New Paper: Virtualization – Did You Overlook Storage?

“With the spotlight on server, desktop and application virtualization, it is easy to forget that your approach to data storage must also change.” Download: Virtualization – Did You Overlook Storage?

American Health Network Adds DataCore Storage Virtualization Software; Provides Business Continuity For Citrix Clients

StorageNewsletter.com – http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/business/datacore-american-health-network

"We were intrigued by the ability to apply virtualization to our storage and the possibility of getting high-end data protection for the disk farms behind our Citrix infrastructure, without incurring the high costs generally associated with such functions or sacrificing security. If DataCore can save us $100,000 to $200,000 during this modernization, then we have really struck gold." - Stuart Donnelson, data center server manager, American Health Network.

Donnelson is quick to point out that DataCore has provided American Health Network with a stable and robust environment. "We have been nothing but pleased with DataCore. The DataCore software is rock-solid. We really haven't had to do anything to it. And to me every time I don't have to worry about a platform or a piece of technology, I sleep a little better every night."

American Health Network "Strikes Gold" With DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Providing Business Continuity For Citrix XenServer And XenApp Clients

American Health Network (AHN) has completed the 3rd part of their virtualization project by adding DataCore storage virtualization software to their Citrix environment. The integration has been tested in production and proven failsafe. "The success that people in the IT industry are having with virtualization speaks for itself," comments Stuart Donnelson, data center server manager, American Health Network. "In looking at the technologies we had available to accomplish this project, it was clear to us that Citrix XenServer was the right choice, since our primary concern was to virtualize XenApp systems and provide a secure, highly-available environment for our physicians. And the reason we chose DataCore for our virtual storage infrastructure came at the recommendation of Citrix and DataCore partner Hogan Consulting Group."

All of the physicians within American Health Network use a centralized medical record known as a EHR (Electronic Health Record) and billing software called NextGen. AHN publishes NextGen and the rest of the company's production applications through Citrix XenApp - sending these out to AHN's 80 sites throughout Indiana and Ohio. The focus of American Health Network's virtualization project was straightforward enough - to modernize their existing Citrix environment.

AHN's immediate requirements were to replace five-year old servers and in the process, take strategic advantage of server and storage virtualization software.

System Already Fail-safe Tested
DataCore proved particularly vital to AHN's operations recently when system administrators noticed that AHN lost a major component of their storage infrastructure due to a firmware problems, yet the DataCore software automatically and non-disruptively failed over to its high-availability partner and kept the storage access 'live' to application servers. In fact according to Donnelson, "Not a single user or individual even noticed this failure - except for the few, select people in IT who were previously set up to monitor systems and receive such notices. "It was then that we said - this DataCore product is really pretty darn great."

Right now, American Health Network has 1,400 users connected to 55 XenApp servers. They expect to grow to 100 servers by the time they get to the next version of their medical records software.

Citrix TV showcases latest videos from Synergy 2010 on DataCore; Virtualization is 3 Dimensional

Storage Virtualization: A peek at the 3rd dimension

Virtualization projects are 3 dimensional. Server and desktop virtualization software address two of those dimensions. DataCore storage virtualization software comprises the 3rd dimension.
Dan Crowe of DataCore at Synergy 2010
http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/2180

Citrix TV talks to Bettye Grant from DataCore about the partnership with Citrix.
http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/2153

Solution resilience: What is DataCore High Availability with Synchronous Mirroring?

Check out the posts on SANmelody Tunes:

High Availability - Where is your weakest link

It surprises me how often I see companies spending money (large amounts) on technology to make their core business applications resilient to infrastructure failure, but fail to build redundancy into all critical infrastructure components. See complete post and diagrams at:
http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2010/04/high-availability-where-is-your-weakest.html

So, what is DataCore High Availability with Synchronous Mirroring?
In simple terms, DataCore HA with Synchronous Mirroring protects and ensures data from ANY single component failure in the storage solution, including environmental, back-end disks, DataCore storage controllers and IO channels.

Not only that, but additional levels of redundancy can be achieved at each layer of the storage network....read the full post and examine a number of failure scenarios at:
http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2010/04/datacore-solution-resilience.html

Failure resilience scenario's
A Healthy Solution:
Two node configuration, redundant mirror channels, redundant disk channels, redundant app channels.
Can be geographically separated - Whether racks, rooms, building, states.

New White Paper: Metro Clusters and Virtualization; Uninterrupted Access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) Synchronously Mirrored Across Metropolitan Hot Sites

Click to download:
WHITE PAPER: Uninterrupted Access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) Synchronously Mirrored Across Metropolitan Hot Sites

For an in-depth Case Study on Continuum Health Partners and Metro Clusters, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/continuum

DataCore at Citrix Synergy 2010: DataCore Virtualization Software Takes Citrix Projects to the 3rd Dimension; Going Beyond Servers and Desktops to Virtualize Storage

DataCore Virtualization Software Takes Citrix Projects to the 3rd Dimension; Going Beyond Servers and Desktops to Virtualize Storage http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=14561

DataCore Virtualization Ensures Uptime and Makes Metro Clusters Possible for Continuum Health Partners – One of the Largest Health Care Providers in the U.S.A.

For a more in-depth Case Study on Continuum Health Partners and Metro Clusters, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/continuum

DataCore Virtualization Ensures Uptime and Makes Metro Clusters Possible for Continuum Health Partners – One of the Largest Health Care Providers in the U.S.
http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/04/14/datacore-virtualization-ensures-uptime-and-makes-metro-clusters-possible-for-continuum-health-partners-one-of-the-largest-health-care-providers-in-the-u-s.aspx

DataCore virtualization software has been deployed in two metro clusters at Continuum Health Partners, Inc. (“Continuum”), whereby it affords multi-site data protection and failover. Continuum, like many health networks, was faced with the challenge of making their diverse storage infrastructure available around the clock, across multiple locations. “Our goal here was to deploy a system that would allow us to achieve high availability and business continuity for all of our clinical systems,” states Jill Wojcik, IT Director, Continuum Health Partners. “With DataCore in place and with hardware in two different locations, this has allowed us to make our mission-critical, clinical imaging – along with other systems – highly available.”

Overcoming Downtime and Unavailability of Data
Beth Israel Medical Center and Roosevelt Hospital, two hospitals in Continuum’s network, were faced with the challenge of downtime and data availability. Thanks to metro-wide storage virtualization from DataCore Software, Continuum now has many of their imaging systems and three of their principal IT facilities running on metro-clusters.

The metro-clustered IT infrastructure at the two Continuum hospitals ensures business continuity, with DataCore storage virtualization software at the center of it. DataCore synchronously mirrors the PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications Systems) images from Beth Israel Medical Center and Roosevelt Hospital in New York to Continuum’s data center in Secaucus, New Jersey. “With specific reference to the PACS images, before this metro-clustering initiative these systems had their own support people at the various hospitals and were pretty much autonomous systems,” explained Wojcik. “We have brought this in and have centralized the systems now in our central data center – using DataCore software running on top of the various hardware solutions.”

The overarching benefit of this implementation, however, has been unprecedented high availability. The key to this is that the data resides on geographically separated 100% mirrored systems – where one set of disks resides at the data center and one set resides in a “remote” hospital. Continuum has effectively eliminated the need to do traditional disaster recovery should a calamity happen. Whereas many IT organizations normally go through a painful process of assembling resources to recover data following a site-wide outage, the metro clusters at Continuum Health Partners allow them to take over operations from their hot site uninterrupted.

Additionally, a very tangible benefit of this metro cluster environment has to do with system maintenance. System maintenance can now be done without any interruption to the user community. Wojcik commented, “Since we have implemented this, we have not experienced any downtime – even for system maintenance.”

Hospitals use DataCore storage virtualization http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1510119,00.html

DataCore helps Australian transport authority process petabytes of video surveillance

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1506929,00.html

...The video surveillance system is now attached to six physical servers running VMware Inc.'s vSphere 4 server virtualization software. The virtual machines' master files are stored on SAS capacity in the DataDirect Networks array, and La Vertu said he fronted the array with two servers running DataCore Software Inc. to make redundant DDNS2A9900's look like one virtualized pool.

This was done on a recommendation by DataDirect Networks, La Vertu said, because DDN does not support native array-based volume replication. "DataCore does virtualization across multiple arrays," he said. "DDN can't do that without a third party."

Storage Insights: Virtualizing Storage Along with Servers and Desktops - New Paper

http://www.storage-switzerland.com/Articles/Entries/2010/4/21_Virtualizing_Storage_Along_with_Servers_and_Desktops.html

When considering the potential benefits that typically drive server and desktop virtualization projects, questions about the underlying storage may never come up. They should. If we look at these benefits; maximizing hardware utilization, insulating the software environment from hardware configuration variables and ensuring that applications keep running, despite system outages, the state of the storage system is, indeed, of primary concern. It’s a fact that virtual infrastructures are completely dependent on the behavior of their underlying shared disks.

It’s well known how easily hypervisors migrate workloads from one physical server to another when one goes down. But what’s not as obvious is what happens when the shared storage device that both of those servers rely on is taken out of service. Taking storage systems down for a routine firmware upgrade, a water leak in the computer room, or just capacity expansion can cause major data outages for numerous virtual machines and the hundreds of desktops that they support. This is true regardless of how reliable a particular disk subsystem has proven to be. Fortunately, there are reasonable solutions available to eliminate this risk.

Companies such as DataCore offer the necessary storage virtualization software to:

a) maximize the utilization of existing storage devices,

b) insulate the software environment from hardware differences, and

c) ensure that applications keep running while storage devices are taken out of service.

Similar to server and desktop virtualization products, SANSymphony storage virtualization software abstracts most commonly used storage hardware devices into idealized, virtual disks. In the process, it automatically mirrors the information between physically segregated devices so that complete disk subsystems can be taken out of service without impacting applications.

Basically, this device-independent, virtualization technology allows normal changes that regularly occur in the storage infrastructure to go on without impacting the servers and desktops that depend on it. And storage virtualization software can repurpose existing disk systems attached to servers for use as part of a broader tiered storage pool. This enables the ‘mixing and matching’ of different models and different vendors, swapping these systems out or growing them in the background without affecting business processing.

The same software can also stretch the storage pool across a campus or a metropolitan area to provide additional safeguards against site problems, allowing it to be managed as one centralized resource. Look for built-in capabilities like cross-device snapshots, remote replication and thin provisioning to get the fullest use from all existing disk assets, despite their mutual incompatibilities.

Server and desktop virtualization initiatives promise significant benefits, like asset optimization, simplified operations and improved application uptime. However, the storage infrastructure that supports this compute environment must be up to the task. Layering in storage virtualization software at the outset as a crucial part of the overall virtualization strategy will ensure that you realize the benefits that first justified the move to a virtual infrastructure.

Drive Down Server Virtualization’s Storage Costs

http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/P3207/34p07/34p07.asp&guid=

As a potential first step to meeting shared SAN requirements across virtual servers, Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing at DataCore Software ( http://www.datacore.com/  ), suggests using portable storage virtualization software to make the disks inside the existing physical servers shareable. “The storage virtualization stack will run inside its own virtual machine (VM) or right on top of the hypervisor. From there, it first virtualizes formerly dedicated drives into shared iSCSI resources accessible from multiple VMs over a conventional LAN.”

...At the point where application workloads consume more than 75% of the physical server resources and the number of servers grows, DataCore’s Gonzalez advises moving the storage virtualization software into a pair of small dedicated servers that can handle the expanded capacity and I/O demands of the bigger environment. This, too, is straightforward, as the software licenses are fully portable from virtual to physical machines. Achieve further cost containment by relocating the original internal drives behind the storage virtualization nodes before any more storage is added.

...Many of the storage applications are dual mode, meaning they can reside in either a virtual machine or a dedicated physical host. DataCore’s Gonzalez believes this gives SMEs the best of both worlds. SMEs can start small, leveraging internal disks, and then as the production environment ramps up, they can move the storage to a dedicated system. Throughout that process, shared storage is available, but cost and complexity are kept to a minimum.

Key Points:
• Shared storage is critical for maximizing the benefits of server virtualization, and now it is also affordable for the small to midsized data center.
• Leveraging the server virtualization project itself either through the use of virtual machines or by repurposing legacy servers is a key element in driving out costs.
• Simplicity is as critical as reducing hard costs; SME personnel typically wear multiple hats, and integrating storage management into the virtual server management console reduces complexity significantly.

Virtualization's Third Dimension: Everything Channel Awards DataCore Software the 2010 Five-Star Partner Program Rating for Its Commitment to the Channel

http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/03/31/virtualization-s-third-dimension-everything-channel-awards-datacore-software-the-2010-five-star-partner-rating-for-its-commitment-to-the-channel.aspx

DataCore Partner Program Recognized as Exceptional by Leading Channel Authority

DataCore Software, announced it has been recognized by Everything Channel as a top information technology (IT) vendors for its DataCore Partner Program. Additionally, the DataCore Partner Program was awarded a Five-Star rating, representative of an exceptional program.

DataCore Takes Virtualization to the Third Dimension

The Five-Star recognition is significant since DataCore has recently undergone a major push to make it easier for partners to reap the rewards and benefits of having DataCore storage virtualization solutions in their arsenal of product offerings. A new Solution Advisor Resource Center includes a wealth of sales training and positioning tools and materials to help resellers and solution advisors grow their virtualization business with DataCore's storage virtualization solutions - http://www.datacore.com/partner/resources/  .

"We are very pleased that Everything Channel has recognized DataCore as a Five-Star Partner Program winner," states Bill Ferara, director of channel sales for the Americas, DataCore Software. "The word is getting out that DataCore storage virtualization software overcomes the major storage-related obstacles and upheavals that slow down or stop virtualization projects from getting off the ground or being successful when deploying a virtual infrastructure. We are confident that resellers will profit from adding DataCore storage virtualization to its business portfolio, particularly since storage virtualization software has become more and more a strategic part of any virtualization deployment."

New DataCore and Hyper-V White Paper: Uninterrupted Access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) Synchronously Mirrored Across Metropolitan Hot Sites

Failover Cluster support in Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V provides a powerful mechanism to minimize the effects of planned and unplanned server downtime. It coordinates live migrations and failover of workloads between servers through a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). The health of the cluster depends on maintaining continuous access to the CSV and the shared disk on which it resides.

In this paper: Uninterrupted Access to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) Synchronously Mirrored Across Metropolitan Hot Sites

You will learn how DataCore Software solves a longstanding stumbling block to clustered systems spread across metropolitan sites by providing uninterrupted access to the CSV despite the many technical and environmental conditions that conspire to disrupt it.

DataCore Software's SANmelody Storage Virtualization Solution Wins 2010 Network Computing Award: Wins Storage Product of the Year

DataCore Software's SANmelody Storage Virtualisation Solution Wins 2010 Network Computing Award: Wins Storage Product of the Year

http://www.it-director.com/technology/data_mgmt/news_release.php?rel=16495

STORAGE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
WINNER: SANMELODY - DATACORE
Keith Joseph of Datacore accepted the Storage Product of the Year award

DataCore Software has once again scooped one of the UK's top networking awards by winning the Storage Product of the Year Award at the prestigious 2010 Network Computing Awards dinner held last week at the Tower Hotel in London. DataCore's SANmelodyTM, beat stiff category competition from finalists EMC, Compellent, LSI, CA, amongst others.

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, Northern Europe, DataCore Software, commented, "It's tremendous recognition from the UK's network managers and administrators who nominated and voted for SANmelody in force. In total, over 7000 votes were cast for the Awards, so it is a real honour in light of the stiff competition we were facing."

The Storage Product of the Year Award signifies the readers' appreciation of SANmelody and how it easily and cost-effectively it converts physical Intel/AMD servers or virtual machines (VMs) into fully-capable, virtual storage servers that are able to optimise, protect and manage storage over existing networks to fulfill the needs of application servers.

In addition, SANsymphonyTM, the enterprise version of SANmelody, came runner up as Data Centre Solution of the Year.

The Network Computing Awards were established in 2004 to recognise best-in-breed, easy to use solutions that make the working lives of network managers easier and more effective.

In SAN We Trust: City Government Deploys DataCore Storage Virtualization To Empower VMware; Sets A New Level Of Uptime For Critical Applications

Computer Technology Review: To read the complete story, please visit: http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=229:virtualization&id=8351:virginias-dinwiddie-county-government-deploys-datacore-storage-virtualization-to-empower-vmware&Itemid=2701140

DataCore Software has been deployed along with VMware vSphere for the government of Dinwiddie County in Virginia. "We were convinced that we needed a SAN to support our objective of server consolidation with VMware as well as our desire to achieve uptime," explained Norman Cohen, IT Director, Dinwiddie County Government. "We are so impressed with the new virtualization environment and DataCore's role as the virtual storage dimension to everything that we are actively encouraging other county governments in our state to do what we have done in our VMware-DataCore deployment."

"DataCore's storage virtualization software solution has allowed us to springboard into the world of virtualization – particularly enabling us to leverage the benefits of VMware," noted Cohen. "The most important component of our virtualization deployment has to do with virtualizing our disks with DataCore. We can now utilize disk space – no matter where those disks reside on campus. But storage virtualization does so much more than delivering shared storage by way of pooling disks. With DataCore, our IT environment has attained high-availability and fault-tolerance, by way of the remote replication that is made possible by the two DataCore-powered SANs."

DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Delivers 100% Uptime to iomart hosting

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=13727
iomart hosting, one of the UK's fastest growing managed services providers, is using DataCore's SANsymphony™ solution to provide the high-availability backbone for iomart's hosted customers.

Richard McMahon is the company's Infrastructure Manager responsible for all hardware and software deployments and services within the group. Twenty-five people operate from within iomart's five (5) state-of-the-art data centers located in London, Maidenhead, Glasgow, Nottingham and Leicester. All centers are linked via Dark Fibre or GigE connections.

"Our 100% uptime guarantee is not a marketing ploy - it's iomart's motto and mantra. We live and breathe it to facilitate our customers' business models. Therefore total high-availability is top of our priority list," he stated.

Recently, to help clients facilitate cloud computing, iomart launched a dedicated, virtualized server service, offering VMware dedicated servers capable of running multiple operating systems and applications from one physical server.

With these services in mind, the challenge that iomart faced was managing 30 terabytes (TBs) of storage across a heterogeneous environment in the City of London and Maidenhead data centers. To meet this objective, iomart approached DataCore, EMC, NetApp and 3PAR for proposed solutions. The suggested environment from DataCore involved using standard x86 hardware, highly specified due to their being of a hosting nature, each having 128GB RAM for caching, 4 Quad Core Processors and 8GB HBA's for connectivity. The disk that sat behind the server was classified as a low-end commodity disk. On top of this hardware, DataCore's SANsymphony solution was used in a mirrored SAN-SAN configuration to virtualize and manage the environment across a fibre link. In total, the solution was less than a one-third of the cost of the equivalent software and hardware alternative proposals.

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, DataCore Software picks up the story: "Cost savings were not the most important factor in iomart's search. What they really wanted was to achieve total control of the environment and have the ability to migrate customer data between storage systems and disk types and to easily replicate to remote sites. This they found with DataCore's SANsymphony."

Mirrored high-availability (HA) between sites over 20 miles away also provides iomart with enhanced disaster recover (DR) capabilities. In their configuration, the environment is distributed throughout several locations and ensures that they have a fully distributed, HA model but across DR geographies.

DataCore's synchronous replication functionality operates on a forced cache coherency model, based on a grid architecture that replicates the I/O block between the cache on each DataCore server before sending the acknowledgement to the application server and committing the data to disk. This overcomes the problems associated with clustered storage, while allowing iomart a greater degree of performance and flexibility.

McMahon concludes, "What we have achieved with SANsymphony is totally flexible, highly performing SAN-to-SAN mirroring, but straight out-of-the-box and backed by a decent price point. We can now move data 'at will' between vendors and seamlessly achieve LUN virtualisation across RAID arrays. No other solution offers us this."
http://www.myhostnews.com/2010/03/datacore-storage-virtualization-software-delivers-100-uptime-to-iomart-hosting/

Video: Storage Virtualization and DataCore (Jon Toigo Interviews Ziya Aral)

Video: Storage Virtualization and DataCore (Click on link below for Video Interview)
http://esj.com/articles/2010/02/16/video-datacore-storage-virt.aspx?sc_lang=en

Ziya Aral , CTO and co-founder of Ft. Lauderdale, FL-based storage virtualization software vendor, DataCore Software, offers an analysis of server and storage virtualization that blows the socks off of the marketspeak one usually hears or reads from industry analysts and vendors. That's because he has been part of the evolution of the technology over the past three decades.

Says Aral, in this interview recorded for the C-4 Summit Cyberspace Edition, virtualization was -- and is -- inevitable. He notes that embedding software on hardware became a costly and inefficient design choice years ago -- especially as hardware architecture became more standardized. Software complexity required its migration to a computer so it could be maintained and improved without requiring the costly replacement of the underlying hardware platform.

He argues that DataCore's key innovation was to conceive of the "storage application" as any other computer application, separating it from the storage hardware layer -- the costly and complex value-add array controller. The benefits of such abstracting storage services into a virtualization layer would be to deliver a rich set of services that could be applied across hardware without concern for the vendor badging of the hardware itself. Software and hardware could scale independently.

Performance and management also improve with virtualization, Aral notes, citing the success of DataCore customers for proof. To hear the rest of Aral's fascinating analysis, check out the C-4 Project (http://www.c4project.org/ ), where Aral is part of an on-going "summit in cyberspace."

Virtualization should be 3D: DataCore

Virtualization should be 3D: DataCore
http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/virtualization-should-be-3d-datacore/140005-pg1

DataCore Software is evangelizing a virtualization strategy that entails server, desktop and storage concurrently from the outset to avoid performance bottlenecks. IDC’s Dave Pearson calls storage virtualization the “support” technology

Storage technology vendor DataCore Software Corp. is touting a three-dimensional approach to virtualization that encourages organizations to address server, desktop and storage concurrently from the outset when building a virtualized environment.

Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing with the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company, said focusing on just server and desktop at the beginning while neglecting storage will lead to negative consequences in the long run.

“Leaving out any one of those dimensions creates shortcomings and obstacles for that customer downstream,” said Gonzalez.

The number of dependencies on the storage infrastructure are magnified with server and desktop virtualization, said Gonzales. Specifically, performance bottlenecks occur when desktops and servers are consolidated and an increased number of inputs and outputs are driven against the storage pool, he explained.

Gonzalez said problems encountered down the road due to bad planning are one reason IT departments hesitate to move Tier 1 workloads to a virtual environment. “As soon as they scale out to actually meet the workload demand, that’s when they hit upon it … and that’s when people start to rethink whether they were doing the right thing by virtualizing,” said Gonzales.

According to Dave Pearson, senior analyst for storage at Toronto-based IDC Canada Ltd., storage virtualization is a relatively new, albeit key, component of virtualization. But he said the storage component is still a “support” technology led in most cases by server virtualization.

Pearson said storage virtualization forms part of what he calls "virtualization 3.0," where it’s not just about getting rid of physical machines and improving processes anymore. “It’s now part of optimizing the entire solution, making sure you’re really getting your money’s worth out of the hardware that you’re committing to these virtualization projects,” he said.

However, while Pearson agrees storage is a vital component of an organization’s virtualization strategy, he said such a 3D approach is hardly a novel idea to IT pros involved in large virtualization projects.

The 3D approach is “just really another tool that’s being added to the box of tools for virtualization,” said Pearson. Besides DataCore, Fremont, Calif.-based 3PAR Inc., among others, is in the market.

DataCore is relying on its community of resellers to evangelize this 3D virtualization approach because, according to Gonzales, customers still require a lot of education on the topic.

Gonzales said the “second phase of adoption” of virtualization to areas like business continuity, risk mitigation and disaster recovery, is beginning to shine a spotlight on storage. “All of those many machines and many users and many virtual workloads now become so centred on how the storage environment behaves and how well that virtual view of storage remains intact as you move through generations of hardware,” he said.

Pearson said storage virtualization is growing more quickly in importance than server virtualization, but not at the same level overall.

ACW Insights: How to add value to your virtual environments

http://www.blog.acw-group.com.sg/2010/02/how-to-add-value-to-your-virtual.html

Virtualization should be 3D: DataCore

http://www.theoutsourceblog.com/2010/02/virtualization-should-be-3d-datacore/

10 Ways To Add Value To Virtual Environments

10 Ways To Add Value To Virtual Environments [slide show]
http://www.crn.com/hardware/223100199;jsessionid=KRTE4R2ONXQ2BQE1GHPCKH4ATMY32JVN?pgno=7
VMware held its annual VMware Partner Exchange earlier this month, and used the conference to talk about virtualization and cloud computing.

DataCore: Virtualization In 3-D
DataCore, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., used the conference less to talk about products and more to discuss its central theme for 2010, "Virtualization in 3-D."

Storage virtualization is the third dimension after server and desktop virtualization, according to DataCore, which also said that the fundamentals of a virtualization solution are not adequately addressed until the software tackles storage-related challenges.

Augie Gonzalez , director of product marketing at DataCore, said that, while servers and desktops deserve much attention, disks represent a constant source of upheaval in virtual environments.

He also said DataCore lets customers provision, share, reconfigure, migrate, replicate, expand, and upgrade storage without impacting production environments, and virtualizes disks across pools of tiered storage devices to overcome incompatibilities between different generations, models, and manufacturers of storage devices.

“Top 20 Storage Products from VMworld” [slide show]

http://www.crn.com/storage/219900016;jsessionid=VAYV1HKMBIUH5QE1GHRSKHWATMY32JVN?pgno=7

VMware Partner Exchange 2010 closes with VMware Solution Providers heralding DataCore Software as the 3rd dimension to their virtualisation practice.
http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/news-full.php?id=14142

Creating DMZs in the Cloud

http://www.ctoedge.com/content/creating-dmzs-cloud
One of the things being heavily pitched toward anybody building a cloud computing service these days is the value of highly integrated servers. The thinking goes that the higher the level of integration, the lower the cost to maintain and run the system.

But there is another argument that speaks to the need to isolate specific sets of services inside a larger cloud computing service. For example, if you go with an integrated server, you pretty much have to move in lockstep with that vendor for all your servers, networking and storage. If there is a major advance in any one of these areas, a chief technologist running a cloud computing service on an integrated server might not be able to take advantage of it until the vendor upgrades the entire system. Given the long-term nature of cloud computing services and the level of cut-throat competition, that might not be the strategic way to go.

Instead, vendors such as DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization software, argue that cloud computing services should, for example, isolate services like storage using a software-only approach that makes it realtively easy to create pools of storage by mixing and matching storage hardware from multiple vendors. This approach helps creates a “demilitarized zone” between technologies that allow IT organizations to continue to leverage multile vendors to take advantage of ongoing advances in technology.

According to Augie Gonzalez, DataCore Software director of product marketing, this approach also provides the ability to leverage inexpensive cache on the server to drive performance, versus relying on limited amounts of expensive cache on the storage arrays. Gonzalez also points out that as software offering, DataCore can offer the same level of integration with cloud computing offerings such as Cisco Nexus virtual switches and VMware’s vSphere management software.

So all things being equal, the question becomes is it worth mortgaging the future to gain some short term gains in system administration that can probably be achieved anyway without locking in the hardware?

Host.net combines DataCore Software, VMware and Cisco to provide new cloud computing platform

Link: Host.net’s Cloud Computing – Enterprise Virtual Solutions Overview

Search Storage: Host.net combines DataCore Software, VMware and Cisco to provide new cloud computing platform

DataCore Software announced that its storage virtualization technology is helping to power a cloud computing platform by Host.net. The Host.net platform also includes VMware server virtualization and Cisco Nexus virtual network technologies. With this platform, private clouds can be built on virtual servers from VMware vSphere, Cisco and DataCore storage virtualization. Each virtualization technology comes with different capabilities such as converged networking from Cisco, synchronous mirroring from DataCore and the ability to quickly grow storage from VMware.
http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid190_gci1379793,00.html#

“We chose VMware, DataCore and Cisco in the core design of our cloud platform because each vendor delivers the very best virtualization component in their respective areas of competence,” said Jeffrey Slapp, VP of Virtualization Services for Host.net. “In three months’ time, dozens of companies have signed on as new customers because of the competitive advantages we have achieved with this combination of technologies and architecture.”

Cloud Agility through Hardware Independence

“It seems to me that any cloud computing platform needs to, at its very core, be based on portable software,” stated George Teixeira, President and CEO, DataCore Software. “Many clouds are being built from a hardware vendor-specific mindset. What is wrong with this picture? Well, the whole point of cloud computing is delivering cost-effective services to users – and that demands the highest degree of flexibility and openness, versus being boxed in to specific hardware platforms that may not adapt to changes over time. Aren’t clouds, after all, supposed to be soft and agile?”

Because the Host.net vPDC platform is comprised of software-based technologies, the company’s offering is not tied to any specific hardware. This avoids the problems associated with building clouds with a hardware provider sandwiched between virtual servers and virtual networks, enabling flexibility far beyond any cloud offering dependent on hardware vendors like IBM, EMC and NetApp. It also essentially eliminates any capital expenditure outlays from the customer.

“With or without a recession, companies are looking for cost-effective infrastructure solutions. A software-based cloud architecture helps answer that need,” said Lenny Chesal, Executive Vice President of Host.net. “This makes it a direct, positive impact on the customer’s bottom line as well as overall efficiency, enabling companies to do more with less.”


Link: Host.net’s Cloud Computing – Enterprise Virtual Solutions Overview

VMware Solution Providers herald DataCore Software as the 3rd dimension to their virtualisation practice.

DataCore™ storage virtualisation software deemed strategic to their Server Virtualisation and Desktop Virtualisation business

As the doors closed on last weeks VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, DataCore Software assessed the strategic value that its storage virtualisation software brings to VMware solution providers. Simply put, DataCore fulfills the 3rd dimension required by VMware value- added resellers (VARs), service and hosting providers to complete their virtualisation offerings. “Failing to include storage virtualisation software to address IT storage challenges results in an incomplete, two-dimensional solution,” comments Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing, DataCore Software. “Virtualisation solutions must concurrently address server, desktop and storage challenges presented by the many variations of hardware that get deployed over the course of multiple years.”

With DataCore storage virtualisation software, VMware customers gain storage hardware flexibility and improved disk space utilization. Importantly, VMware users do not have to spend a lot of time and money ripping out and replacing perfectly good disks to set up a shared storage infrastructure. DataCore Software enables solution providers to easily repurpose their customers’ existing hardware into a highly-available storage network that supports VMware features like VMotion and remote site disaster recovery (DR) – perfectly complementing their virtual servers and desktops with virtualised storage.

Testimonials from VMware VARs

The following testimonials reveal just how important DataCore is to meeting customer needs in virtual IT infrastructures and cloud initiatives.

“Virtualisation is a 3-dimensional puzzle,” states Pat Sigg, Regional Vice President of Sales at Software Information Systems (SIS), a VMware partner. “What we consistently find when engaging in virtualisation deployments is – first and foremost – the need to virtualise storage resources with the flexibility, high-availability and performance to support numerous virtual servers and desktops without single points of failure. It is this 3rd dimension to virtualisation – the storage virtualisation dimension – that DataCore brings to our virtualisation practice.”

“As a VMware partner specializing in virtualisation solutions, what we have found is that to really get the magic out of VMware, you need DataCore storage virtualisation – be that hardware independence as well as just an astonishing degree of flexibility – that combine to literally pave the way for each of our virtualisation deployments to perform as promised,” comments Chuck Renfro, CEO, ThinkingCap Technologies, LLC. “The bottom-line is that DataCore is vital in enabling our virtualisation customers to meet their business objectives – chief among which is realising high-availability.”

“Virtualisation projects are three-dimensional,” explains Andy Judge, Founder and CEO of Grove Networks, a VMware Enterprise Partner. “Server and desktop virtualisation software address two of those dimensions. DataCore storage virtualisation software is as important, financially and operationally, to a successful virtual infrastructure project as are the server and desktop virtualisation aspects.”

Virtualising Storage in the Cloud: “Priority One”

Any cloud computing platform, just like any virtualisation deployment, needs to have portable software as its building blocks – providing the highest degree of flexibility and openness. DataCore partner Host.net knows intuitively that storage virtualisation software is priority one.

“We chose DataCore in the core design of our virtual private data center (vPDC) platform alongside VMware and Cisco because it delivers the very best storage virtualisation component,” notes Jeffrey Slapp, Vice President of Virtualisation Services for Host.net. “Virtualising the storage is paramount to us for two reasons. First, we required a solution that would allow us to expand storage resources rapidly and non-disruptively to meet increasing demand. Second, we needed a solution that could leverage various hardware storage platforms simultaneously in order to keep pace with technology changes. Accomplishing both allows us to provide high-end enterprise-level services while remaining agile and cost-effective.”

VMware Partner Exchange 2010 ran from February 8 -11 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.

HP confirms Hyper-V LeftHand appliance in 2011; DataCore already shipping Virtual SAN Appliances

HP confirms Hyper-V LeftHand appliance in 2011; DataCore already shipping Virtual SAN Appliances

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/15/hp_lhn_hyper_v/
HP is going to have VSA running under Hyper-V within a year.
... DataCore already provides its SANmelody software as a Hyper-V-based software appliance. Darth Redmond will be encouraging other companies to follow suit, citing HP as evidence that the storage force really is with Hyper-V.

To download DataCore's Virtual SAN Appliance, please visit:
http://www.datacore.com/VSAppliance/

Stainless steel provider virtualizes with DataCore, VMware

Search Storage - Stainless steel provider virtualizes with DataCore, VMware
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1379370,00.html

DataCore Software Corp. said North American Stainless in Ghent, Ky., is deploying its SANmelody storage virtualization software along with VMware vSphere to consolidate servers and storage.

VMware vSphere and DataCore Software's Storage Virtualization Are Making Both Disaster Recovery and "Hands Free" Maintenance Possible at One of North America's Largest Stainless Steel Manufacturers
http://www.snseurope.com/all_newsletter09/general/issue376.htm

"It was clear to us that the storage sub-system had to provide extra functionality and it was also clear that any of the hardware-based, appliances were going to be well into six figures in price," added Sigg. "This was not the path that we or the customer sought to take. Instead, what we found in DataCore's portable, software-based, SANmelody SAN solution was that it offered all the functionality needed – including high availability and zero points of failure – all at reasonable cost. For the price point, what you get in functionality with DataCore convinced us and sold the customer."

DataCore Software announced its SANmelody storage virtualization solution has been deployed along with VMware vSphere at one of the world's premiere providers of stainless steel - North American Stainless in Ghent, Kentucky. The company's IT department was trying to cope with an already increasing server spiral that encompassed ten (10) servers - all of which were over five years old. "We felt VMware would give us more options than simply adding more physical servers," stated Judy Pieper-Young, Manager - Information Systems, North American Stainless. "Now with VMware combined with DataCore, we can simply add more virtual machines on-the-fly and it only costs us a new server license - instead of having to purchase a whole new physical box."

A Virtual Infrastructure That Delivers Value as Promised
The IT landscape has gone a diet, so to speak, since the advent of virtualization at North American Stainless. Today, the company relies on four (4) physical servers and 35 virtual machines (VMs). The system supports 1,400 end-users.

"The appeal for us in going virtual in terms of servers was straightforward," explained Pieper-Young. "Knowing that we were facing a situation where we were in need of adding even more servers – we chose to embrace virtualization so that we could actually reduce the number of physical servers. But we did not want to stop at servers. In order to achieve a completely virtual infrastructure, we selected DataCore along with VMware to serve as a total virtual infrastructure spanning both servers and storage."

North American Stainless manufactures stainless steel 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. Therefore, beyond an initial desire to add more capacity by adding virtual storage to the mix was an overarching objective to have a disaster recovery plan in place. For disaster recovery, the company now has two SANmelody nodes that are mirrored so as to offer synchronous replication. "If for any reason we have a server crash, the virtual infrastructure enables us to get up and running within seconds," noted Pieper-Young.

The two, redundant SANmelody SANs that are mirrored are connected to redundant switches that are in turn connected to four VMware ESX hosts, to remove any single point of failure. Now North American Stainless has redundant, high-availability SANs that are synchronous – connected with a direct-attached fibre link. With this in place, the company can withstand a full hardware failure at a server level, at a switch level as well as a SAN level and still be up and running, in production. Other than a facility failure, North American Stainless now has 100% uptime.

The IT Landscape – Virtualization Powers Mission-Critical Applications

The virtual infrastructure powered by VMware and DataCore supports the company's Oracle ERP system servers (including payroll), several SQL servers, Blackberry® server, fax servers, print servers as well as user data. The ability to add VMs "on-the-fly" was a primary objective in going virtual. This is made possible through the combination of VMware vSphere's live migration functionality and the DataCore SAN. With VMware and DataCore run in tandem, the IT team at North American Stainless is able to do testing on applications and do so in way that the any testing procedures for new applications are segmented from the overall system. This is accomplished with DataCore SANmelody serving as a complete virtual storage infrastructure and storage management system – whereby multiple terabytes of storage can be both partitioned in units for a specific use as well as aggregated for general consumption.

Both SANmelody nodes are running on IBM 3650 servers as are the VMs on the two additional servers.

DataCore adds support for logical volumes up to 1 PB and the Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) standard

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/datacore-adds-support-for-logical-volumes-up-to-1-pb/
DataCore kicked off 2010 with updates to its SANSymphony and SANMelody storage virtualization software, adding support for logical volumes up to 1 PB and the Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) standard...

DataCore director of product marketing Augie Gonzalez said that as with last year’s 1 TB “mega-cache” support, the logical limit is beyond where most customers will be looking to stretch today. But the previous 2 TB limit had grown impractical for making RAID sets out of the latest 1 TB and 2 TB SATA disks.

“The logical volume expansion and thin provisioning allows users to say, ‘I don’t care how big the volume will be in the future’,” Gonzalez said. “Rather than defining LUNs up front and then having to make changes later, you can immediately set up a large volume and expand the storage with no applicvation or infrastructure changes.”

A DataCore service provider customers says adding ALUA support will improve management in his storage environment. Joseph Stedler, director of data center engineering for cloud computing and managed IT service provider OS33, said he uses DataCore’s SANSymphony software to host back-end storage for his SMB customers. Right now SANSymphony is running on IBM System x servers in front of IBM DS3400 arrays and Xiotech Emprise 5000 storage devices, mirroring between redundant sets of the tiered hardware. The logical volume expansion will be especially helpful in cutting down on backup administration overhead, Stedler said.

“With two terabyte volumes, we had to present things in 2 terabyte chunks to our Veeam [backup] server,” he said. “With a larger primary volume we could have fewer backup targets to manage.”

Stedler said the addition of ALUA support will be even more important for creating multipath I/O in OS33’s VMware environment. “ALUA solves a major pain for everybody running DataCore with VMware,” he said. “The way VMware understood it before was active-passive only. DataCore was able to do active-active failover but with VMware you’d have to run multipathing with the most recently used path. The new release is fully compliant with ALUA, so VMware can view it as active-active.”

Stedler said he’s looking forward to the addition of more granular scripting capabilities for the software in future releases.

DataCore virtual storage area network meets backup, disaster recovery needs for Legal Firm

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1373949_mem1,00.html?ShortReg=1&mboxConv=searchServerVirtualization_RegActivate_Submit&

With about 3 TB of virtualized server data and another 2 TB of email and database data that needed to be backed up daily, Canada-based law firm Stikeman Elliott LLP faced a growing problem. Virtual storage area network backups were taking 24 to 48 hours, and not all of the data was getting backed up properly.

What was needed, said Marco Magini, a network system specialist for the firm, was an almost instantaneous backup system. The firm chose DataCore Software Corp.'s SANmelody software, a virtual storage area network (SAN) that's installed on one or two x86 servers. The servers become virtual storage controllers for large arrays of physical and virtual storage disks. Those disks are then moved to existing networks to send data to application servers, according to DataCore.

SANmelody solved several other IT challenges, including disaster recovery shortcomings and high-availability needs for virtualized servers, Magini said. "I was not looking for storage virtualization. We had plenty of storage to fill our needs." But once the application was installed, we uncovered a host of new unexpected capabilities, he said.

The 1,200-employee law firm is using the product in its Montreal headquarters and will roll it out to six other offices around the globe.

Magini said he's still finding new ways to get performance gains using SANmelody. "We started small," he said. "It's not that you don't have faith in the products, but when you are moving business-critical data, you want to be sure it can handle it."

SANmelody also allowed the IT department to make use of all types of unused legacy disks. When added to the system, SANmelody's management system views them as one massive disk for storage. That allowed Magini to reuse about 50 old 72 GB drives that were sitting on a shelf.

Mark Bowker, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., said it's not unusual for a planned server or storage virtualization project to affect other IT needs. "People typically begin projects for something as simple as server consolidation or resource utilization," Bowker said. "But they find other infrastructure is needed. Once they start rolling out virtualization, they find there are other benefits to be had," including disaster recovery and improved backup capabilities.

New Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) Option for DataCore SANmelody targets ROBOs and Remote Offices

http://www.channelprosmb.com/article/15736/DataCore-Software-Adds-Advanced-Site-Recovery-ASR-Option-for-SANmelody/

ASR was first developed around SANsymphony to enable larger data centers and organizations to simplify remote site recovery while leveraging readily available IT assets between different sites. In releasing ASR for SANmelody, DataCore is providing a more cost-effective solution for smaller businesses and remote site deployments.

See ASR description:
http://www.datacore.com/downloads/ASRbackgrounder.pdf

ASR makes distributed disaster recovery (D-DR) flexibility more practical for all organizations, thereby opening the field of users to smaller businesses. ASR can be tailored to whatever a company's cost structure allows.

"With ASR, DataCore has developed a distributed and cost-effective way to have IT assets at remote offices and branch offices (ROBOs) take over for the main data center when the central machines are unable to meet processing obligations," explains Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing, DataCore Software. "Whether that is during planned facility outage or an unexpected disaster makes no difference. There are major cost savings from repurposing ROBO IT assets and personnel for business continuity."

Gonzalez also says DataCore's approach has an added benefit: regular disaster recovery tests and refresher training can be performed at the branch location during periods of slow activity, while the main data center processing continues undisturbed."

ASR for SANmelody builds on DataCore's universal storage virtualization software to move IT operations from a central site to one (or more) distributed contingency locations--and back again. While SANmelody ASR can be used between two sites, the far more likely scenario is a "hub and spoke" model in which a SANsymphony ASR license will be used in the central site, with connections to multiple remote offices/branch offices running SANmelody ASR.

This solution allows organizations to spread DR responsibilities across several smaller sites. Additionally, the solution makes no distinction between physical and virtual servers, unifying their DR operations in a common, automated process. And, ASR for SANmelody does not depend on duplicating equipment offsite, such as disk arrays and specialized networking gear.

Virtualization Predictions: Desktop and Storage Virtualization are the next "Big Wave"

David Marshall from Infoworld/VMblog has posted a series of interviews on 2010 predictions.
DataCore and 2 DataCore solution providers - Helixstorm and Mirazon Group share their outlook on 2010 trends. Read the full article at:

http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/12/31/desktop-and-storage-virtualization-are-the-next-big-wave.aspx

Desktop and Storage Virtualization are the next "big wave"

DataCore Software's CEO George Teixeira shares his viewpoint on 2010. Plus, representatives from two DataCore solution advisor partners weigh in on what they see coming in the virtualization space in 2010.

George Teixeira - President & CEO of DataCore Software

Prediction: Consolidation was the driver of the first wave of virtualization. In 2010, both storage and desktop virtualization will go mainstream.

Prediction: The growing cost disparity between Hypervisors and traditional SANs and shared storage arrays, needed to support virtual infrastructures, will slow down the pace of virtualization adoption.

Prediction: Microsoft Hyper-V has created another wave - the whole Microsoft world -that is embracing virtualization and this trend will continue to accelerate in 2010.

Prediction: This will be the year of virtual desktop proof of concepts (POCs) and pilots; greatest challenge to success is overcoming the cost of storage and the ability to scale storage effectively.

Prediction: Because virtual servers are starting to become a commodity - this puts even more importance on getting the storage piece right.

2 TB max VVol size ... busted! Top News of the Day - DataCore Rocks in 2010 with 1 Petabyte Support

2 TB max VVol size ... busted!
http://www.datacore.com/forum/thread/785/re-2-tb-max-vvol-size-busted-.aspx#post787

THE TOP NEWS OF THE DAY
DataCore Super-Sizes Virtual Disks (Up to 1PB)
With its latest storage virtualization software
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/software/datacore-super-sizes-virtual-disks

DataCore Software responds to market demands, this time by stretching the size of its virtual disks from 2 Terabytes (TBs) to 1 Petabyte (PB).

“Rather than inch up to 4 or 16 TBs as others are considering, DataCore made the strategic design choice to blow the roof off the capacity ceiling with 1 Petabyte LUNs,” commented Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing, DataCore Software. “But we’re still frugal on the back-end, using thin-provisioning to minimize how much real capacity has to be in place day one.”

Performance wise, these immense virtual disks benefit from DataCore’s 1 TB per node, 64-bit 'mega-caches.' “You can be big, and very fast too,” added Gonzalez.

DataCore Software Super-Sizes Virtual Disks with Storage Virtualization
http://au.sys-con.com/node/1232015

Happy Holidays from DataCore Software, Check out the latest PSP3 release for SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0

SANsymphony 7.0 PSP3 & SANmelody 3.0 PSP3 are released.
For more info, please check the DataCore support site.
http://datacore.com/support/support_home.asp

For a Blogger's view of SANmelody 3.0 PSP3, check out the SANmelody Tune's site.
http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2009/12/psp3-for-sanmelody-30-release.html

Host.net a BroadbandOne Company offers Cloud Computing Solution - VMware, DataCore and Cisco - vServers, vStorage and vNetworks

Check out the new solution offering from Host.net. Virtual Servers & Virtual Storage [powered by DataCore] for Enterprise Scalability: http://www.host.net/Uploads/HostnetCloudInsertV10.pdf

Deploying DataCore Storage Virtualization Software And Microsoft Hyper-V

http://www.datastorageconnection.com/article.mvc/The-Sweet-Smell-Of-Server-And-Storage-0001
"What we have found with the DataCore and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 + Hyper-V combination is a virtual infrastructure that is redundant, reliable, flexible and expandable," stated Mary Toupin, Office Manager, Northwest Wholesale Florists. "Moreover, the redundant storage with DataCore complements the redundancy built into the VM system. We are very pleased with the way the system has performed."

The original desire to upgrade its IT infrastructure was driven by the fact that NWF was moving to a new warehouse – and needed to do that while running operations from the existing warehouse. NWF looked to its partner to design a new IT infrastructure system and provide a smooth transition. In this case, there were a number of benefits in deploying Hyper-V, even before the release of Windows Server 2008 R2. However, after the R2 release of Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V has been infused with live migration functionality – which was not in Hyper-V prior to R2. "As a reseller, the combination of DataCore with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V gives our firm and this customer a lot of flexibility," commented Scott Gorcester, President, Moose Logic, a solutions provider and DataCore partner in the Pacific Northwest. "Using DataCore storage virtualization combined with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V in joint configurations is already proving to be a great combination for both resellers and users alike."

Re-purposing Existing Hardware and Deploying Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V

Knowing that there were two sound pieces of hardware that could be re-purposed, Moose Logic recommended a solution based on Windows Server 2008 R2 running Hyper-V. The firm built the customer two Hyper-V servers with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, running in a failover cluster. Coupled with the clustered pair of Hyper-V servers is a pair of DataCore SANmelody servers – one on an existing HP DL 380 G5 that was repurposed after adding new disk drives and more memory and the other on a new HP DL 380 G5 server to match the existing one. These G5 servers became the SAN nodes. This system went live at the customer's new location on October 1, 2009. Thirty-plus (30+) users benefit from the system daily.

DataCore performance testing with Sun 'Thumper' server

Recently had the chance to configure a SUN x4500 "Thumper" server with SANmelody 3.0.2 for connection to an VMware Vsphere4 environment. I was able to put together some basic benchmark numbers for this very interesting configuration which highlights the flexibility that DataCore software brings in designing storage solution to fit specific budget and storage requirements.
See the complete post and results at SANmelody Tunes:
http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html

Network Computing Feature: WHY A STORAGE BACKBONE BENEFITS FROM HARDWARE INDEPENDENCE WHEN BUILDING A STORAGE VIRTUALISATION STRATEGY.

Network Computing Feature
http://networkcomputing.co.uk/articles/reviews.asp?a_id=253
From Network Computing Vol 18
DATACORE EXPLAINS WHY A STORAGE BACKBONE BENEFITS FROM HARDWARE INDEPENDENCE WHEN BUILDING A STORAGE VIRTUALISATION STRATEGY.

Over the past 12 months as the credit crunch has deepened, organisations have sought alternatives from purchasing costly storage hardware. In turn, many have explored the adoption of software virtualisation to enable and optimise their storage. They have understood that software based Storage Area Networks (SAN) offer immediate advantages to the bottom line, invariably meaning that the IT Department can enable the project to progress, rather than be stopped at sign off. The Finance Manager has also seen that software based SANs enable the IT Manager to repurpose existing hardware, or to elect to buy lower cost hardware, as opposed to always chasing newer, high cost hardware, to get the required functionality.

The inherent beauty of storage virtualisation software is that it can bring high performance and high functionality along with hardware independence at lower investment and with lower operational costs. This approach can also be highly complementary to an IT Department's preferred hardware, giving an extra lease of life, or adding that extra functionality normally only available on highend disk arrays. So storage virtualisation, like server virtualisation, implies the use of software to overcome inherent hardware limitations, without regard to the make or model of the underlying storage devices; those who limit use of this powerful technology to a given hardware configuration, are doing the industry a disservice, setting users up for avoidable obsolescence. The central point of the debate lies not in hardware versus software, but in the hardware choices offered to run the storage virtualisation code, this year, next year, and the year after that.

Pick an appliance and your fate is sealed. The moment that appliance runs out of steam, be it processing power, I/O bandwidth or expansion slots, determines its end of life. The rate of change in the computer industry suggests that could be as short lived as 6 months. What would you say to anyone who told you that your server virtualisation license can only run on your current server? And that you have to buy a new license to move it to a bigger or faster server? Worse yet, that you have to buy them together from the same supplier, who only offers two models! And it only supports their "special" disks. Pretty ridiculous, but that is exactly what storage virtualisation appliance vendors promote under the header of being 'factory integrated'.

Does it matter whether you use Fibre Channel or iSCSI for a software based SAN? Both provide solutions for different needs today. Fibre Channel is very fast and easily outperforms iSCSI at the moment. It was designed and optimised for a SAN, and many companies have taken the jump and invested in Fibre Channel switches, Host Bus Adapters and storage, but it is costly compared to IP SANs where iSCSI uses NICs and switches that are commodity items, available at commodity prices. Often an enterprise that has already invested in Fibre Channel or needs the performance of Fibre Channel for its hightransaction and high workload applications also uses iSCSI for lower performance applications.

Using the existing skills in an organisation of IP Networks rather than the 'dark magic' of Fibre Channel, means that human resources are more readily available and their costs are invariably lower. But as technology moves forward and iSCSI speeds increase from 10Gbit to 100Gbit and eventually to 1Tbit, the cost differences will be minor, let alone looking at FCoE, and other network technologies of the future.

Once again, only a truly independent software virtualisation solution can work with all these technologies today and future proof the options for tomorrow. Those who have adopted a hardware appliance have done so at their own peril, playing the future-guess game and possibly limiting their business.

Barren County Schools Deploys DataCore Storage Virtualization to Support VMware and Provide a Complete Virtual Environment

http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/news-full.php?id=13668&result=datacore

"This is not one of those products where we were sold more than we bought," concluded Gumm. "With DataCore SANmelody, we bought more than we were sold. We are getting far more out of it than I thought we would, which is a wonderful thing."

"The biggest benefit for us was realizing a virtualized data infrastructure," stated Steve Gumm, IT director, Barren County Schools. "Because we adopted storage virtualization, we now have a front-end piece whereby we can deploy any hardware behind it that we want. We can bring in an additional SAN if we want – whatever vendor we choose – and still use the DataCore product. We can just fold those SANs into our infrastructure and it would be seamless to the end user. Beyond this – with DataCore we were able to repurpose old equipment."

"For all intents and purposes, we are 100% virtual," commented Gumm. Barren County Schools has two data centers – one primary and one secondary. VMware vSphere is currently running on two, new PowerEdge servers. The Xiotech storage arrays are in both data center locations – the primary one and the "offsite," or secondary, data center. The two locations contain a similar, mirrored, environment which includes two DELL vSphere servers and a Xiotech array which are attached to the SANmelody SAN server. To get to this, Barren County Schools migrated everything it had on an existing EMC SAN to the DataCore and Xiotech based SAN in a live environment using SANmelody to do so. The IT team mapped LUNs from the old SAN to the new SAN and while in production migrated all of the data to the new location.

Did DataCore Software Invent Thin Provisioning SAN Software?

The original post on the subject on DrunkenData: http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=1162
More recently:

Check out DataCore Software, the company that invented thin provisioning. Yes, ‘invented’, the first company to ship the network-wide thin provisioning capability, ala a SNIA defined Sparse Volume, back in 2002, well before 3Par, the company credited with the term “thin provisioning”. DataCore and 3Par were several years ahead of and have several years more experience in, thin provisioning, than the competition.

DataCore also provides space reclamation for any host O.S. type and does what 3Par, Compellent, NetApp, HDS and all the other hardware centric storage providers DON’T do, DataCore allows the end user to choose who’s disk and what type of disk technology they want to use, freeing them from the shackles of the storage silo model of having to fill all those expansion trays and drive slots from the given company, where the first time buyer sweetheart deal is long gone.

Test Drive it now!Try thin provisioning with your disks or storage array, a 30 day trial download is available at: http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmel_trynow_form.asp

Plus, given the fact it’s openly running on industry standard commodity hardware, it’s always at least a generation ahead of all the ’specialized’ array controller heads, that are also running on commodity hardware in reality. Add to that the flexibility that type of solution provides when it comes to adding interfaces (iSCSI, FC), increasing interface density, speed (the first 8Gb FC target on the market), cache size, etc., you can’t find a better overall value.

Dave Brown: http://www.cinetica.it/2009/10/14/start-thin-stay-thin-think-thin/

Eweek: Live Migration Coming into Play in System Refreshes

http://blogs.eweek.com/storage_station/content/general/live_migration_coming_into_play_in_system_refreshes.html Storage virtualization provider DataCore Software is now deploying its SANmelody system in conjunction with the second release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, working in clustered Hyper-V systems.

The news here is that a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster now has the ability to "live-migrate" the virtual machines, meaning two cluster nodes have read/write access to the disk at the same time. This wasn't possible in the first release.

The time and money savings of this feature are potentially significant. Live migration elicited a lot of interest recently when DataCore showcased its storage virtualization software at Microsoft's TechEd Europe show in Berlin.

"What this DataCore-Hyper-V setup does is to minimize or even eliminate downtime, when we need to make system changes," said Jack Weisberg, IT director of an early adopter, the New York law firm of McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams. "So far this system is working very nicely. Plus, everything is redundant. We have redundant storage with DataCore. And we have redundancy built into the VM system."

When making the purchasing decision to replace some legacy hardware and software, Weisberg said it boiled down to DataCore's SANmelody versus an HP/LeftHand Networks system.
"In comparing both systems, we found both to be strong in terms of their capability of avoiding single points of failure," Weisberg said. "But I really like not being tied to specific hardware -- something DataCore enables. It was very important for us not to get locked into older platforms, when there is newer hardware available on the market that we could use with SANmelody."Using DataCore, the storage solution provider, P&J Computers, was able to use its preferred hardware of choice -- in this case, enterprise-class 6GB SAS drives. DataCore enabled administrators to add a couple of 10GB NICs (network interface cards) in these servers at a very low cost.

So, there's some real-world decision making at work. Is that something you're looking at for 2010?

DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Proves to Be a Great Fit for Microsoft Hyper-V and Cluster Deployments

Case in Point - Law Firm McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams
http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/11/16/datacore-storage-virtualization-software-proves-to-be-a-great-fit-for-microsoft-hyper-v-and-cluster-deployments.aspx

DataCore Storage Virtualization Software Proves to Be a Great Fit for Microsoft Hyper-V and Cluster Deployments; Case in Point - Law Firm McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams
Microsoft Hyper-V and DataCore Software's Storage Virtualization Are Winning New Customers Together by Successfully Powering Virtual Infrastructures

DataCore Software announced its SANmelody storage virtualization solution has been deployed along with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ at the law firm McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams. "McNamee/Lochner" is one of the largest law firms in Albany, New York. "The combination of DataCore with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 for Hyper-V allowed us a lot of flexibility to deploy the best solution possible at McNamee/Lochner with the available hardware," stated Kelly M. Knowles, Network Engineer, P&J Computers, Inc.

Hardware Independence - Optimized by Virtualization

McNamee/Lochner had reached a point where the firm needed to increase its storage capacity. "Our storage was growing at a much faster rate than it had in the past," noted Jack Weisberg, IT director, McNamee, Lochner, Titus and Williams. "Moreover, the hardware that we were running on was out of warranty - so we were looking to get something new." Since 2004, the firm had been using a clustered SAN - an HP MSA 1000. Initially, a key requirement in a new system was something that had a solid approach to redundancy, as well as one that offered ease of expansion.
Whereas LeftHand Networks was an early front-runner, since it seemed a logical replacement to the MSA SAN, P&J Computers presented DataCore SANmelody to the firm as well. "In comparing both systems, we found both to be strong in terms of their capability of avoiding single points of failure," noted Weisberg. "But I really like not being tied to specific hardware - something DataCore enables. It was very important for us not to get locked into older platforms, when there is newer hardware available on the market that we could use with DataCore SANmelody."

With DataCore, P&J was able to their preferred hardware of choice - in this case enterprise-class disks 6 GB SAS drives. Knowles praised the ability of DataCore to enable administrators to add a couple of 10 GB NICs in these servers for a very low cost as "tremendous."

P&J Computers - Trusted Solution Providers
DataCore partner P&J Computers, Inc., a data storage and IT service provider, sees the DataCore and Microsoft Hyper-V combination to be not only a good fit - but a great opportunity for both resellers and users alike. It also showcases P&J Computers' ability to be one of the first to implement the latest Windows Server 2008 R2 technology, which was released to the manufacturer (RTM) in July and was just released publicly in October 2009.

P&J Computers is engaged in several accounts where they are deploying DataCore storage virtualization, Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V in joint configurations. What the partner saw in the new R2 release of Windows Server 2008 release was an opportunity for McNamee/Lochner to take some of the complexity out of its existing environment. What was imperative to making this possible was the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the live migration functionality - which was not in Hyper-V prior to R2.

A Virtual Infrastructure - Combining Servers and Storage to Support Mission-Critical Applications

DataCore SANmelody is now deployed in conjunction with a clustered Hyper-V system. Moreover, with a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster McNamee/Lochner now has the ability to "live migrate" the virtual machines (VMs). Both cluster nodes have read/write access to the disk, at the same time. Running on this infrastructure, there are four (4) VMs that can "live migrate" between the two hosts. Currently, the second node at McNamee/Lochner is located onsite, albeit in a separate rack. "What this DataCore-Hyper-V set-up does is to minimize or even eliminate downtime, when we need to make system changes," noted Weisberg. "So far this system is working very nicely. Plus, everything is redundant. We have redundant storage with DataCore. And we have redundancy built into the VM system."

The multi-Terabyte data pool at McNamee/Lochner and the system is currently supporting 130 users. A third node - running Microsoft Data Protection Manager - is deployed for back-up. The applications McNamee/Lochner uses run on HP DL 380 G6s (dual processor, quad core with Nahalim). The 24 GB of memory can be expanded to 144 GB, if need be. "All the bread and butter applications for running McNamee/Lochner's business will run on this by year-end," noted Knowles.

The next phase of the migration will entail moving what was clustered on Windows 2003 on the old SAN into the virtual environment as well. Space is allocated and P&J Computers just needs to schedule a date to do the cut-over.

Value Protection That Meets Business Objectives
In embracing a virtualized approach, McNamee/Lochner is looking three or four years down the road. Therefore DataCore's "Carry Forward Value Protection Program" - which translates to "Buy - Upgrade - And only pay the difference" - is for McNamee/Lochner a real insurance policy, whereby they might look at new hardware and still keep the same software. "I love this policy that DataCore offers," commented Weisberg. "I am entitled to upgrade the hardware I use with DataCore storage virtualization software. Rather than be forced to scrap my MSA 1000 SAN when it is at its end-of-life, with DataCore I can just buy new hardware and I can continue to use the software - on any new environment I choose. I really think this is awesome."

"We were looking for something redundant, reliable, flexible and expandable," summarized Weisberg. "The DataCore-Hyper-V combination really fit our needs. I certainly like the virtual environment. I also really like having redundant storage. And having seamless failover was key for us as well."

About McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams
Based in Albany, New York, McNamee, Lochner, Titus & Williams is one of the Capital Region's oldest and largest law firms with multiple practice areas ranging from civil litigation to business transactions, reflecting a diverse clientele. For more, visit www.mltw.com.

About P&J Computers, Inc
For connectivity, network and data center solutions, P&J Computers has served as a complete source for IT solutions since 1984. www.pjcomp.com.

DataCore Virtual SAN Appliance Software Lets Customers Experience New Migration and Clustering Features in Microsoft Hyper-V without Buying a New SAN

http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/news-full.php?id=13508&result=datacore

DataCore Software says that customers who don't have a SAN can now experience new features in Microsoft Hyper-V including live migration, dynamic load balancing and high-availability, simply by downloading DataCore's pre-configured Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA).VSA makes it possible for two physical servers to share disks and that is something of great significance to Hyper-V users – since many Hyper-V capabilities require just that. The DataCore VSA comes in a standard VHD format for Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ and Microsoft Hyper-V.The VSA can be downloaded at http://www.datacore.com/msvsappliance/ .
Fully operational in just a few minutes With DataCore's Virtual SAN Appliance Microsoft Hyper-V users can quickly:

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  Utilize Microsoft virtualization environments with an iSCSI SAN created from their server's internal disks. No need for new hardware!
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  Pool up to 1 Terabyte of disk space "Thin Provision" storage to the virtual machines. See how much capacity it saves!
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  Leverage DataCore's "mega cache" capability – this speeds up performance for Exchange, SQL and others applications using surplus server memory to cache I/Os from the virtual SAN
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  Use Snapshots for Instant Volume Cloning and Fast Disk-to-Disk Backups Create a SAN from their server's internal disks

DataCore™ Virtualizes Storage for Microsoft Hyper-V Users "Why wait until you can roll in a SAN?" said Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing at DataCore Software. "When DataCore can virtualize the physical storage from internal or direct-attached disks to make it behave as a shared storage pool."

Microsoft and DataCore Software Combine to Address ‘Real-World' Site Recovery

http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/news-full.php?id=13495&result=datacore
Market Forces: New Virtualization Drivers; Comprehensive Solutions

Despite the tough economic times, Microsoft has noted recent studies which have reported that over 30% of businesses surveyed this year indicated DR will be their main driver for virtualization. These reports show a continued shift, as IT professionals look at addressing new challenges beyond test/dev and basic server consolidation scenarios in deploying virtualization technologies.Microsoft has clearly recognized the importance of site recovery solutions in terms of addressing real-world user scenarios and the benefit of partnering to provide end-to-end solutions that together overcome the limitations of single-vendor, specific site recovery solutions such as VMware's SRM.

Microsoft and DataCore Software Combine to Address ‘Real-World' Site Recovery
Taking machines from one site and replicating them to another site before a calamity unfolds is not new. But buyer beware. Many other disaster recovery products are limiting in that they assume recovery, from one environment to an identical or very similar environment or they support only a subset of the infrastructure. Often physical servers are not supported or require a separate solution from applications and virtual servers. DataCore ASR enables users to execute site recovery operations in a way that is fundamentally different from existing solutions in the marketplace today by bringing the data center together into a single solution.

"The industry is conditioned to think of DR as a one-to-one proposition. This places unreasonable demands on a single recovery site that mirrors the main site," argues Augie Gonzalez, product marketing director at DataCore Software."But most organizations aren't structured that way. They look more like a hub and spoke, with smaller branches emanating from the central data center. For this reason, DataCore's Advanced Site Recovery distributes the disaster recovery workloads among these smaller entities, allowing each of them to accept a more manageable role in keeping the business going."

DataCore Software: Create a virtual SAN for Hyper-V

Create a virtual SAN for Hyper-V
http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1374013,00.html#
DataCore released a version of its Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) this week for Microsoft Hyper-V environments. The product allows customers to access Hyper-V features such as live migration, dynamic load balancing and high availability without having to purchase an external storage area network (SAN) storage.Using locally attached internal disk drives, the DataCore VSA creates a virtual iSCSI SAN that can pool up to 1 TB of capacity.

VSA includes the ability to "thin provision" VM storage to save capacity, create snapshots for instant volume cloning and speed up application performance by leveraging surplus server memory.DataCore VSA comes as a virtual appliance in Microsoft-standard Virtual Hard Disk format, and can be downloaded from the DataCore website for a free 30-day trial.