage infrastructure, if you want to run the latest software. And of course you’ll need to have the latest hardware. This is just not true.

Smarter virtualization software has shown that it can take advantage of just about any storage hardware and you don’t need the most powerful, fastest, or biggest anymore. That’s because the software is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Just like with a car… if you want more oomph off the line, you don’t need a new engine, you just need to change the gear ratios and the shift points (the latter also being a software programming issue), in other words, use a smarter program to get much more from the same “old” engine. This is the same with storage virtualization projects.

Now don’t get me wrong, software cannot extend the life of hardware indefinitely. Eventually, your car engine will die, but hopefully after several hundred thousand miles. And the space shuttle will retire this year, only to be replaced by something newer.

Eventually, you may have to roll in some new devices, but smarter software can ensure that the investments you’ve already made won’t go obsolete anytime soon and can enjoy a long, healthy, and productive lifespan. Maybe people will be talking about your “old” disks, even 30 years from now.

Is This The Year When Desktop Virtualization “Gets Real”? VMware Thinks So.

2011-05-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

I recently came across the following article in Barron’s and I think it merits discussion. Financial analyst Louis Miscioscia of Collins Stewart gives some insight into what’s cooking at VMware, and interestingly, the virtualization leader believes that this is the year when desktop virtualization projects will transform from proof of concepts to real deployments.

The main reason for this adoption? The cost of deploying a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) has dropped so significantly (about 70% cheaper) in just the past few years that it’s becoming a no-brainer from an investment perspective. The writer, Tiernan Ray, does point out that server virtualization deployments have far outpaced this uptick in VDI, so the bottom line is that there is a real uptick in the overall volume of virtualization projects going on right now. Maybe your own organization is dealing with this surge right now.

But as enterprises jump to on the ...

Full story

DataCore Software Powers Scottsdale Community College Virtual Storage Infrastructure Designed for Virtual Desktops

2011-05-05T03:19:00.000-07:00

Read the full Case study:
http://www.datacore.com/Libraries/Case_Study_PDFs/Scottsdale_Community_College.sflb.ashx

DataCore Software Powers Scottsdale Community College’s Virtualized IT Environment

Complements Citrix XenDesktop to provide an end-to-end virtualization solution and an enhanced virtual desktop experience for approximately 12,000 students and 1,000 employees

http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12712:datacore-powers-scottsdale-community-colleges-virtualized-it-environment&catid=231:storage-software&Itemid=2701181

http://www.istockanalyst.com/business/news/5108185/datacore-software-powers-scottsdale-community-college-s-virtualized-it-environment

Scottsdale Community College (SCC) has deployed DataCore’s SANsymphony™ storage virtualization software in conjunction with XenDesktop from Citrix in order to realize a fully virtualized IT environment. The responsiveness of virtualized environments – and in particular – the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), is closely tied to the availability and performance of the underlying storage systems.

DataCore SANsymphony and Citrix run with server hardware from HP and storage hardware from Xiotech. Collectively, they power the mySCC (my Scottsdale Community College) virtualized environment. With mySCC’s virtualization strategy, Scottsdale Community College has significantly reduced the total costs of its IT operations by $250,000, while increasing the number of services offered and dramatically improving access to them through a richer, more powerful desktop interface. The full case study is available on DataCore’s website: Virtual Storage Infrastructure Designed for Virtual Desktops.

“DataCore front-ends our Xiotech storage arrays and improves I/O performance”
“DataCore front-ends our Xiotech storage arrays and improves I/O performance,” said Dustin Fennell, vice president of IT and CIO, Scottsdale Community College. “And next year, if we get a better hardware option in terms of price-performance – we can hang that behind DataCore too. By embracing total virtualization of servers, desktops and storage, the college is now saving a quarter million dollars a year that would have been spent on hardware had we not deployed best-of-breed virtualization solutions from DataCore and Citrix.”

A Complete Virtual IT Environment Powered by DataCore and Citrix
DataCore’s SANsymphony software enables institutions of higher learning, such as SCC, to use their existing storage equipment and devices to achieve the robust and responsive shared storage infrastructure necessary to support highly dynamic virtual IT environments, including desktops. This contrasts sharply with the alternative “rip and replace” approach, which is often prohibitively expensive and results in a rigid infrastructure that cannot adapt to future storage needs.

DataCore software runs on HP DL 380 servers and these DataCore storage virtualization nodes connect to Xiotech Emprise 5000 hardware. The combination of Citrix’s unique provisioning technology and DataCore’s storage virtualization software dramatically reduces demands on storage and improves performance significantly – giving users maximum availability and performance from their virtual desktops.

Virtualization has turned technology operations at SCC from a cost center into a resource that actually funds innovation. SCC now offers technology innovation grants from the money it is saving in its technology operations budget.

The mySCC Virtual Environment: Today’s Online, Digitized University of the Future
mySCC is an end-to-end virtual IT environment whose virtual desktops enable access to over 230 applications across all of SCC’s faculty, staff and students. It serves the needs of approximately 12,000 students and 1,000 employees, including both full-time and part-time staffers, as well as adjunct and residential faculty. Through mySCC’s virtual desktop experience, users are presented with remote access to simple Windows applications like Microsoft Office – as well as more esoteric ones like AutoCAD. SCC sought to make its learning materials and resources completely accessible and affordable for any student – regardless of physical whereabouts, academic discipline and socioeconomic status.

IT administrators at SCC are now able to manage their older storage devices behind the same unified DataCore interface as the newer, higher-speed Xiotech arrays. SCC centrally controls DataCore’s comprehensive feature set across their entire infrastructure rather than being forced to deal with model-specific variations as is the case with device-by-device administration.

“The IT needs of our country’s colleges and universities are growing increasingly complex and expensive,” said George Teixiera, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “With tuition growing at alarming rates, colleges must drive operating costs down significantly to keep higher education affordable and accessible. By virtualizing their infrastructure, SCC has not only been able to extend their online resources to every student regardless of location and focus of study, they were able to generate incredible savings – funds that can be re-allocated to support critical assets and functions, such as the faculty and academic programs.”

DataCore offers 50% discounts to qualified educational institutions. To find out more, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/Solutions/Major-Verticals/storage-virtualization-software-for-education.aspx.

Full Scottsdale Community College Case Study: http://www.datacore.com/Libraries/Case_Study_PDFs/Scottsdale_Community_College.sflb.ashx

About Scottsdale Community College
Scottsdale Community College, a two-year college located in Scottsdale, Arizona, enrolls approximately 12,000 students and employs around 1,000 staff. The institution has recently expanded enrollment with non-traditional learners such as working adults and people who take courses online. Visit www.scottsdalecc.edu.

How To Sell Storage Virtualization To the CIO

2011-05-04T02:42:00.000-07:00

http://community.crn.com/groups/how-do-i-info-for-starting-your-var-business/blog/2011/04/29/how-to-sell-storage-virtualization-to-the-cio#comments

By Dan Hascall, vice president of Americas channel and sales operations, DataCore Software

Your customers are becoming overrun with data—and those that must comply with Federal regulations are struggling to store crushing amounts of information for long periods of time. The solution is, quite obviously, to sell the those companies more storage. Here, Hascall, who has held senior level management positions at VMware, Alliance Systems, and Sun Microsystems, discusses how to get buy-in from the top for a virtualized solution.

Data that is housed in enterprise data centers is growing at an astounding 60 percent per year, according to analyst firm IDC. For CIOs, this is not good news. Furthermore, Sarbanes-Oxley compliant companies must store their data for at least seven years. The move to agile, virtual infrastructures has also exacerbated the cost and demands placed on shared storage systems. In this quandary of data storage issues, storage virtualization software has provided a much-needed grounding.

Virtual Resource Pools: Manage the growth and cost of storage as you do servers

Put simply, storage virtualization software makes it easy to pool and share storage resources just as server virtualization allows you to do the same for computing resources. It adds a new level of flexibility and responsiveness to meet user needs by ensuring that supply meets business demand. From a ‘lowering risk’ standpoint, storage virtualization software insulates users and applications from the inevitable upgrades, changes and disruptions that occur at the underlying hardware level. Storage virtualization software that works infrastructure-wide is the logical next step to complement and extend the business value of server and desktop virtualization. The combination acts as an enabler and an accelerator for businesses to fully benefit from virtualized environments, while at the same time giving users the freedom to choose the storage hardware technologies that best meet their needs and budgets.

How do you get CIOs to jump on the storage virtualization bandwagon if they’re not on it already? Learn five compelling points that make storage virtualization right for their organization. [Read the complete article]

3 Year Storage Implementations … Déjà Vu All Over Again?

2011-05-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

We’ve been talking a lot lately about “The Big Problem” facing virtualization projects, which is the need to virtualize the often-overlooked storage tier when desktops and servers are being virtualized. Many organizations have fallen into the trap of totally overhauling their existing hardware storage infrastructure in order to accommodate large-scale projects, at great expense both financially and in terms of IT efficiency.

One example that stuck out to me was in a recent article by CMIO Magazine in which a New York-based rehab hospital spent $450K and three years implementing a storage disk array to facilitate the use of electronic medical records (EMRs).

The CIO of the hospital was dealing with 500 users with more than 1,000 devices on its network across 15 buildings, spanning a 60-acre campus. One of main problems he was facing was that his 10-person IT staff had 30 projects going on simultaneously and the server-attached ...

Full story

DataCore Adds NAS Performance Acceleration and High-Availability File Sharing Support to SANsymphony-V Storage Virtualization Software

2011-05-02T00:19:00.000-07:00

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/03/18/datacore-adds-nas-performance-acceleration-and-high-availability-file-sharing-support-to-sansymphony-v-storage-virtualization-software.aspx

DataCore Software is announcing that its SANsymphony™-V software addresses the three major roadblocks – cost, performance and business continuity – that have made it impractical for critical virtualization projects to utilize Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Why It Matters?

DataCore with SANsymphony-V software can now address customer NAS requirments in addition to meeting their SAN needs.

Enterprise NAS hardware (High Performance, Highly Available, Highly Scalable) systems such as NetApp filers and EMC Isilon have been successful in larger data centers but due to their very expensive price points are not able to meet the needs of small and mid-size businesses. DataCore has addressed this dilemma with its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software. The new development announced today employs standard Windows servers with off-the-shelf disks to achieve the required levels of uninterrupted shared file services at a reasonable price. Moreover, these systems now scale to performance levels once achieved only by “enterprise” NAS hardware.

Quotes --

Jeff Boles, senior analyst and director of validation services, Taneja Group:
“SANsymphony-V can be easily configured to significantly accelerate performance and add a new level of data protection to Microsoft’s Clustered File Shares. This resulting combination of SANsymphony-V and Microsoft is additive; it is simple to set up, requires no additional purchases and best of all it allows organizations to meet both their NAS and SAN requirements from one virtual infrastructure.”

John Bocskor, vice president of product management, DataCore Software:
“Unlike other attempts at converged SAN/NAS, the DataCore approach optimizes each layer for what it does best, yet both are managed from the familiar Windows Server administration console via a user-friendly interface with self-guided wizards.”

Key points --

SANsymphony-V overcomes shared storage shortcomings and makes it feasible to employ the widely used NAS services already built into the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 platform in those environments.
DataCore’s powerful feature set can be easily configured to enhance these Microsoft services. The integrated combination cost-effectively speeds up performance and adds a new level of fault tolerance to clustered network file system (NFS) and common Internet file system (CIFS) sharing.
The new solution is particularly well-suited for IT organizations that prefer to store their VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenDesktop virtual machine images under NFS or CIFS. Many of them are eager to eliminate bottlenecks and disruptions in their underlying storage systems, but not willing to spend a lot of money doing it.

Existing DataCore SANsymphony-V customers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Hyper-V do not need to buy additional software to support the clustered NAS file sharing features. For those new to DataCore, SANsymphony-V software, including the NAS capabilities, can be professionally installed through DataCore-authorized solution providers across the globe.

Storage by the Barrel

2011-05-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

Every time you drive past a gas station, it’s painfully clear that the oil and gas industry is experiencing extraordinary supply and demand issues … which translates to escalating prices. According to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook report, by 2030 global energy demand is expected to increase by 50%, and oil- and gas-based energy will account for approximately 60% of this increase.

That’s why there may be no other industry today that demands a more diverse set of technological capabilities than oil and gas exploration and production. Mark P. Mills said it best in his recent Forbes.com column, “Whither oil prices? 150 in sight. So follow Bill Gates in to digital barrels”:

Sit in an oil conference today and you hear about digital technology and software, cloud computing, remote servers, bandwidth constraints, high-speed wireless, terabytes of storage, GPS, laser mapping, virtualization, virtual-reality caves, satellite imaging, hyperspectral cubes, reverse-time software, and virtualization.

Did you catch that: terabytes of storage? Let me put it into perspective. One terabyte can hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica and 10 terabytes can hold the printed collection of the Library of Congress. That’s a lot of data.

There’s little doubt that data and storage are literally the “beating heart” of today’s oil and gas organizations. But really, oil and gas is just a “poster child” for what’s happening across enterprises of all types and sizes. As enterprises become increasingly data-driven, they consume and create ever-more data from an increasingly diverse universe of sources. And while storage prices continue to decline, they are not keeping pace with the rate of data consumption, which is causing new problems in manageability, usability and data center resources. This all adds up to systemic storage problems.

With the emergence of the virtualized IT infrastructure, as well as the explosive data growth we’ve experienced over the past 10-plus years, storage management is now in the spotlight as storage volume has become the biggest cost driver for IT. And it’s become evident that a new approach is needed.

In this quandary of data storage issues, we believe virtualization-driven storage consolidation has provided a much-needed grounding. Storage virtualization is a practical and effective way to manage the increasing complexity of data and growing demands for high-availability. It also allows organizations to meet this challenge in a manner that reduces operational costs, improves efficiency, provides an expanded choice of hardware alternatives, and extends the life of existing storage assets.

And it puts real money back into the IT budget. Don’t you have some encyclopedias to buy or something?

DataCore Unveils Features of Forthcoming Storage Pooling Add-in for Microsoft Home Server

2011-04-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

The Home Server Show interviewed DataCore’s Carlos Carreras this week about their forthcoming storage pooling add-in for Windows Home Server 2011. As revealed back in February, DataCore the Enterprise storage virtualization specialist was approached by Microsoft late last year to look at ways of replicating some of the Drive Extender features that have been removed from Windows Home Server 2011.

The company subsequently announced support for Windows Home Server some weeks later but there has been little detail on which features from Datacore’s Enterprise software would be enabled for Windows Home Server users, and indeed, how the software’s storage pooling capabilities would work. In the course of this week’s interview, some of those questions were answered.

http://www.wegotserved.com/2011/04/22/datacore-unveils-features-forthcoming-storage-pooling-addin/

What is Tranquil PC Doing with Windows Home Server 2011

http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2011/04/21/more-information-on-what-are-tranquil-pc-doing-with-windows-home-server-2011/

...I already said a few weeks ago that DataCore’s add-in for Windows Home Server 2011 was the one I was most interested in testing and using, and now that Tranquil are going to be incorporating it as well can only be yet another tick in the box for DataCore.

DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V Wins 2011 Network Computing Award for "Data Center Product of the Year"

2011-04-29T01:13:00.000-07:00

“With the launch of SANsymphony-V, DataCore has redesigned its software for virtual server and desktop environments. However, DataCore’s key benefits of extending the useful life of hardware, cutting hardware costs and removing vendor lock-in are still intact, and apply to both the physical and virtual world.” -Carla Arend , IDC

http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/04/25/datacore-software-s-sansymphony-v-wins-2011-network-computing-award-for-data-center-product-of-the-year.aspx

http://www.it-director.com/channels/sys_integration/news_release.php?rel=24580

DataCore Software, the industry’s premier provider of storage virtualization software announced that it has won one of the UK’s top networking accolades by scooping the Data Center Product of the Year Award at the prestigious 2011 Network Computing Awards held at the Russell Hotel in London.

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, Northern Europe at DataCore Software, happily collected the award and commented, “This is the first award that SANsymphony-V has gained since its launch in January. Part of what enticed the Network Computing readers to vote for the new solution was the favorable independent review that appeared in the magazine recently. The review and this award endorses just how easy SANsymphony-V has made installation of virtualization across desktop and server environments for network administrators and managers.”

Indeed, Carla Arend, program manager, European infrastructure software research at IDC, underscores Joseph’s comments, “With the launch of SANsymphony-V, DataCore has redesigned its software for virtual server and desktop environments. However, DataCore’s key benefits of extending the useful life of hardware, cutting hardware costs and removing vendor lock-in are still intact, and apply to both the physical and virtual world.”

In brief the award recognizes that with SANsymphony-V network managers can achieve:

Much lower risk to deploy virtualization projects since a complete storage and process overhaul is not required; changes can be implemented incrementally, tried or undone selectively.
Cost-effective Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery to safeguard business.
Infrastructure-wide administration and automation to increase staff productivity.
Greater savings from consolidation, repurposing and better utilization of existing resources.
Reduced complexity and greater control to manage growth and optimize budgets.
Enduring value from a software solution that lives beyond devices that “come and go.”

The Network Computing Awards were established in 2005 to recognize best-of-breed, easy to use solutions that make the working lives of network administrators and managers easier and more effective. Voting takes place independently across a two month time frame, with just under 4,000 voters contributing.

“DataCore Tackles Storage Virtualization Barrier”
Access the Network Computing review on SANsymphony-V:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization/datacore-tackles-storage-virtualization-barrier.php?keyword=SANSymphony-V

Test-drive SANsymphony-V:
http://www.datacore.com/Software/Closer-Look/Demos.aspx

New Microsoft Case Study Details How DataCore Storage Virtualization Software and Hyper-V Combine to Enable Cloud Service Provider AcXess to Save Millions

2011-04-28T01:41:00.000-07:00

SANsymphony and Hyper-V software support Microsoft’s global field and technical force sales teams who rely on AcXess V-Works™ Cloud to demonstrate and sell their solutions to customers worldwide.

At the recent Microsoft Management Summit 2011 in Las Vegas, DataCore Software announced that cloud services provider AcXess is using DataCore’s SANsymphony™ software to create a dynamic, resilient virtual storage infrastructure that cost-effectively supports the company’s Microsoft® Hyper-V™ server virtualization environment and its business model.

AcXess has built its business around flexible virtualization technologies designed to meet the needs of key customers such as Microsoft who rely on AcXess to provide reasonably priced services such as on-demand sales demos, proof-of-concept (POC) labs, and training sessions in virtualized environments to thousands of employees, partners, and customers. Leveraging the combination of Hyper-V and DataCore, AcXess has doubled the number of users year over year and has grown its business 300 percent, while saving $5 million in hardware costs. A full case study is available on Microsoft’s website.

“DataCore storage virtualization software has proven itself to be the ideal solution. We run a number of large systems for Microsoft in the cloud today and it was a very logical choice to choose DataCore to run the SAN component of the AcXess V-Works™ platform,” states Tom Elowson, president and cofounder of AcXess. “The reason that we chose DataCore was the flexibility and cost savings we gained from their storage virtualization solution and the way that it worked within our system to provide very powerful experiences to accelerate revenue for Microsoft sales people and other clients around the world.”

ESG Lab Reports: DataCore SANsymphony-V: Compelling Storage Virtualization Software

2011-04-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

ESG Lab Validation Highlights: http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/04/datacore-sansymphony-v-compelling-storage-virtualization-software/

DataCore SANsymphony-V R8 was very quick and easy to set up and manage. ESG Lab set up a two node, high-availability SANsymphony-V environment and was serving storage to virtual machines in minutes.
With one click of a mouse, ESG Lab was able to serve a thin provisioned, performance tuned, fully protected, synchronously mirrored 1TB virtual disk to a Windows server in less than a minute.
Migrating and importing disk drives from a working physical server into the virtual disk pool was a quick and easy process. The DataCore software provided a seamless transition from physical to virtual infrastructure while actually enhancing performance and availability.
DataCore synchronous mirroring provided hosts with continuous access to virtual disks through a node outage with zero downtime and no interruptions to service.
DataCore Continuous Data Protection (CDP) was easy to configure and use, enabling rollback to a specific point in time without having to create multiple snapshots.
DataCore asynchronous remote replication was also easy to configure; compression and multi-streaming provided a 2x throughput enhancement over a simulated T1 link.

451 Group Impact Report: DataCore Renews Storage Virtualization, Plays Up Virtual Desktop Synergies

2011-04-26T01:32:00.000-07:00

Analyst: John Abbott, Simon Robinson

DataCore Software recently introduced the first complete rewrite of its core storage virtualization technology since it was founded in 1998. The newly launched SANsymphony-V will eventually replace the original SANsymphony product line and also incorporate the previously separate entry-level SANmelody software, first introduced back in 2005. It's been designed to better support more recent trends in computing, such as cloud, virtual servers and virtual desktops, but it also helps simplify the core functionality with a better user interface, auto-tuned caches and built-in features such as workflow, continuous data protection and automated traffic-compressing replication.

Check out all the latest analyst reports on DataCore at: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/What-Others-are-Saying/Analyst-Reports.aspx

Tips to Overcome 3 Potential NAS Issues

2011-04-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.bisdatacentres.co.uk/news/tips-to-overcome-3-potential-nas-issues/2022011

Network attached storage (NAS) is an attractive idea. It is relatively inexpensive and can deliver high performance; but unless managed carefully, with a product like Datacore’s virtualizing SANsymphony-V, it can create its own problems.

Virtualization TCO: Fact or Fiction?

2011-04-22T12:11:00.000-07:00

“The nine-month ROI that vendors might advertise for their latest and greatest technologies can actually average three or four years, according to our clients that have crunched the numbers for their hosted desktop virtualization deployments,” Forrester wrote. “Why? Because the upfront infrastructure and licensing costs far outweigh the upfront benefits.”

This is especially true when you consider the high cost of the storage infrastructure needed to support virtual desktop deployments. In fact, Wikibon recently posted an intriguing video interview on how storage represents the biggest drag to virtual desktops. It points out that for every $1 spent on virtual desktop deployments, $3 to $10 is spent on storage.

To offset these numbers and make the cost of storage seem reasonable, vendors have spread the large cost over thousands of desktops. But as desktop Guru Brian Madden points out on his blog, we can clearly see the problem when ...

Full story

Server Virtualization Faces Real Problems

2011-04-21T01:55:00.000-07:00

Storage costs and needed upgrades slowing adoption, surveyed IT managers say

https://www.information-management.com/news/server-virtualization-problems-10020082-1.html?zkPrintable=true

Valerie Valentine: Information Management Online

According to Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International, said the figures in the survey underscore anecdotal issues facing IT managers. “The fundamental issue confounding hypervisor-based virtualization is storage. Inflexible storage fabrics are becoming a source of application performance pain and represent a single point of failure in the high availability story touted by hypervisor vendors,” Toigo says.

Toigo points out that virtualizing storage is less expensive than ripping out and replacing current storage infrastructure.

“Virtualized storage is also the key, going forward to successful desktop virtualization initiatives and to cloud service integrations. As more companies, compelled by reasons of cost or enhanced user mobility, begin to explore these technologies, hopefully the lessons learned around stalled server virtualization projects will not be forgotten.”

Unanticipated storage costs, availability concerns and performance bottlenecks are hindering server consolidation and desktop virtualization projects, according to storage vendor DataCore’s survey of more than 450 IT organizations across North America and Europe.

Of those that have deployed server virtualization, 66 percent cited a substantial increase in storage costs as the biggest problem they are facing. Nearly 40 percent say the storage infrastructure is either slowing application performance or limiting its availability, while more than 20 percent indicate that business continuity has become more difficult, according to the survey.

DataCore reports that despite hype surrounding cloud initiatives, a majority (73 percent) of organizations have yet to take advantage of cloud services for storage needs. However, 70 percent said access to more disk space would be the most important characteristic they would want from cloud-related storage.

Almost half (48 percent) of those surveyed are now using storage virtualization software with their server and desktop virtualization initiatives. Nearly three in four (74 percent) rely on it to improve disaster recovery and business continuity practices.

Storage: Virtualization’s wallflower?

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/IT-watch-blog/storage-virtualizations-wallflower/

DataCore Software, known for its storage virtualization software, has released a survey comprising over 450 IT organizations across North America and Europe, “The State of Virtualization.” The findings can be a little disturbing, especially to a company who creates a product that many medium and large enterprise IT orgs are leaving out of their virtualization plans: Storage. The study found that 43 percent had mistaken the impact storage would have on server and desktop virtualization or had shied away from a virtualization project because storage-related costs were too high.

Enterprise Strategy Group Hands-On Testing and Benchmarking Validates Key Value Propositions of DataCore Software’s Storage Virtualization Platform

2011-04-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

DataCore Software has announced the results of comprehensive hands-on testing and performance benchmarking conducted on its SANsymphony™-V R8 product by the Lab team at leading industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

“DataCore’s impact on performance was dramatic, in every metric we measured,” said Tony Palmer, senior engineer and analyst with ESG Lab. “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.”

ESG Lab summarized its test conclusions as follows: “ESG Lab firmly believes that it would benefit any organization considering or implementing an IT virtualization project to take a long look at DataCore SANsymphony-V R8 storage virtualization software. It is robust, flexible, and responsive and delivers major value in terms of utilization, economics, improved response times, high-availability, and easy administration.”

To download the full ESG Lab Validation Report, please visit: DataCore Software – FEATURED ANALYST REPORTS.

Powerful, Intuitive, and Automated

ESG Lab found that the software was “very quick and easy to set up and manage” and “virtualizing storage was intuitive and straightforward.” In fact, ESG analysts configured a high-availability SANsymphony-V environment and were serving storage to virtual machines in minutes. “The volume was thin provisioned, mirrored for high-availability, and preferred and alternate paths to storage resources were set without administrator intervention. ESG Lab was impressed with the speed, simplicity, and completeness of the configuration.”

SANsymphony-V software enables data centers to use existing equipment and conventional storage devices to achieve the robust and responsive shared storage environment necessary to support highly dynamic virtual IT environments. This contrasts sharply with the expensive “rip and replace” approaches being proposed to support desktop and server virtualization projects. In its findings, ESG Lab verified that DataCore SANsymphony-V software can be deployed to cost-effectively provide easy-to-configure, performance enhanced, storage virtualization, offering affordable scalability, and performance acceleration for virtualized servers and applications.

“Enterprises have long been concerned about underutilization of servers in their data centers,” continued Palmer. “Virtualization helps them consolidate data by reducing the number of servers used and leaving those that remain as a pool of resources to be drawn on as needed. Now, enterprises are turning their attention to storage, and DataCore is tapping into that demand.”

SANsymphony-V Delivering Compelling Value, Innovation and Faster Performance

The ESG Lab Validation Report on DataCore SANsymphony-V also specifically highlights the following:

Performance improved significantly for every workload with the File Server workload posting the most significant improvement, more than 6x and the Exchange 2007 workload showing a 5x improvement.
With one click of a mouse, ESG Lab was able to serve a thin provisioned, performance tuned, fully protected, synchronously mirrored 1TB virtual disk to a Windows server in less than a minute.
Migrating and importing disk drives from a working physical server into the virtual disk pool was a fast and effortless process. DataCore storage virtualization software provided a seamless transition from physical to virtual infrastructure while actually enhancing performance and availability.
DataCore synchronous mirroring provided hosts with continuous access to virtual disks through a node outage with zero downtime and no interruptions to service.
DataCore Continuous Data Protection (CDP) was simple to configure and use, enabling rollback to a specific point in time without having to create multiple snapshots.
DataCore asynchronous remote replication was also easy to configure; compression and multi-streaming provided a 2x throughput enhancement over a simulated T1 link.

“The results of the ESG Lab test strongly validate the core value proposition we hoped to achieve with SANsymphony-V, which is to cost-effectively shape the shared storage infrastructure required by virtual IT environments,” said Alex Earhard, product manager of DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V. “By providing high-availability storage virtualization that multiplies the performance of what’s already in place, we are solving the big problem that is bringing many of today’s server and desktop virtualization projects to a standstill.”

For more information and to view the full report, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/What-Others-are-Saying/Analyst-Reports.aspx.