DataCore Parallel I/O Software Takes the Gold in the Storage System Software Category of Storage Magazine/SearchStorage.com Products of the Year Awards

DataCore, the leader in Parallel-Powered Software-Defined Storage, Application-Adaptive Data Infrastructure and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solutions, today announced that its Adaptive Parallel I/O software was named a Gold winner in the Storage System Software category of the 2015 Products of the Year Awards announced this month by Storage Magazine/SearchStorage.com. The awards, presented annually by the editors of TechTarget's Storage Media Group, were judged by the Storagemagazine/SearchStorage.com editorial staff, in conjunction with a team of users, industry experts, analysts and consultants.

The judging panel rated DataCore^TM Adaptive Parallel I/O first in performance among the 13 finalists in the Storage System Software category. Comments from the judges included that there is nothing else like DataCore's Adaptive Parallel I/O on the market, and one called the software "potentially revolutionary." Another noted that most software-defined storage products, or storage virtualization, are not capable of parallel I/O.

The award comes on the heels of DataCore setting a new world record for price-performance in the Storage Performance Council's SPC-1, the industry's most recognized and peer reviewed storage benchmark. Due in large part to the breakthroughs of parallel I/O technology that harnesses the untapped power of multi-core processors, DataCore achieved an audited SPC-1 Price-Performance of $0.08 per SPC-1 IOPS, making it the number one result for SPC-1 Price-Performance overall. This result was certified with DataCore's SANsymphony and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN software featuring parallel I/O technology on a powerful 2U Lenovo System x3650 M5 multi-core server featuring Intel® Xeon E5-2600 v3 series processors. On this same platform, DataCore also booked record-breaking response times of 0.32 milliseconds at 100% load. At the incredibly fast 0.32 milliseconds response time, the results are 3x-10x better than all other reported results including those from all-flash arrays and million dollar plus systems.

Additionally, DataCore received a Silver Stevie Award for the Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Technology Industries Category of The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service in March, the world's leading sales, business development, contact center, and customer service awards. This tops off a banner year for DataCore in 2015 when its SANsymphony-V and DataCore Hyper-Converged Virtual SAN both received the Virtualization Review 2015 Editor's Choice Awards, with DataCore SANsymphony-V being called one editors' "favorite technology product in 2015." The readers of Storage-Insider and IT Business also awarded SANsymphony-V with the Reader's Choice Award for Best Software-Defined Storage.

Furthermore, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) named DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V the "Best Enterprise Solution for Software-Defined Storage" in the EMA Radar Report for Enterprise Software-Defined Storage. DataCore SANsymphony-V was named a category value leader in the same report.

SearchStorage report: DataCore announces powerful new releases

DataCore has been previewing the next major release of its SANmelody and SANsymphony storage virtualization software at VMworld Europe 2009 this week. SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 will ship next month with 64-bit software architectures and new features for virtual server users.

SearchStorage has done a good write up hitting some of the highlights and also included comments from Jack Fegreus, CEO at Southborough, Mass.-based openBench Labs.

He is in agreement with most of the other analysts who tout storage virtualization as the area of focus in 2009 as he says that DataCore's combining these features into a server-centric approach looks like the wave of the future for networked storage as integration increases between SANs and servers.

Product highlights include:

• x64 versions which support up to 1TB cache
• Transporter feature allowing for offline conversion of any to any physical or flavors of virtual servers.
• Space reclamation capability for DataCore's Thin Provisioning feature
  

Read the entire article here.

Thin Provisioning: Great concept, but how can it help me?

There is a new post on the Infoworld Storage Advisor blog which neatly and succinctly summarizes the provisioning challenge which every company faces. The entire article can be found here, and a quick excerpt follows:

To give a practical example, Windows Server is generally installed in a partition of at least 100GB, and often 200GB or more, especially if Exchange Server or SQL Server is installed. However, the initial install may actually consume only 10GB or so. With thin provisioning, the volume can be set to a virtual size of 200GB or more, but it will actually use only 10GB. As the amount of data stored nears a set percentage of full (often 80 percent), the storage system can either notify the admin to expand the volume, or with more sophisticated systems such as 3Par or Compellent, expand the volume automatically. If a volume is increased to 200GB (for that theoretical log file), once the problem is resolved and the log file deleted, the system can automatically shrink the volume again to reclaim the excess space.

If the admin is willing to trust the system, he no longer has to worry about the capacity of specific volumes. He can buy excess capacity for the array as a whole, which can encompass storage for dozens of servers, rather than having to play it safe for each and every server, only to have 50 to 80 percent of the internal or direct-attached storage on each server go unused.

I know what you're thinking. While this is fine for companies that already have a SAN in place, what about smaller companies? Well, there’s an answer there too – storage virtualization software such as DataCore’s SANSymphony can provide similar functionality using existing hardware and with a relatively small overall investment.

Thin Provisioning can be an incredibly powerful tool, but as with most powerful technology, care must be employed to assure best practices. Please contact us to understand what these are (after all, we did invent the concept!).