CIO asia: DataCore ramps up channel investment in Australia/ NZ with new partner program for storage virtualisation solutions; New Storage Hypervisor Update

http://www.cio-asia.com/tech/storage/datacore-ramps-up-channel-investment-with-new-program/

Storage virtualisation vendor, DataCore Software, has revealed a new partner program as it seeks to strengthen its channel presence in the A/NZ market.

DataCore has also recently announced a new solution update: DataCore Software Announces Hot New Capabilities and Turbo Charged Performance for Tier-1 Applications with SANsymphony-V R9 Storage Hypervisor

DataCore COO, Steve Houck, visited Australia recently and said it was investing and concentrating its efforts on getting the channel to understand the value of storage virtualisation through launching a new partner program.

"We want partners that have the skills set and understand the market opportunity," Houck said.

The program features include profitability, business planning, product integration, solution architects and helping partners understand how DataCore integrates with their existing lines of business, Houck said.

It will only feature one tier- the DataCore Business Partner. The previous program did feature tiers, but Houck said it was taking a different approach.

"The program features beyond rich financial rewards. There's a lot of effort in investment being put into developing business opportunities with the partner," he said. "The whole goal with the program is to get to first revenue with the partner very quickly. "There's no channel conflict because we have a narrow set of partners and we're not over-distributed, and we're not competing against other partners selling the same thing."

The vendor is also seeking to involve partners in product development and look at launching a partner advisory council. The new program will become available in the second quarter (April/May).

According to DataCore vice president and general manager Asia Pacific and Japan, Manish Sharma, it has about 12 active partners in the local market and about 100 customers in Australia including Kingston City Council in Melbourne, Murdoch University, Deloitte Australia, and RTA in NSW. DataCore is currently distributed by Avnet Technology Solutions in Australia.

"A lot of partners are afraid of putting too many lines in their portfolio, because it's more skills you have to add. For us, we're looking for dedicated partners, to go with us on the ride," Sharma said.

ARN: DataCore ramps up channel investment in Australia / New Zealand with new program

Storage virtualisation vendor places strong emphasis on building business with partners
http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/453891/datacore_ramps_up_channel_investment_new_program/

Storage virtualisation vendor, DataCore Software, has revealed a new partner program as it seeks to strengthen its channel presence in the A/NZ market.

DataCore COO, Steve Houck, visited Australia recently and said it was investing and concentrating its efforts on getting the channel to understand the value of storage virtualisation through launching a new partner program.

“We want partners that have the skills set and understand the market opportunity,” Houck said.

The program features include profitability, business planning, product integration, solution architects and helping partners understand how DataCore integrates with their existing lines of business, Houck said.

It will only feature one tier- the DataCore Business Partner. The previous program did feature tiers, but Houck said it was taking a different approach.

“The program features beyond rich financial rewards. There’s a lot of effort in investment being put into developing business opportunities with the partner,” he said. “The whole goal with the program is to get to first revenue with the partner very quickly. “There’s no channel conflict because we have a narrow set of partners and we’re not over-distributed, and we’re not competing against other partners selling the same thing.”

The vendor is also seeking to involve partners in product development and look at launching a partner advisory council. The new program will become available in the second quarter (April/May).

According to DataCore vice president and general manager Asia Pacific and Japan, Manish Sharma, it has about 12 active partners in the local market and about 100 customers in Australia including Kingston City Council in Melbourne, Murdoch University, Deloitte Australia, and RTA in NSW. DataCore is currently distributed by Avnet Technology Solutions in Australia.

“A lot of partners are afraid of putting too many lines in their portfolio, because it’s more skills you have to add. For us, we’re looking for dedicated partners, to go with us on the ride,” Sharma said.

DataCore Software Announces Hot New Capabilities and Turbo Charged Performance for Tier-1 Applications with SANsymphony-V R9 Storage Hypervisor

Expanding Enterprise IT Environments, Virtualized Applications and Hybrid Clouds Benefit with Extended Scalability, Added Performance Optimization and Greater Cost Savings from New Configurability Choices

DataCore Software, the premier provider of storage virtualization software, today introduced major enhancements to its SANsymphony™-V Storage Hypervisor. The new capabilities come at a critical time as CIO reactions to an extraordinary barrage of data, coupled with the need to make business-critical application response times faster and continuously available, are determining competitiveness and which companies come out on top.

“What matters most to a business is the ability to compete, so we deliver an industry-leading user experience with fast, constantly available applications for the greatest possible productivity,” explains George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “Customers clearly want to get more from their tier-1 apps and infrastructure. Whether they’re running SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, SharePoint, Exchange or VDI, they quickly realize SANsymphony-V maximizes performance like no other technology, providing them with a clear business advantage.”

Several of the more visible technology innovations of the new SANsymphony-V are as follows.

Enterprise and Cloud Scalability X 8
As data grows the ability to easily scale performance and capacity also grows; a critical need is sizing which is often unknown at the start of a new project. DataCore provides the freedom to choose and define cost-effective nodes, and with the enhanced SANsymphony-V, the maximum number of storage virtualization nodes in a centrally managed group doubles from four to eight. This enables large scale data centers and cloud service providers to non-disruptively expand into the additional nodes, extending capacity, throughput and connectivity. Most clients managing capacities in the petabyte range will configure DataCore™ software in an N+1 redundant grid to achieve continuous availability while reducing the cost of redundancy.

Faster & More Predictable Performance: 50 Percent Quicker, Optimized for Flash
Lack of performance or overprovisioning due to unpredictable demands are major cost drivers and throwing costly hardware at the problem is not an optimal or sustainable solution. SANsymphony-V maximizes existing resources, while incorporating the latest technologies like flash/solid state disks (SSD) cost effectively. The software adds several new features to its adaptive caching algorithms aimed at virtualized, mission critical applications, yielding close to 20 percent faster IOPS and throughput (Megabytes/sec) than earlier versions. These refinements, along with special multi-threaded developments, better leverage processor parallelism to make I/O response approximately 50 percent quicker for transactional workloads.

Equally important, performance spikes are “smoothed” for more predictable application response times, with users benefitting from a more linear performance growth curve as memory or the latest flash/SSD innovations are incorporated.

Application Performance & Storage - New Tuning and Troubleshooting Options
DataCore offers an extensive set of management tools including “heat maps” to optimize performance and cost-effective tiering of storage assets. The new SANsymphony-V adds an ability to do trend analysis over time with a recording feature that compiles and displays a running chart of metrics gathered from the environment. Workload spikes or potential bottlenecks can then be easily addressed. The historical collection may also be exported as a CSV file for further analysis, planning and reporting with Microsoft Excel and other tools.

Customized Control for Better Resource Utilization and Storage Tiering
Every environment is different, so greater control allows even more optimizations to improve costs and performance. Storage profiles for virtual disks may be customized to control how the dynamic policies for auto-tiering, remote replication and synchronous mirror recovery are prioritized. These custom profiles supplement default policies built into the software. The importance of virtual disks can be set to critical, high, normal, low, or archive to control which volumes take precedence when competing for shared resources. This ensures important applications benefit from more valuable resources such as flash memory and SSDs, with less demanding tasks using lower cost, higher density storage.

Fast, Simple “Undo” Continuous Data Protection, Rapid Restore for Critical Applications
Business critical applications need to be up-and-running and SANsymphony-V now offers a greater degree of Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and near instant restoration. In addition, conventional nightly back-up windows either no longer exist or are difficult to schedule, therefore, the ability to do non-disruptive backups and do them when time permits is a major business benefit. The recovery window and running log for continuous data protection has been extended from hours to two weeks. This helps IT rapidly restore virtual volumes to a point in time before malware, logic errors or user mistakes occurred, even if detected several days later. System administrators may also rewind a virtual disk image to any point within the 14 day rolling window. As a result, the rollback image can be mounted to recover specific files accidentally deleted, and/or, the current disk can be replaced with the rollback image to completely undo changes that transpired after malware infection or logic errors began.

New Windows Server 2012 Platform
SANsymphony-V now runs on the Windows Server 2012 operating system in addition to Windows Server 2008 R2. The storage hypervisor can run on dedicated physical Windows servers to virtualize storage over a SAN for numerous hosts. It can also co-reside with virtualized applications hosted by Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 and VMware vSphere 5.x. In either case, DataCore maximizes the performance, availability and utilization of internal and directly attached storage (DAS), as well as external disk arrays.

Lower Cost to Unify Storage and Clustering- Highly Available NAS/SAN
DataCore takes advantage of new capabilities in the Windows Server 2012 platform for more powerful and cost-effective unified network attached storage/storage area network (NAS/SAN) capabilities. Fully redundant, highly available configurations scale out to more nodes and quickly switchover network file system (NFS) and common Internet file system (CIFS) SMB clients despite hardware and facility outages. Customers will find the storage solution even more attractive since Microsoft has made failover clustering available in its lower cost Standard Edition, allowing files to be de-duplicated to save disk space.

Pricing and Availability
The latest version of SANsymphony-V R9 will be generally available starting February 2013.
Pricing starts under $10,000 for two licenses used in highly available configurations and includes 24x7 annual technical support and new version rights. Existing DataCore SANsymphony-V customers under annual support contracts may upgrade at no-charge.

Dot Hill Storage Certified 'DataCore Ready' for SANsymphony-V

Dot Hill Systems and DataCore Software Partner to Deliver Integrated Storage Solutions

http://investors.dothill.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=735978

Dot Hill Systems Corp., a provider of world-class storage solutions and software, today announced that its AssuredSAN(TM) 3000 series storage arrays are 'DataCore Ready' and provide full interoperability with the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor from DataCore Software.

The combination of Dot Hill AssuredSAN storage and DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor can assist end users in simplifying storage management, boosting performance and greatly improving data availability. Certification under the DataCore Ready program provides end users with the confidence that Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 storage solutions have undergone verification testing to ensure joint solution compatibility.

"We have a great working relationship with Dot Hill which has established itself as a leading manufacturer of storage solutions," stated Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development at DataCore Software. "This allows both our channel partners and end users to leverage a powerful, adaptable and scalable storage solution that will not only increase performance and functionality, but have a positive impact on their bottom line."

SANsymphony-V provides centralized storage management under a single pane of control to simplify and optimize existing storage assets while delivering enterprise-class features. The DataCore storage hypervisor will enable Dot Hill's AssuredSAN 3000 series with added performance acceleration through adaptive caching, space efficiency with thin provisioning and a multitude of high availability (HA) features including synchronous mirroring, and continuous data protection (CDP) for any point-in-time backup and recovery.

"SANsymphony-V software from DataCore complements the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 series storage hardware to deliver an affordable solution boasting a wide range of features normally found only on high-end enterprise solutions," said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing at Dot Hill. "Working in close collaboration with leading technology partners, such as DataCore, we can deliver more powerful storage solutions to the end user at a very compelling price."

Dot Hill Systems and DataCore Software
With a combined 44 years of storage industry experience, Dot Hill Systems and DataCore have served clients representing the broad spectrum of IT organizations around the globe, spanning all the major vertical industries. Their combined expertise has served both end users and many of today's leading OEM manufacturers.

The DataCore Ready Program
The DataCore Ready program identifies solutions that are trusted to enhance DataCore SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor-based infrastructures. While DataCore solutions interoperate with common open & industry standard products, those listed as DataCore Ready have completed additional verification testing to ensure a superior level of joint solution compatibility. Only third party products that successfully meet the verification criteria set by DataCore are qualified as DataCore Ready.

Beware “Old Acquaintance” Hardware Vendors’ Claims for Virtualization and Software-Defined Storage; Hardware-defined = Over Provisioning and Oversizing

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2013/01/24/beware-%E2%80%9Cold-acquaintance%E2%80%9D-hardware-vendors%E2%80%99-claims-virtualization-and-software-defined-st

2013 is the year of the phrase “software defined” infrastructures. Virtualization has taught us that the efficiency and economy of complex, heterogeneous, IT infrastructures are created by enterprise software that takes separate infrastructure components and turns them into a coherent manageable whole—allowing the many to work as ‘one.’

Infrastructures are complex and diverse, and as such, no one device defines them. That’s why phrases like “we’re an IBM shop” or “we’re an EMC shop,” once common are heard less often today. Instead, the infrastructure is defined where the many pieces come together to give us the flexibility, power and control over all this diversity and complexity—at the software virtualization layer.

Beware of “Old Acquaintance” Hardware Vendors’ Claims that They are “Software-Defined.”

It’s become “it’s about the software, dummy” obvious. But watch- In 2013, you’ll see storage hardware heavyweights leap for that bandwagon, claiming that they are “software-defined storage,” hoping to slow the wheels of progress under their heft. But, like Auld Lang Sine, it’s the same old song they sing every year: ignore the realities driving today’s diverse infrastructures—buy more hardware; forget that the term ‘software-defined’ is being applied exclusively to what runs on their storage hardware platforms and not all the other components and players—beware, the song may sound like ‘software-defined’ but the end objective is clear: ‘buy more hardware.’

Software is what endures beyond hardware devices that 'come and go.'

Think about it. Why would you want to lock yourself into this year’s hardware solution or have to buy a specific device just to get a software feature you need? This is old thinking, before virtualization, this was how the server industry worked. The hardware decision drove the architecture, today with software-defined computing exemplified by VMware or Hyper-V, you think about how to deploy virtual machines versus are they running on a Dell, HP, Intel or IBM system. Storage is going through this same transformation and it will be smart software that makes the difference in a ‘software-defined’ world.

So What Do Users Want from “software-defined storage,” and Can You Really Expect It to Come from a Storage Hardware Vendor?

The move from hardware-defined to a software-defined virtualization-based model supporting mission-critical business applications is inevitable and has already redefined the foundation of architectures at the computing, networking and storage levels from being ‘static’ to ‘dynamic.’ Software defines the basis for managing diversity, agility, user interactions and for building a long-term virtual infrastructure that adapts to the constantly changing components that ‘come and go’ over time.

Ask yourself, is it really in the best interest of the traditional storage hardware vendors to go ‘software-defined’ and avoid their platform lock-ins?

Hardware-defined = Over Provisioning and Oversizing

Fulfilling application needs and providing a better user experience are the ultimate drivers for next generation storage and software-defined storage infrastructures. Users want flexibility, greater automation, better response times and ’always on’ availability. Therefore IT shops are clamoring to move all the applications onto agile virtualization platforms for better economics and greater productivity. The business critical Tier 1 applications (ERP, databases, mail systems, OLTP etc.) have proven to be the most challenging. Storage has been the major roadblock to virtualizing these demanding Tier 1 applications. Moving storage-intensive workloads onto virtual machines (VMs) can greatly impact performance and availability, and as the workloads grow, these impacts increase, as does cost and complexity.

The result is that storage hardware vendors have to over provision, oversize for performance and build in extra levels of redundancy within each unique platform to ensure users can meet their performance and business continuity needs.

The costs needed to accomplish the above negate the bulk of the benefits. In addition, hardware solutions are sized for a moment in time versus providing long term flexibility, therefore enterprises and IT departments are looking for a smarter and more cost-effective approach and are realizing that traditional ‘throw more hardware’ solutions at the problem are no longer feasible.

Tier 1 Apps are Going Virtual; Performance and Availability are Mission Critical

To address these storage impacts, users need the flexibility to incorporate whatever storage they need to do the job at the right price, whether it is available today or comes along in the future. For example, to help with the performance impacts, such as those encountered in virtualizing Tier 1 applications, users will want to incorporate and share SSD, flash-based technologies. Flash helps here for a simple reason: electronic memory technologies are much faster than mechanical disk drives. Flash has been around for years, but only recently have they come down far enough in price to allow for broader adoption.

Diversity and Investment Protection; One Size Solutions Do Not Fit All

But flash storage is better for read intensive applications versus write heavy transaction-based traffic and it is still significantly more expensive than a spinning disk. It also wears out. Taxing applications that prompt many writes can shorten the lifespan of this still costly solution. So, it makes sense to have other choices for storage alongside flash to keep flash reserved for where it is needed most and to use the other storage alternatives for their most efficient use cases, and to then optimize the performance and cost trade-offs by placing and moving data to the most cost-effective tier that can deliver acceptable performance. Users will need solutions to share and tier their diverse storage arsenal – and manage it together as one, and that requires smart and adaptable software.

And what about existing storage hardware investments, does it make sense to throw them away and replace them with this year’s new models when smart software can extend their useful life? Why ‘rip and replace’ each year? Instead, these existing storage investments and the newest Flash hardware devices, disk drives and storage models can easily be made to work together in harmony; within a software-defined storage world.

Better Economics and Flexibility Make the Move to ‘Software-defined Storage’ Inevitable

Going forward, users will have to embrace ‘software-defined storage’ as an essential element to their software-defined data centers. Virtual storage infrastructures make sense as the foundation for scalable, elastic and efficient cloud computing. As users have to deal with the new dynamics and faster pace of today’s business, they can no longer be trapped within yesterday’s more rigid and hard-wired architecture models.

‘Software-defined’ architecture and not the hardware is what matters.

Clearly the success of software-defined computing solutions from VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V have proven the compelling value proposition that server virtualization delivers. Likewise, the storage hypervisor and the use of virtualization at the storage level are the key to unlocking the hardware chains that have made storage an anchor to next generation data centers.

‘Software-defined Storage’ Creates the Need for a Storage Hypervisor

We need the same thinking that revolutionized servers to impact storage. We need smart software that can be used enterprise-wide to be the driving force for change, in effect we need a storage hypervisor whose main role is to virtualize storage resources and to achieve the same benefits – agility, efficiency and flexibility – that server hypervisor technology brought to processors and memory.

Virtualization has transformed computing and therefore the key applications we depend on to run our businesses need to go virtual as well. Enterprise and cloud storage are still living in a world dominated by physical and hardware-defined thinking. It is time to think of storage in a ‘software-defined’ world. That is, storage system features need to be available enterprise-wide and not just embedded to a particular proprietary hardware device.

For 2013, be cautious and beware of “old acquaintance” hardware vendors’ claims that they are “software-defined.”

2013 – The Year ‘Software-defined,’ Flash technologies and Virtualization of Tier 1 Applications Transform the Enterprise Storage World

Flash technologies and virtualization of Tier 1 applications are shaking up the enterprise world.

By George Teixeira, President and CEO, DataCore Software
During the past year, we have seen the first steps in a move to software-defined architectures. This has spurred a number of critical trends that are reshaping and having a major impact in the enterprise storage world, setting the stage for 2013 to become the year software-defined storage transforms the data center.

The move from hardware- to a software-defined virtualization-based model supporting mission-critical business applications has changed the foundation of architectures at the computing, network, and storage levels from being “static” to “dynamic.” Software defines the basis for agility, user interactions, and for building a long-term virtual infrastructure that adapts to change. The ultimate goal is to increase user productivity and improve the application experience.


Trend #1: Tier 1 apps will go virtual and performance is critical

Efforts to virtualize more of the data center continue and we will see an even greater surge to move Tier1 applications (ERP, databases, mail systems, OLTP etc.) onto virtualization platforms. The main driver for this is better economics and greater productivity.

However, the major roadblocks to virtualizing Tier1 apps are largely storage related.

Moving storage-intensive workloads onto virtual machines (VMs) can greatly impact performance and availability. Therefore, storage has to be over-provisioned and oversized. Moreover, as businesses consolidate onto virtual platforms, they have to spend more to achieve the highest levels of redundancy to ensure no down time and business continuity in addition to worrying about performance bottlenecks.

The high costs and complexities of oversizing negate the bulk of the benefits. With this in mind, enterprises and IT departments are looking for a smarter, more cost-effective approach (ie smart software), realizing that the traditional “throw more hardware at the problem” tact is no longer practical.

Trend #2: SSD flash technologies will be used everywhere; storage is not just disk drives

Another major trend related to virtualizing Tier 1 applications is the proliferation of SSD flash-based technologies. The reason is simple. Disk drives are mechanical rotating devices and not as fast as those that are based on high-speed electronic memory technologies.

Flash memory has actually been around for years; it was previously way too expensive for broad adoption. Though still more costly than rotating hard drives, their use in tablets and cell phones are driving prices downward. Even so, flash wears out, and taxing applications that prompt many writes can impact their lifespan.

Yet, flash devices are an inevitable part of our future and need to be incorporated within our architectural thinking. The economics are already driving us to a world that requires different tiers of fast memory-based storage and less expensive, slower disk drives. This, in turn, increases the demand for enterprise-wide auto-tiering software able to optimize the performance and cost trade-offs by placing and moving data to the most cost-effective tier that can deliver acceptable performance.

Trend #3: More storage will require more automation

There is a constant and insatiable demand for more data storage; it continues to grow more than 50 percent per year. However, the need is not just for more hardware disks to meet raw capacity. Instead, users want automatic, self-managed storage, scalability, rapid provisioning, fast performance, and the highest levels of business continuity.

Again, it takes “smart software” to simplify and automate the management of storage.

Trend #4: Software-defined storage architecture will matter more than hardware

These trends -- and empowering IT users to make storage hardware interchangeable within virtual infrastructures -- will have a profound impact on how we think about, buy, and use storage. In 2013 and beyond, IT will need to embrace software-defined storage as an essential element to data centers.

As users deal with the new dynamics and faster pace of today’s business, they can’t be trapped within yesterday’s rigid and hard-wired architectures. Infrastructure is constructed on three pillars -- computing, networking, and storage -- and in each, hardware decisions will take a back seat to a world dictated by software and driven by applications.

Clearly, the great success of VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V demonstrates that there’s compelling value delivered by server virtualization. Likewise, the storage hypervisor, and virtualization at the storage level, are critical to unlocking hardware chains that have made storage an anchor to next-generation data centers.

Trend #5: Software-defined storage is creating the need for a storage hypervisor

The same thinking that changed our views about the server is needed to address storage, and smart software is the catalyst. In effect, a storage hypervisor’s main role is to virtualize storage resources to achieve the same benefits -- agility, efficiency, and flexibility -- that server hypervisor technology brought to processors and memory.

This year, software will take its rightful seat at the table and begin to transform the way we think about storage.

The Ultimate Goal: Better App Experience through Software-defined Storage

Virtualization has changed computing and the applications we depend upon to run our businesses. Still, enterprise and cloud storage are dominated by physical and hardware-defined mindsets. We need to change our thinking and consider how storage impacts the application experience and view storage as software-defined, with storage services and features available enterprise-wide and not just embedded to a proprietary hardware device.

Why would you buy specific hardware just to get a software feature? Why would you restrict a feature to a single platform versus using it across the enterprise? This is old thinking, and prior to virtualization, that’s how the server industry worked. Today, with VMware or Hyper-V, we think about how to deploy VMs versus “are they running on a Dell, HP, Intel, or IBM system?”

Storage is going through a similar transformation, and in the year ahead, it will be smart software that leads the industry into a better, software-defined world.

Smart Storage Virtualization - Enabling Tier-1 Apps to Break Through Cloud Barriers

http://www.datastoragereport.com/smart-storage-virtualization-enabling-tier-1-apps-to-break-through-cloud-barriers

 

“Virtualization” is an IT buzzword that marks an era, and that era is today. No matter where you look or where you go, the Cloud seems to be the answer to every processing question there is today, except for one lone, albeit very important, holdout: Tier-1 apps.

Bruised from earlier, failed attempts to virtualize mission critical enterprise apps by throwing expensive new hardware and storage at the problem – and still facing performance and downtime issues – enterprises continue to shy away from virtualizing their most essential, widely used applications.

Conventional wisdom among systems gurus today is that to avoid I/O bottlenecks and ensure reliable performance, Tier-1 apps require, without exception, their own dedicated (not to mention wasteful and costly) machines. Veteran OLTP consultants grimly describe the nightmare scenarios they say will inevitably occur should these instructions not be followed. Stick more than one instance of a heavily loaded Oracle, SQL Server or SAP image on a shared machine – and all hell breaks loose. So until recently, virtualization of Tier-1 apps has been pretty much out of the question.

This situation poses a dilemma for enterprises. If the cost effectiveness and convenience of virtualization don’t filter down to the applications you rely on and use the most, how cost effective and convenient can your system actually be?

Fortunately, there is now an answer to the previously unsolvable Tier-1 virtualization riddle, one that works reliably, effectively, and without the need for additional hardware: high-performance storage virtualization. The industry calls this convenient, shrink wrapped software stack a storage hypervisor.

A true hypervisor embodies a range of characteristics that improve performance to the extent that Tier-1 apps and the Cloud are no longer at odds in the enterprise. A storage hypervisor offers large scale, distributed caching. A storage hypervisor provides auto-sensing, auto-tuning and auto-tiering techniques capable of making priority decisions autonomically at the micro level. Equally important, a true storage hypervisor delivers fault-tolerant I/O re-direction across widely dispersed resources.

With storage hypervisor software, owners of business critical apps can now confidently virtualize them without fear of slow erratic service levels, efficiently managing the confluence of storage traffic that characterizes virtualized Tier-1 programs.

As an important added benefit, the need to throw expensive new hardware at the problem is eliminated. The storage hypervisor cost-effectively resolves the contention for shared disks and the I/O collisions that had previously disappointed users. It takes great advantage of new storage technology like SSDs and Flash memories, balancing those investments with more conventional and lower cost HDDs to strike the desired price/performance/capacity objectives.

It’s the perfect complement to classic transactional ERP and OLAP settings. Beyond SQL databases, it does wonders for virtualized Exchange and SharePoint as well.

This advanced new software probably won’t stop the veterans from trading IT war stories about the old days. However, storage virtualization through a storage hypervisor, with its superior performance at a lower cost, provides the current pros in charge of enterprise apps with a far more compelling and career-building narrative.

ABOUT Steve Houck

Chief Operating Officer of DataCore Software, Steve Houck, is a highly regarded veteran in virtualization, flash storage, cloud computing and data center technologies. DataCore develops storage virtualization software for high availability, fast performance and maximum utilization from storage in virtual and physical IT environments.

Jon Toigo Video on Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Use a storage hypervisor for data replication

Toigo: Use a storage hypervisor for data replication

Video: http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/video/Toigo-Use-a-storage-hypervisor-for-data-replication

In this video, Jon Toigo, founder and CEO of Toigo Partners International, says that relying on a storage hypervisor like DataCore's SANsymphony-V provides greater ease of management and greater resistance to disruption.

Toigo said that storage environments have isolated islands of capability on hardware from different vendors and software products that add functionality for services like provisioning and mirroring, but these capabilities don't scale as you need more capacity and have to purchase another array. But the hardware behind the different vendor's product names is "generic," said Toigo, and a storage hypervisor can bring those disparate elements together by presenting storage as logical volumes rather than physical volumes -- allowing users to pool disparate hardware together into a common storage repository.

And for disaster recovery, storage virtualization can be a real benefit because you do not need to replicate between identical devices. "I could make a copy of data over to any other platform. I don't have to use the most expensive gear to make a copy of the most expensive gear … it doesn't matter, because it's all virtual volumes that we're dealing with," said Toigo...

Former VMware Managing Director GM of APAC and Japan Joins DataCore; Virtualization Veterans to Spearhead Asia Pacific Expansion and Meet Rising Global Demand

Company’s Continued Growth in Software-Defined Storage Prompts Additional Sales and Service Emphasis in Asia Pacific, China and Other Rapidly Developing Markets
 

DataCore Software has  named two well-recognized sales and operations executives with exemplary track records in the virtualization industry to spearhead the company’s business in Asia Pacific (APAC) and to develop sales in other rapidly emerging markets across the globe. The appointments facilitate DataCore’s continued worldwide growth, driven by high demand for its SANsymphony™-V Storage Hypervisor and the pivotal role it plays in software-defined data centers and cloud solutions.

 

Former VMware Managing Director/GM of APAC and Japan Joins DataCore
Manish Sharma’s extensive domain expertise and intimate familiarity with the region will be instrumental in the role of general manager (GM) and VP for APAC. He adds more than two decades of continuous sales and management experience to DataCore’s established presence throughout the territory. Sharma was VP and GM for Appirio Inc., a technology-enabled services company, leading the organization to 85 percent year-over-year growth while helping enterprise customers adopt cloud solutions.

 

Prior to that, Sharma spent six years in executive management posts within VMware’s APAC and Japan (APJ) market. He was largely responsible for managing and building out the VMware virtualization partner network, overseeing enterprise product sales and integration, channel enablement and field operations. He started at VMware as GM of the APJ Partner Organization and progressed rapidly to become the Managing Director and GM of Emerging Products for all of APJ. Sharma is also very familiar with the countries within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), having served as managing director for BEA, as well as director of sales and business development in Australia and New Zealand. His earlier sales management tenure took him regularly to Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and India. He will be strategically based in Singapore.

New Emerging Markets Position
Assuming DataCore’s newly created role of VP Emerging Markets is Peter Thompson. He will focus on driving the business expansion, key programs and partnerships needed within high-growth areas in APAC and the Americas regions, with a major emphasis on developing the Chinese marketplace. In addition, Thompson, who is based in Silicon Valley, will work with major industry partners, technology alliances and their global teams both locally and overseas to develop joint business opportunities and programs focused on emerging markets.

Thompson possesses more than two decades of expertise in APAC markets and was instrumental in developing DataCore’s storage virtualization business throughout the region, as well as its presence, partner network and offices in Japan, China and Australia. Formerly DataCore’s Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Thompson oversaw all sales, marketing and operations activities and was based in Japan for a number of years. He joined DataCore in 2000 to help develop the company’s APAC market strategy after a decade with Inabata & Co., a 200 year old trading company based in Osaka, where he led sales and new business efforts, mainly for the semiconductor industry.

“We see tremendous global demand for our solutions and are investing in an executive team with the proven experience to drive and significantly grow our market share in APAC and other emerging regions,” said Steve Houck, COO, DataCore Software. “Manish and Peter have proven records of success and they understand the challenges of growing virtualization companies in these markets. Furthermore, the IT industry is rife with businesses looking for cost-effective solutions to overcome the storage challenges related to virtualizing Tier 1 business-critical applications, transitioning to cloud computing, and taking on Big Data. Bottom-line, there’s growing demand for the powerful software-defined storage infrastructure that our SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor can provide.”

Priorities for the new leaders include channel expansion, partner enablement and closer alignment with the adjacent server and desktop virtualization ISVs and hardware suppliers (e.g., SSD/Flash) critical to modern datacenters. Their proven instincts for building rich relationships throughout APAC and the worldwide virtualization and storage community will immediately be put to use in enabling customers and partners to maximize the performance, availability and utilization of their IT environments.

VARs, system builders, managed service providers and cloud hosters operating in APAC and other emerging markets can learn how to extend their product and services portfolios with complementary storage virtualization solutions from DataCore by contacting sanvantage@datacore.com.
 

What is a Storage Hypervisor? Storage Hypervisors - Enterprise Strategy Group Video Blog with DataCore, HDS, IBM, & Virsto

 

Link: What is a Storage Hypervisor?

High Performance Storage Virtualization and Streamlining Virtualizing Tier 1 Apps

By Steve Houck

The magic to making tier 1 apps perform happens in the adaptive technology known as high-performance storage virtualization. http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2012/11/14/vv-streamline-tier-1-apps.aspx?sc_lang=en

Back in 2010 when I was at VMware, I would have bet you money that within months, the virtualization movement was going to sweep up enterprise apps with the roar of an unabated forest fire. But it didn't.

What seemed like fait accompli at the time turned out to be far more elusive than any of us could have predicted. The naïve, invigorated by the thrill of consolidating dozens of test/development systems in a weekend, bumped hard against a tall, massive wall. On the vendor side, we fruitlessly threw more disk drives, sheet metal, and plumbing at it. The price climbed, but the wall ceded not.

Fast forward to late 2012. Many still nurse their wounds from those attempts, unwilling to make another run at the ramparts which keep Tier 1 apps on wasteful, isolated servers until someone they trust gets it done first. To this day, they put up with a good deal of ribbing from the wise systems gurus, who enjoy reminding us why business critical apps absolutely must have their own, dedicated machines.

The seasoned OLTP consultants offer a convincing argument. Stick more than one instance of a heavily loaded Oracle, SQL Server or SAP image on a shared machine and all hell breaks loose. You might as well toss out the secret book on tuning, because it just doesn't help.

To some degree, that's true, even though the operating systems and server hypervisors do a great job of emulating the bare metal. It's an I/O problem, Mr. Watson.

It's an I/O problem indeed, into and out of disks. Terms like I/O blending don't begin to hint at the complexity and chaos that such consolidation introduces. Insane collisions at breakneck speeds may be more descriptive. Twisted patterns of bursty reads queued up behind lengthy writes, overtaken by random skip-sequential tangents. This is simply not something one can manually tune for, no matter how carefully you separate recovery logs from database files.

That's before factoring in the added pandemonium when the shared array used by a DB cluster gets whacked by a careless construction worker, or a leaky pipe drips a little too much water on the redundant power supplies.

Enter the adaptive technology of high-performance storage virtualization. Whether by luck or design, the bedlam introduced when users collapse multiple enterprise apps onto clustered, virtualized servers, mirrors the macro behavior of large scale, discreet servers banging on scattered storage pools. The required juice to pull this off spans several crafts. A chunk of it involves large scale, distributed caching. Another slice comes from auto-sensing, auto-tuning and auto-tiering techniques capable of making priority decisions autonomically at the micro level. Mixed in the skillset is the mysterious art of fault-tolerant I/O re-direction across widely dispersed resources. You won't find many practitioners on LinkedIn proficient in cooking up this jambalaya. More importantly, you won't have to.

In the course of the past decade, this enigmatic mojo and the best practices that surround it have been progressively packaged into a convenient, shrink-wrapped software stack. To play off the similarities with its predecessors, the industry calls it a storage hypervisor.

But I stray. What owners of business critical apps need to know is that they can now confidently virtualize those enterprise apps without fear of slow erratic service levels, given, of course, that they employ a high-performance, fully redundant storage hypervisor to yield fast, predictable response from their newly consolidated environment. Instead of throwing expensive hardware at the problem, or giving up altogether, leave it to the intelligent software to manage the confluence of storage traffic that characterizes virtualized Tier 1 programs. The storage hypervisor cost-effectively resolves the contention for shared disks and the I/O collisions that had previously disappointed users. It takes great advantage of new storage technology like SSDs and Flash memories, balancing those investments with more conventional and lower-cost HDDs to strike the desired price/performance/capacity objectives.

The stuff shines in classic transactional ERP and OLAP settings, and beyond SQL databases does wonders for virtualized Exchange and SharePoint as well.

Sure, the advanced new software won't stop the veterans from showing off their scars while telling picturesque stories about how hard this was in the old days. Though, it will give the current pros in charge of enterprise apps something far more remarkable that they too can brag about -- without getting their bodies or egos injured on the way.

Brennercom Adds DataCore Storage Hypervisor for Business Continuity and High-Performance Storage for their New VMware View Desktops and Cloud Services

Brennercom, an Italian-based Telecommunication Technology Company, has Extended its Redundant, High-availability Storage Infrastructure to Service its Private Cloud and Virtual Desktop Requirements.
http://www.it-director.com/technology/storage/news_release.php?rel=35287

DataCore Software today announced that information and communication technology (ICT) company Brennercom has attained a new level of business continuity and performance for its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud services using the DataCore SANsymphony™-V Storage Hypervisor.

By making use of the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor, corporate data is centrally administrated on a variety of different hardware storage solutions and all of it is protected by DataCore’s synchronous mirroring capability. The virtualization software from DataCore required only a quarter of the investment that would have been needed for a hardware-based SAN to provide a stable, high performance VMware View VDI for 160 desktop platforms, in addition to supporting the storage needs for all of its virtual machines running on VMware vSphere.

"The virtualization and common central management provided by the DataCore storage hypervisor considerably reduced our IT division's work load. New systems can now be fully set up for users within 10 minutes, unlike the laborious, many hours and days set-up required to install physical server storage systems in the past. Fast provisioning and capacity expansions can now be easily implemented via the central console with a few mouse clicks in the event of an acute need for storage," explained Roberto Sartin, head of Technical Division at Brennercom.

Establishment of Virtual Desktop and Cloud Infrastructure
At Brennercom, internal IT services are provided by the IT Management Division. The Division decided to extend its existing virtual VMware server infrastructure and to establish a VDI and cloud services based on VMware. To handle the expansion, it was decided that a new approach to managing data storage was needed.

The primary drivers were two-fold: First, Brennercom needed to expand its external computer center to accommodate new cloud computing services. Central and efficient system administration was a core objective of this extension. Second, Brennercom needed greater high-availability due to the increased business continuity requirements that would result from its move to centralization. The project plan and investments also encompassed the need for a later partial move of a number of the systems to a second location in Trento (about 30 miles away) to ensure that the immediate, high-availability system could be backed up by a two-site disaster recovery model for the purposes of required ISO audits.

The company also had to consider the planned consolidation of its current, heterogeneous IT landscape at the Bozen site. While the central computer center services were based on a fiber channel infrastructure, some divisions were making use of iSCSI storage. Apart from vSphere virtual machines, Citrix XenServer was also used in some areas.

Cost-effective VDI with 160 desktops
The VDI with VMware View is based on an integrated system supporting virtualized storage and virtualized servers. The decision to use this platform was taken after the positive experience gained with the VMware hypervisor. The 160 desktops are successfully being migrated to the notebooks or thin clients of the field workers and the helpdesk, using the centralized infrastructure. The long-term benefits of VDI lie in the lower costs and the less cumbersome, centralized administration needed when it comes to the setup, updating and maintenance of these virtual desktops.

"On the storage side, the VDI and the virtual servers are supported by DataCore’s round-the-clock, failsafe storage infrastructure and performance has been enhanced by intelligent caching, fulfilling all our expectations," comments Sartin. "By using the DataCore storage hypervisor, we were able to integrate a technically complex solution with a universal range of services to meet the short-term performance and high-availability requirements of our VDI needs. In addition, the integrated migration and replication features have created the basis for efficiently implementing the planned model we need for disaster recovery."

Flexible Infrastructure for Cloud Services
The next large-scale project to be concluded by year-end 2012 is dividing and synchronizing the existing systems between the computer centers in Bolzano and Trento so that operations can continue at one location in the event of a catastrophe.

"As is the case in other industries, business continuity is an absolute necessity for us. By making use of the DataCore solution within the virtual infrastructure created by VMware vSphere and VDI, we cannot only ensure that we meet these corporate requirements, but also guarantee optimal cost efficiency as a result of the hardware independence of the solution. This affects both the direct investment and the indirect and long-term cost of refreshes, expansions and added hardware acquisitions. We have thus created the technical basis for our external IT services, and within this framework we are creating the most flexible and varied range of cloud services possible," concludes Brennercom CEO, Dr. Karl Manfredi.

To read more regarding this deployment, please access a complete case study concerning DataCore’s implementation at Brennercom: Brennercom SpA Case Study.

Storage virtualization solutions help make the most of virtualization

Good recent article worth to share: GARTNER analyst recently spoke on why Storage Virtualization solutions make the most of virtualization, SSDs, Auto-tiering http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240169260/Storage-virtualization-solutions-help-make-the-most-of-virtualization

...Server virtualization allows much higher rates of system usage, but the resulting increases in network traffic pose significant challenges for enterprise storage. The simple "single server, single network port" paradigm has largely been displaced by servers running multiple workloads and using numerous network ports for communication, resiliency and storage traffic.

Virtual workloads are also stressing storage for tasks, including desktop instances, backups, disaster recovery (DR), and test and development.

At Gartner Symposium/ITxpo recently, Stanley Zaffos, a Gartner research vice president, outlined the implications of server virtualization on storage and explained how storage virtualization solutions, the right approach, and the proper tool set can help organizations mitigate the impact on enterprise storage.

Consider using storage virtualization. Gartner's Zaffos urges organizations to deploy storage virtualization as a means of better storage practice, and he underscores core benefits of the technology:

• Storage virtualization supports storage consolidation/pooling, allowing all storage to be "seen" and treated as a single resource. This avoids orphaned storage, improves storage utilization and mitigates storage costs by reducing the need for new storage purchases. The benefits of storage consolidation increase with the amount of storage being managed.
• Storage virtualization supports agile and thin provisioning, allowing organizations to create larger logical storage areas than the actual disk space allocated. This also reduces storage costs because a business does not need to purchase all of the physical storage up front -- simply add more storage as the allocated space fills up. Later tools may allow dynamic provisioning where the logical volume size can be scaled up or down on demand. Management and capacity planning is important here.
• Storage virtualization supports quality of service (QoS) features that enhance storage functions. For example, auto-tiering can automatically move data from faster and more expensive storage to slower and less expensive storage (and back) based on access patterns. Another feature is prioritization, where some data is given I/O priority over other data.

Consider using solid-state drives (SSDs). One of the gating issues for storage is the lag time caused by mechanical delays that are unavoidable in conventional hard-disk technologies. This limits storage performance, and the effects are exacerbated for virtual infrastructures where I/O streams are randomly mixed together and funneled across the network to the storage array, creating lots of disk activity. Storage architects often opt to create large disk groups. By including many spindles in the same group, the mechanical delays are effectively spread out and minimized because one disk is writing/reading a portion of the data while other disks are seeking. Zaffos points to SSDs as a means of reducing spindle count and supplying much higher IOPS for storage tasks.

Plan the move to virtualization carefully. Data center architects must develop a vision of their infrastructure and operation as they embrace virtualization. Zaffos suggested IT professionals start by identifying and quantifying the impact server virtualization, data growth and the need for 24/7 operation will have on the storage infrastructure and services.

Next, determine what you actually need to accomplish and align storage services with the operational abilities and physical infrastructure. For example, if you need to emphasize backup/restoration capabilities, support data analytics, or handle desktop virtualization, it's important to be sure that the infrastructure can support those needs. If not, you may need to upgrade or make architectural changes to support those capabilities.

When making decisions for virtualization, Zaffos notes the difference between strategic and tactical issues. Strategic decisions create lock-in, and tactical decisions yield short-term benefits. For example, the move to thin provisioning is a tactical decision, but the choice to use replication like SRDF would be a strategic decision.

...Ultimately, Zaffos notes that storage virtualization solutions can be a key enabling technology for server and desktop virtualization -- both of which place extreme demands on the storage infrastructure. But, he said, the move to storage virtualization takes a thorough understanding of the benefits, careful planning to ensure proper alignment with business and technical needs, and judicious use of storage technologies like tiers and SSD.

Storage hypervisor: Storage's future? It' the software that matters: Software-defined Storage; Storage Virtualization

By now you may have heard the term "storage hypervisor." You probably don't know exactly what it means, but that isn't your fault. Vendors that use the term to describe their products disagree on the exact meaning, although they mostly agree on why such a technology is useful.

A vendor panel at the Storage Networking World (SNW) show in Santa Clara, Calif., last month set out to define storage hypervisor. The represented vendors sell different types of products, though. The panel included array-based virtualization vendor Hitachi Data Systems Corp., network-based storage virtualization vendor IBM, software SAN virtualization vendor DataCore Software Corp. and virtual machine storage management vendor Virsto Software Corp.

Can all of these vendors' products be storage hypervisors? It's more accurate to say that, taken together, the storage hypervisor products make up an overview of storage virtualization under a new name. And that new name is already giving way to a newer term. "Software-defined storage" was used interchangeably with "storage hypervisor" during the SNW panel.

Software-defined storage is no better defined than storage hypervisor, but it includes the "software-defined" phrase taking over the data center and networking these days.

DataCore Software Corp. CEO George Teixeira said his company was ahead of the current trend when it started back in the 20^th century with the premise that software gives storage its value.

"Today we have fancy terms for it like software-defined storage, but we started DataCore in 1998 with a very basic [PowerPoint] slide that said, 'It's the software that matters, stupid,'" Teixiera said. "And we've seen storage from the standpoint of really being a software design."

Teixiera said any talk of a storage hypervisor must focus on software.

"Can you download it and run it? And beyond that, it should allow users to solve a huge economic problem because the hardware is interchangeable underneath," he said. "Storage is no longer mechanical drives. Storage is also located in flash. Your architecture can incorporate all the latest changes, whether it's flash memory or new kinds of storage devices. When you have software defining it, you really don't care.

"Just like with VMware today," said Teixiera, you really don't care whether it's Intel, HP, Dell or IBM servers underneath. Why should you care about the underlying storage?"

Read more at: http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/Storage-hypervisor-Hypothetical-or-storages-future

The Red Cross Embraces DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor to accelerate data mining speed by 300 Percent

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/red-cross-embraces-datacore-softwares-120000196.html

DataCore Significantly Optimizes Online Analytical Processing Performance

DataCore Software today announced that the British Red Cross Society has deployed the SANsymphony™-V Storage Hypervisor to provide a significant performance acceleration on its new Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) system, dramatically shortening response times and increasing the reliability of data extraction. The performance improvements were achieved by installing SANsymphony-V on an HP Proliant DL 370 server. The DataCore™ software has reduced the time window needed to perform the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) operations from an average of 12 hours down to four, with the load spread across half the original number of internal hard disk drives achieved through the efficiency of SANsymphony-V's thin provisioning.

The British Red Cross Society is the United Kingdom's registered charity arm of the worldwide humanitarian organization, the International Red Cross. Formed in 1870, the Red Cross has over 31,000 volunteers and 3,300 staff providing assistance and aid to all people in crisis, both in the UK and overseas, without discrimination and regardless of their ethnic origin, nationality or religion.

"In order to sustain the Charity's considerable ongoing work worldwide, the Red Cross needs to continually generate additional income from new and existing donors," said Kevin Bush, technical architect for the Charity's MIS Enterprise Architecture Team in London. "It is our function in MIS to ensure the relevant departmental units have the appropriate infrastructure available to allow them to complete automated processes in time to fulfil marketing campaigns to drive further donations."

To help facilitate ongoing fundraising, a new suite of hardware and business intelligence tools were deployed six months ago for the British Red Cross utilizing OLAP - an approach that swiftly answers multi-dimensional analytical queries through accurate Business Intelligence (BI) tools deployed on British Red Cross' SQL Server database. BI data marts are created to track behavioral changes, creating campaign relevancy trends for business units. This level of data profiling, specifying individual campaigns with matched targets, entails significant I/O (Input/Output) processing demands and depends on a stable, optimized infrastructure.

Working in conjunction with the MIS Enterprise Architecture Team, the British Red Cross's partner, Adapto, recommended that deploying DataCore's SANsymphony-V software would significantly decrease I/O strain and dramatically increase performance in a cost effective, non-invasive way. The SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor could dramatically improve performance levels by increasing the speed of read/write requests across the entire British Red Cross storage infrastructure using the storage server memory as the caching engine. This caching could dramatically accelerate application response times, manifesting in a dramatic increase in the speed of database queries and data extraction for the business units.

Critical to the effectiveness of the Extract/Transform and Load (ETL) from the database is achieving ongoing consistency within a predefined extraction window. The speed of I/O to process workloads determines these two factors; a slow I/O equates to a long and erratic extraction window. In practice, prior to the performance caching gains, each ETL was taking between nine and 15 hours, being set to run overnight with the resultant data marts ready in time for the next working day.

Following Adapto's suggestion, Kevin downloaded the easy to install SANsymphony-V test drive and right away ran a test ETL that displayed immediate benefits through DataCore's mega caching ability, with the software recognizing I/O patterns to anticipate which blocks to read next into RAM from the back-end disks. Requests became fulfilled quickly from memory at electronic speeds, eliminating the delay associated with the physical disk I/O. The findings were impressive. The production-ready, easy to use GUI allowed the ETL to perform at a blistering pace, similar to that achieved by SSD but without the associated cost overheads. This manifested in a shorter four hour query extraction timeframe.

"From the point of evaluation onwards, we haven't looked back with SANsymphony-V," said Bush. "It's caching and performance acceleration has certainly addressed the consistency of extraction, whilst reducing the window to an acceptable level, so that as a Charity, we can concentrate on effective fundraising to help those most in need. We are so impressed that we are now looking at installing another node of SANsymphony-V for high availability and mirroring."

Check out all the latest Product Reviews on SANsymphony-V

Most recent: SANsymphony-V R9.0 Product Review by NT4ADMINS Magazine

Greater scalability, improved administration functions and close integration with vSphere environments and system management suites are the main core characteristics of Release 9 of the SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor. Above all, the 'group operations' make life easier for the administrator:

See All: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/What-Others-are-Saying/Product-Reviews.aspx

Set your data free with Dell Fluid Data™ and DataCore SANsymphony-V

When businesses change, whether in response to a new opportunity or a competitive challenge, the applications and the data they depend on have to change too. That can be really hard with legacy storage solutions, whose rigid boundaries tend to hold data captive. This is especially true if, as is often the case, the storage infrastructure has been built up over time out of various “point solutions.” This creates inefficient data silos that make it hard to optimize the match between storage capabilities and application needs or take advantage of new hardware capabilities. Availability and disaster recovery capabilities can suffer as well.

The Fluid Data™ architecture from Dell is designed to overcome these storage challenges by making data as dynamic as the businesses that depend upon it. DataCore is a long-time Dell ISV partner, and we’ve been working with our reseller partners around the world to help our customers realize the benefits of Fluid Data. “We have thousands of DataCore storage hypervisor customers using Dell storage platforms,” says Carlos Carreras, DataCore’s Vice President of Alliances & Business Development. “We see many DataCore partners like The Mirazon Group and Sanity Solutions penetrating non-Dell accounts and leveraging SANsymphony-V to make it easier for customers to meet their storage needs with Dell solutions.”

The DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor lets Dell resellers seamlessly harness the Dell Fluid Data architecture and its wide range of products to address the storage appetite of their customers, including platforms such as Compellent, EqualLogic, and the PowerVault MD Series. Customers can add these cost-effective Dell solutions to their storage portfolio without a forklift upgrade, preserving their storage investments and prolonging the useful life of existing storage (e.g., moving it down-tier) while leveraging the power of Fluid Data for increased storage efficiency and performance. The DataCore storage hypervisor and enterprise-wide auto-tiering makes it easy to penetrate and refresh existing storage installations and add new Dell storage to modernize the infrastructure and lower overall costs. With the SANsymphony Cloud Gateway, customers can even add popular public cloud hosting services as a low-cost tier in their storage strategy. With DataCore and Dell, customers get infrastructure-wide storage management and the compelling benefits of Fluid Data across all their storage investments.

For DataCore partners, the new DataCore SANsymphony-V Migration Suite makes it easy to introduce new customers to Dell storage with completely non-disruptive data migration. The suite enables a DataCore partner to set up a temporary dual-node SANsymphony-V installation that can turn a hardware refresh into a zero-impact process. A pass-through architecture assures that the customer’s environment remains “hot” the entire time. Users never even know a migration has taken place.

“In customer meetings, I am often met with skepticism that there is no way to do an easy migration without a lot of disruption. After they see the power of DataCore storage virtualization software in action, their jaws literally drop because they cannot believe that it can be that simple to migrate their storage and VMs,” said Barry Martin, partner and chief technology officer at The Mirazon Group.

Barry also notes that the heat map recently introduced in SANsymphony-V 9.0 is an especially powerful analytical tool. “While the migration suite is in place, you could show the customer all their storage I/O ‘hot spots,’ and where, for instance, a SSD tier could boost the performance of critical applications. Being able to give that kind of strategic advice is key to our business success, and the visual impact makes it all the more powerful.”

These and other features make SANsymphony-V a natural complement to the Dell Fluid Data architecture. You can start learning more about SANsymphony-V here, or check out case studies in a variety of industries and applications to see how the DataCore storage hypervisor can go to work for you.

SEE DATACORE SOFTWARE AT THIS UPCOMING DELL EVENT

Dell Storage Forum Paris 2012

DataCore will be a Petabyte Sponsor at the upcoming Dell Storage Forum.

The event takes place 14-16 November 2012 in Paris. Address follows:

Marriott Rive Gauche Hotel & Conference Center
17 Boulevard Saint Jacques
Paris, 75014
France

Description
This is a channel partner and an end-user focused event. DataCore will present the newest version of its storage hypervisor – SANsymphony-V 9.0.

For more information on the show, visit Dell Storage Forum Paris 2012.