DataCore Launches “The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud”

DataCore Launches Large Scale, Automated Infrastructure-as-a-Service Enhancements and Empowers Enterprises with “The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud”

DataCore Software, the storage hypervisor leader and premier provider of storage virtualization software, announced far-reaching innovations required to manage enterprise-wide storage and quickly roll out agile, scalable cloud storage infrastructures. Aptly described as “The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud,” DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V 9.0 offers customers superior flexibility, powerful automation and exceptional value.

The new capabilities are driven by:

•Organizations planning private cloud deployments

•Large data centers seeking responsive, cloud-like services

•Cloud service providers (CSPs) developing public, private and hybrid cloud offerings.

“DataCore’s latest storage hypervisor innovations, together with both its pricing and rental models, are extremely well tailored for building out cloud storage infrastructures, whether a user is starting out with a modest trial or is well on their way to a full-blown, large scale rollout,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “It has succeeded in abstracting the storage-related aspects of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer so that cloud-storage is easy to drop into place, and can be flexed or expanded at will. It makes perfect sense – even for contemporary data centers that don’t yet have cloud on the brain.”

Manage Storage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to Meet Unpredictable Demands
Storage has long been managed as static, motionless hardware. Each request for capacity requires IT specialists to manually intervene anytime new applications or users demand new storage. That means provisioning space using complicated, device-specific procedures and permanent connections. In contrast, self-service requests for cloud storage come fast and furious in unpredictable patterns. Resources across multiple purpose-built devices with tiered levels of protection must be quickly reserved and subsequently released to make room for the next subscriber. Manual intervention, especially in large scale systems, is overwhelming and simply not an option. It is made even more difficult by the sheer number of devices and the variety of equipment necessary to satisfy the different classes of service.

“IaaS modules supported by SANsymphony-V 9.0 orchestrate the dynamic coordination between the catalog choices subscribers see and the storage devices enlisted to meet their needs,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO, DataCore Software. “It’s what makes cloud storage work unattended.”

Powerful Infrastructure-wide Storage Management and Dynamic Asset Optimization
CSPs can programmatically call the IaaS functions in SANsymphony-V 9.0 to satisfy each client’s individual storage needs. The DataCore storage hypervisor provides an extensive and comprehensive set of capabilities that can be centrally managed and work infrastructure-wide. Storage devices can be profiled and organized into different tiers and optimized dynamically to maximize the efficient use of more expensive and higher performance assets. The software dynamically sets up or tears down virtual disks on cue, reclaiming space when done. For complete control and visibility of the infrastructure, SANsymphony-V 9.0 offers IaaS modules that integrate with popular server hypervisors from VMware and Microsoft, as well as broad systems management products like Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager and VMware vCenter.

Device-Independent Storage Virtualization Scales Up and Out
Variable size is an intrinsic property of cloud infrastructures, dictating that storage pools be segmented, readily expandable and even shrunk according to the changing needs of users. In response, SANsymphony-V 9.0 scales up and scales out, automatically adapting to new requirements quickly and without disruption. That means key storage elements beyond disk space - including the horsepower to multiply IOPS, throughput and caches - can be harnessed quickly for added performance when demand calls for it. The SANsymphony-V 9.0 centralized management console scales accordingly, supporting operations on large groups of related objects for convenience and synchronization, yet allowing experts to troubleshoot and tune on a granular basis.

Scale to Federate Diverse Resources; Automate to Optimize Utilization and Performance
The storage hypervisor excels at pooling distributed storage assets regardless of vendor make or model, whether co-located or many miles away. The hardware-agnostic design harnesses the value of purpose-built storage devices (solid state disks, external storage systems, internal server drives and public cloud storage) while eliminating management confusion and complexity. Automatic storage tiering combined with automatic load balancing results in optimal use of disk space and the ultimate I/O performance. These features are key to fulfilling the dynamic and variable needs of users, applications and the business at a reasonable cost.

The Role of Scale in Realizing Resiliency and Meeting Looming Performance Expansion
In large scale scenarios, SANsymphony-V 9.0 uses N+1 redundant grids to ensure necessary performance expansion and to make cloud storage continuously available. The storage hypervisor anticipates equipment periodically being taken out-of-service for planned and unplanned reasons, redirecting suitable storage resources to take their place in accordance with service level agreements. In effect, a configuration that requires two storage virtualization nodes to handle peak workloads is configured with an active third node to which information is mirrored. The third node is able to take over transparently for any of the others. As the cloud expands, additional nodes can be seamlessly inserted to add performance and facilitate growth.

For evidence of continuous availability with DataCore’s architecture in large scale deployments, one need only look at Host.net, a provider of enterprise private cloud as well as colocation, offsite backup and network solutions. Jeff Slapp, chief technology officer at Host.net explains, “We’re fast approaching 1,000 days of 100 percent uptime thanks largely to the DataCore platform – and we continue to check off days on the calendar without a hitch. All this while we expand, upgrade, change out storage devices and even reconfigure networks in the background. It offers flexibility and interchangeability at its best.”

Unlike traditional data centers, clouds don’t just expand at the core, they expand at the periphery, particularly to remote locations. The satellite locations provide extra safeguards against regional disasters and bring the data closer to distant subscribers. SANsymphony-V 9.0 stretches outwards to connect these sites with 1-to-many and many-to-1 replication options. Disaster recovery procedures can be periodically tested and verified without disturbing production activities at other points in the cloud. Similarly, the software allows rapid resynchronization and resumption of a temporarily suspended site.

Licensing, Pricing and Availability
The new licensing structure for SANsymphony-V 9.0 aligns perfectly with the broad range and scale of the product. It is available in five different virtualization models spanning from very large deployments to small pilot programs and branch applications. Customers can upgrade across levels without any software “throw-away,” disruption or retraining, ensuring maximum ROI.  SANsymphony-V 9.0 will be generally available from DataCore-authorized partners around the world beginning July 2, 2012. For more information, please visit – http://www.datacore.com/storagehypervisor .

DataCore Software has released new plug-in to integrate DataCore’s Storage Hypervisor and Management with VMware vCenter™

DataCore Software has released a new plug-in software to integrate the powerful enterprise-wide storage management capabilities of DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V Storage Hypervisor with VMware vCenter™ Server. The management plug-in software is available immediately for download to all SANsymphony-V customers.

VMware vCenter is the de facto standard for managing VMware virtual infrastructures and the SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor combines powerful storage virtualisation and enterprise-wide storage management. Together, these capabilities are seamlessly integrated to allow a VMware administrator to efficiently manage all their virtual machines (VM) and storage resources from a single console.

DataCore and VMware – A Combination Delivering Compelling Benefits

VMware administrators are now able to provision, monitor and manage their storage and server resources from a single pane of glass and perform common storage tasks and complex scheduling workflows to clone, snapshot and restore datastores and VMs without having to become storage experts

The vCenter Plug-In helps VMware administrators increase productivity and respond faster to user needs in a number of ways, including:
•Enabling an end-to-end view for VMware to storage from a virtual machine, host or virtual disk perspective; central monitoring and management of storage resources

•Rapidly provisioning virtual disks to VMware vSphere®/ESX® hosts

•Creating and restoring snapshots of datastores where VMs are housed
•Scheduling tasks to coordinate workflows between vSphere and SANsymphony-V servers

•Taking consistent snapshots of a datastore for validation or before making changes to the environment

•Scheduling recovery clones (full copy) or efficient differential snapshots to rapidly restore VMs

•Employing high-availability mirror protection to virtual disks

•Visualising current conditions in easy-to-understand terms to simplify troubleshooting and performing root cause analysis for virtual machines and their storage•Lowering OpEx and enhancing administrator productivity – through automated workflows, task wizards and lesser need for storage training and specialised skill sets



Simplify Difficult Storage Tasks: Snapshots, Clones and Restorations
The software’s built in wizards and simple command menus take the complexity out of creating, scheduling or capturing snapshots of VMs. Administrators simply select the datastore housing the specific VMs of interest. The plug-in signals the VMware vCenter Server to quiesce those VMs and then triggers SANsymphony-V to take snapshots of the corresponding datastore. Both full clone and differential (lightweight) snapshots are supported. The known positive state in those online snapshots may be used to set up new VMs or quickly recover from malware and user errors that may have damaged their integrity.

Snapshots with a click of the mouse may be scheduled at regular intervals, for instance, Saturday morning at 3:00 a.m. when it will not disrupt daily operations. The workflow can also define how long the snapshots should be retained before being deleted.

TechEd 2012: DataCore Software Selected to Present Storage Virtualization Best Practices Sessions for Building, Deploying and Managing Private Clouds

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2012/06/04/teched-2012-datacore-software-selected-present-storage-virtualization-best-practices-sess?page=0,0

Microsoft Enlists Longtime Partner and Creators of the First Storage Hypervisor to Showcase Joint Cloud Solutions at Worldwide TechEd 2012 Events in North America, Europe and APAC

DataCore Software, the storage hypervisor leader and premier provider of storage virtualization software, today announced it has been chosen to participate worldwide at multiple TechEd events and to present the “Private Cloud Design and Management” session at Microsoft’s TechEd North America 2012 aimed at helping organizations understand and overcome the difficult storage related challenges needed to build, deploy and manage successful private clouds. TechEd is Microsoft's premier technology conference for IT professionals and developers and takes place June 11-14 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. DataCore, who introduced the first storage hypervisor with its SANsymphony-V, will be delivering a session titled “Private Cloud Design and Management: Speeding the Transition to a Responsive, Virtualized Storage Infrastructure,” scheduled for June 12 at 10:15 a.m. ET in room S210A (387).

Microsoft’s selection of DataCore to present the session marks the continuation of a long relationship between the companies, highlighted by the success of thousands of joint customers and partners around the world using the combination to build highly available and flexible virtual infrastructures. For those unable to attend the session in North America, please note that DataCore has also been chosen to present multiple sessions at Microsoft’s TechEd Europe and will have a booth at TechEd Australia showcasing private cloud design and management, as well as its pioneering storage hypervisor, SANsymphony-V.

“Private Cloud Design and Management” will detail how to transform operations into a robust, private cloud, utilizing existing storage assets and without putting a massive strain on IT departments or budgets. The session will provide recommendations for achieving performance, availability and flexibility through a virtualized storage infrastructure. Focus will be placed on incorporating storage hypervisor functions to rapidly provision resources, dynamically distribute workloads across multiple tiers and types of storage, non-disruptively refresh hardware to expand capacity, while tapping into the latest and most cost-effective disk technologies. Emphasis will be placed on leveraging and optimizing Hyper-V, clustered shared volumes and Microsoft System Center. Attendees will take away concrete, actionable steps considered standard practice by seasoned colleagues in IT for building and enhancing private cloud infrastructure. The session will include a live demonstration and a discussion of various real-world customer scenarios.

Conducting “Private Cloud Design and Management” will be DataCore’s Director of Worldwide Business Development, Rob Griffin, an expert in helping original equipment manufacturers, independent software and hardware vendors take advantage of private cloud and virtualization technology. Griffin was formerly involved in OEM Server business development at Microsoft Corporation and was a server product manager at Lenovo. He also possesses nearly a decade of experience as an IT director.

“Advancements in private cloud and virtualization have been very dramatic and rapid, so it’s important IT professionals get a real handle on proven approaches before proceeding down a path that can be costly and frustrating,” said Griffin. “Improperly handling storage is an area that can bring such projects to a grinding halt. With DataCore’s breakthrough storage hypervisor, and our long history in virtualization, we can draw off real-world examples to provide attendees with solid and precise recommendations that will help them achieve the great benefits of private cloud in the easiest, most cost-effective way possible.”

“Private Cloud Design and Management” is an intermediate level breakout session, though it is valuable for anyone interested in learning more about successfully harnessing the technology. Additionally, DataCore will be exhibiting at TechEd and invites attendees to visit booth #509 for further information. 

The Top 2 virtualization worries keeping IT admins up all night

System downtime and slow application performance related to storage in virtualized environments are the primary concerns of IT administrators surveyed in a new report on the state of private clouds.

IT administrators are more concerned about performance issues and less about the cost of storage than they were a year ago, according to the report, “2012 State of the Private Cloud Survey” by DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization software.
DataCore’s survey, which polled IT administrators in the private and public sectors worldwide, revealed that 63 percent of respondents consider system downtime and slow application performance to be their primary storage-related virtualization concerns, up from 36 percent in 2011.

IT administrators still consider the rising cost of storage to be a problem with virtualization initiatives, but overall it is declining as a major concern, with just over half (51 percent) describing increasing storage costs as one of their biggest problems (down from 66 percent in 2011), the report states.

While increasing storage costs may be less of an issue than last year, storage-related costs continue to comprise a significant portion of virtualization budgets, with 44 percent of respondents saying that storage costs represent more than a quarter of their total budget for virtualization, the report states

Many companies are allocating more money for storage, with 37 percent saying their storage budgets have increased this year, while just 13 percent say they have been cut.

Despite this, more than one in three respondents (34 percent) admit they underestimated the impact server/desktop virtualization would have on their storage costs. For those deploying a private cloud, more than one in four (28 percent) underestimated how storage costs would be affected.

“More companies are virtualizing more servers than ever before, but a notable faction of users – about a third – are underestimating the storage costs associated with server and desktop virtualization projects as well as the storage costs associated with private clouds,” said to Mark Peters, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.

Throwing more money at storage has not reduced performance concerns for companies that have embraced server and desktop virtualization. Even with an increase in the average storage budget, more companies reported significant problems with storage-related performance, bottlenecks, downtimes and business continuity in 2012, the report states.

“Rather than simply continuing to expand traditional storage solutions, IT managers would be well advised to consider addressing performance and downtime issues with a storage virtualization solution that enables them to apply a simplified management approach to manage their storage resources in a single, logical storage pool," Peters said.

“As virtualization moves from theory to practice, storage-related performance and availability are becoming of greater concern to businesses, but cost concerns haven’t gone away,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software, who recommends the use of storage hypervisors.

Storage hypervisors ensure high performance and availability in the storage infrastructure through features such as auto-tiering, device interchangeability, thin provisioning and continuous data protection, Teixeira noted. “A storage hypervisor solves the cost issue by enabling enterprises to make greater use of existing storage infrastructure, while reducing the need for large-scale storage hardware,” he said.

Read full article at: http://gcn.com/articles/2012/05/01/datacore-storage-virtualization-survey-top-concerns.aspx

DataCore Software Announces Enterprise-Wide Storage Hypervisor Management Integration with VMware vCenter™ to Empower vSphere Admins to Manage VMs, Snapshots and Storage from a Single Console

Enterprises can control and schedule key SANsymphony-V storage virtualization services directly from their VMware vCenter™ Server management platform

"The new DataCore Storage Hypervisor Plug-in for VMware vCenter Server combines two industry-leading management solutions to offer customers the best of both worlds through a single view infrastructure management," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "Customers can better manage and realize the full benefits of their desktop, server and storage resources in a VMware virtual environment."

DataCore Software today announced that it has released new plug-in software to integrate the powerful enterprise-wide storage management capabilities of DataCore’s SANsymphony™-V Storage Hypervisor with VMware vCenter™ Server. The management plug-in software is available immediately for download to all SANsymphony-V customers.

VMware vCenter is the de facto standard for managing VMware virtual infrastructures and the SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor combines powerful storage virtualization and enterprise-wide storage management. Together, these capabilities are seamlessly integrated to allow a VMware administrator to efficiently manage all their virtual machines (VM) and storage resources from a single console.

DataCore and VMware – A Combination Delivering Compelling Benefits
VMware administrators are now able to provision, monitor and manage their storage and server resources from a single pane of glass and perform common storage tasks and complex scheduling workflows to clone, snapshot and restore data stores and VMs without having to become storage experts.

The vCenter Plug-In helps VMware administrators increase productivity and respond faster to user needs in a number of ways, including:


• Enabling an end-to-end view for VMware to storage from a virtual machine, host or virtual disk perspective; central monitoring and management of storage resources

• Rapidly provisioning virtual disks to VMware vSphere®/ESX® hosts


• Creating and restoring snapshots of data stores where VMs are housed


• Scheduling tasks to coordinate workflows between vSphere and SANsymphony-V servers


• Taking consistent snapshots of a data store for validation or before making changes to the environment


• Scheduling recovery clones (full copy) or efficient differential snapshots to rapidly restore VMs


• Employing high-availability mirror protection to virtual disks


• Visualizing current conditions in easy-to-understand terms to simplify troubleshooting and performing root cause analysis for virtual machines and their storage


• Lowering OpEx and enhancing administrator productivity – through automated workflows, task wizards and lesser need for storage training and specialized skill sets

Simplify Difficult Storage Tasks: Snapshots, Clones and Restorations
The software’s built in wizards and simple command menus take the complexity out of creating, scheduling or capturing snapshots of VMs. Administrators simply select the data store housing the specific VMs of interest. The plug-in signals the VMware vCenter Server to quiesce those VMs and then triggers SANsymphony-V to take snapshots of the corresponding data store. Both full clone and differential (lightweight) snapshots are supported. The known positive state in those online snapshots may be used to set up new VMs or quickly recover from malware and user errors that may have damaged their integrity.

Snapshots with a click of the mouse may be scheduled at regular intervals, for instance, Saturday morning at 3:00 a.m. when it will not disrupt daily operations. The workflow can also define how long the snapshots should be retained before being deleted.

VMware administrators want to focus on VMs not storage complexity
Transitioning to a virtualized environment creates new requirements for the effective management of the underlying storage resources that are virtualized. VMware administrators are faced with requests to provision new VMs, set up data stores and manage cloning and snapshot copy operations. There can be a lack of in-depth knowledge of storage systems and no end-to-end management leaving VMware administrators with an incomplete view into how physical resources in the virtual environment are used. This in turn, can increase the amount of time and effort required to manage the environment. Therefore, VMware administrators need to be prepared with the right management tools to take on these tasks and as a result are using VMware vCenter to manage their servers.

The SANsymphony-V Plug-in for VMware vCenter provides a rich set of management capabilities for storage. From the plug-in, vSphere administrators can fulfill the dynamic storage needs of their vSphere/ESX clusters, hosts and virtual machines without having to become a storage expert or having to leave their familiar central console.

DataCore and VMware: The Fully Virtualized Data Center
“VMware customers around the globe running VMware vSphere rely on DataCore’s solutions to deliver the critical 'third dimension' of virtualization – storage. DataCore has architected its software to cost-effectively shape the shared storage infrastructure required by virtualization,” states Carlos Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development for DataCore Software. “The SANsymphony-V VMware vCenter Plug-in makes the storage management job significantly easier for VMware administrators. They now have a ‘one-stop’ administrative console to monitor and manage the full set of server and storage resources across their entire virtual data center.”

For more information:
For more information please see the SANsymphony™-V Plug-in for VMware vCenter or email DataCore at info@datacore.com .

Data sheet: http://pages.datacore.com/SANsymphony-VforVMwarevCenter.html

Storage hypervisor makes cloud storage fast, affordable and reliable

http://searchcloudprovider.techtarget.com/podcast/Storage-hypervisor-makes-cloud-storage-fast-affordable-and-reliable

Cloud providers like to tout how quickly and easily they can scale their environments to meet customer demands, but nothing puts that to the test like cloud storage growth. Even outside of the cloud, storage demands can easily spiral out of control, and there comes a point when it's no longer economical for a provider to keep adding boxes. Anticipating that challenge before launching its cloud services in 2009, Host.net deployed DataCore Software's storage hypervisor, SANsymphony-V, a platform that Host.net credits for providing its customers with 900 days of consecutive, uninterrupted uptime.

In this case-study podcast, SearchCloudProvider.com site editor Jessica Scarpati gets a crash course on storage hypervisors from George Teixeira, CEO of DataCore Software, before diving into the details of Host.net's deployment with Jeffrey Slapp, vice president of virtualization services at the Florida-based cloud and managed services provider.

Read the rest of the article and hear the podcast: http://searchcloudprovider.techtarget.com/podcast/Storage-hypervisor-makes-cloud-storage-fast-affordable-and-reliable

Can Storage Hypervisors Enable BYOD for Data Storage?

By George Teixeira, CEO & President DataCore Software

I’m sure you have seen the wider use of the term BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in our industry and while I know it mainly refers to mobile devices, it got me thinking about why this is an inevitable trend – fueled by customers wanting greater buying power and flexibility. Therefore why shouldn’t this same trend impact their storage devices?

In reality, with storage hypervisors it already has. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software empowers users with hardware interchangeability (another way to say BYOD) and a powerful, enterprise-wide feature set that works with whatever the existing or latest storage devices happen to be. For those skeptics out there, try it out yourself Download a Storage Hypervisor or give it a Test Drive on our hosted virtual environment.

Why do I say it’s inevitable? Because it has already happened before with server hypervisors and they dramatically make the point. Think how the world has changed in terms of server platforms. We now take for granted that with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V software in place that the hardware they run on has become largely irrelevant and for the most part a matter of personal preference.
 Think about it. When you deploy VMware vSphere or Hyper-V, do you really care if it is running on a Dell, HP, IBM or Intel server platform? Sure you may have a preference, but it clearly a secondary consideration. Instead, other factors like company buying practices, best price or the personal vendor choice of your boss often drive the decision. It is now obvious that after the advent of server virtualization, we now can take it for granted that software architecture is what truly matters and that the underlying hardware will continuously change. The software-based hypervisor architecture is what endures and enables new technologies to be incorporated over time. Specific hardware devices (or brands) are like fads -- they will continue to "come and go." The faster pace of change and the need to continue to drive costs down will make this trend inevitable. BYOD in a corporate sense means greater purchasing power and greater freedom to incorporate ”best value” storage solutions when and where they are needed.

Don’t take my word for it. Thousands of customers have already deployed DataCore SANsymphony-V and are realizing the compelling benefits of hardware independence. Find out more by checking out the SANsymphony-V analyst lab reports and the latest storage hypervisor capabilities like automated storage tiering that let you not only bring new devices into your infrastructure but get the most out of them.

Big Smart Storage for a Big Data World - Major issues to Address, Virtualization and Auto-tiering

http://www.storagereview.com/big_smart_storage_for_a_big_data_world

In 2012, the phrase “big data” is on everyone’s lips, just like virtualization was five years ago. Also just like virtualization, and cloud computing, there is a lot of hype obscuring the more important discussions around IT challenges, skill sets needed and how to actually build an infrastructure that can support effective big data technologies.

When people waxed poetic about the wonders of virtualization, they failed to recognize the new performance demands and enormous increase in storage capacity required to support server and desktop initiatives. The need for higher performance and continuous availability came at a high price, and clearly, the budget-busting impact subsequently delayed or scuttled many projects.

These problems are now being solved through the adoption of storage virtualization that harnesses industry innovations in performance, drives greater commoditization of expensive equipment, and automates storage management with new technologies like enterprise-wide auto-tiering software.

That same dynamic is again at work, only this time with big data.

Business intelligence firms would have you believe that you simply slap their analytics platforms on top of a Hadoop framework and BINGO – you have a big data application. The reality is, Hadoop production deployments are practically non-existent in large enterprises. There are simply not many people who understand and can take advantage of these new technologies. In addition, the ecosystem of supporting technologies and methodologies are still too immature, which means the industry is going through a painful process of trial and error, just as it did with virtualization five years ago. Again, underestimating storage requirements is emerging as a major barrier to adoption as the age-old practice of “throwing hardware at the problem” creates often-untenable cost and complexity.

To put it bluntly, big data does not simply require big storage – it requires big smart storage. Unfortunately, the industry is threatening to repeat major mistakes of the past!

Before I turn to the technology, let me point out the biggest challenge being faced as we enter the world of big data - we need to develop the people who will drive and implement useful big data systems. A recent Forbes article indicated that our schools have not kept pace with the educational demands brought about by big data. I think the following passage sums up the problem well: “We are facing a huge deficit in people to not only handle big data, but more importantly to have the knowledge and skills to generate value from data — dealing with the non-stop tsunami. How do you aggregate and filter data, how do you present the data, how do you analyze them to gain insights, how do you use the insights to aid decision-making, and then how do you integrate this from an industry point of view into your business process?”

Now, back to the product technologies that will make a difference - especially those related to managing storage for this new paradigm.

As we all know, there has been an explosion in the growth of data, and traditional approaches to scaling storage and processing have begun to reach computational, operational and economic limits. A new tact is needed to intelligently manage and meet the performance and availability needs of rapidly growing data sets. Just a few short years ago, it was practically unheard of for organizations to be talking about scaling beyond several hundred terabytes, now discussions deal with several petabytes. Also in the past, companies chose to archive a large percentage of their content on tape. However, in todays on-demand, social media centric world, that’s no longer feasible. Users now demand instantaneous access and will not tolerate delays to restore data from slow and or remote tape vaults.



Instant gratification is the word-of-the-day and performance is critical.

New storage systems must automatically and non-disruptively migrate data from one generation of a system to another to effectively address long-term archiving. Also adding to this problem is the need to distribute storage among multiple data centers, either for disaster recovery or to place content closer to the requesting users in order to keep latency at a minimum and improve response times.

This is especially important for the performance of applications critical to the day-to-day running of a business such as databases, enterprise resource planning and other transaction oriented workloads. In addition to the data these resource-heavy applications produce, IT departments must deal with the massive scale of new media such as Facebook and YouTube. Traditional storage systems are not well suited to solve these problems, leaving IT architects with little choice but to attempt to develop solutions on their own or suffer with complex, low performing systems.

Storage systems are very challenged in big data and cloud environments because they were designed to be deployed on larger and larger storage arrays, typically located in a single location. These high-end proprietary systems have come at a high price in terms of capital and operational costs, as well as agility and vendor lock-in. They provide inadequate mechanisms to create a common, centrally managed resource pool. This leaves an IT architect to solve the problem with a multitude of individual storage systems usually compromised of varied brands, makes and models, requiring a different approach to replication across sites and some form of custom management.



With this in mind, there are major issues to address:

• Virtual Resource Management and Flexibility: It takes smart software to transition the current landscape of monolithic, independent solutions into a virtual storage resource pool that incorporates and harnesses the large variety of storage hardware and devices available today. High Capital and Operational Costs: To reduce operational costs, achieving greater productivity through automation and centralized management is essential. Just as importantly, empowering companies with more of an ability to commoditize and allow hardware inter-changeability is critical to cost-effective storage scalability. No one can afford “big bucks” to throw more expensive “big box” solutions at a big data world. Hypervisors such as VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V have opened up purchasing power for users. Today, the use of a Dell, HP, IBM or Intel server has become largely a personal company preference. This same approach is required for storage and has driven the need for hypervisors.
• Scalability Demands Performance and Continuous Availability: As data storage grows and more applications, users and systems need to be serviced, the requirement for higher performance and availability rise in parallel. It is no longer about how much can be contained in a large box, but, how do we harness new technologies to make storage faster and more responsive. Likewise, no matter how reliable any one single storage box may be, it does not compare to many systems working together over different locations to ensure the highest level of business continuity, regardless of the underlying hardware.
• Dynamic Versus Static Storage: It is also obvious we can no longer keep up with how to optimize enterprise data for maximum performance and cost trade-offs. Software automation is now critical. Technologies such as thin-provisioning that span multiple storage devices are necessary for greater efficiency and better storage asset utilization. Powerful enterprise-wide capabilities that work across a diversity of storage classes and device types are becoming a must-have. Automated storage tiering is required to migrate from one class of storage to another. As a result, sophisticated storage hypervisors are critical, regardless of whether the data and I/O traffic is best-migrated from high-speed dynamic RAM memory, solid state drives, disks or even cloud storage providers.

Intensive applications now need a storage system that can start small, yet scale easily to many petabytes. It must be one that serves content rapidly and handles the growing workload of thousands of users each day. It must also be exceedingly easy to use, automate as much as possible and avoid a high degree of specialized expertise to deploy or tune. Perhaps most importantly, it must change the paradigm of storage from being cemented to a single array or location to being a dispersed, yet centrally managed system that can actively store, retrieve and distribute content anywhere it is needed. The good news is, storage hypervisors like DataCore’s SANsymphony-V, deliver an easy-to-use, scalable solution for the IT architect faced with large amounts of data running through a modern-day company.

Yes, big data offers big potential. Let’s just make sure we get storage right this time to avoid repeating the big mistakes of the past.

DataCore Software 2012 Private Cloud and Storage Virtualization Survey: Performance Bottlenecks and Downtime Top Storage-Related User Concerns

DataCore Software 2012 Private Cloud and Storage Virtualization Survey: Performance Bottlenecks and Downtime Top Storage-Related User Concerns

A Perfect Storm of Possibilities for Storage Virtualization

http://vmblog.com/archive/2012/05/01/datacore-software-2012-private-cloud-and-storage-virtualization-survey-performance-bottlenecks-and-downtime-top-storage-related-user-concerns.aspx
According to Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, “If the DataCore survey shows anything, it's that the time is ripe for storage virtualization, both to meet the business objectives associated with virtualization projects and to reduce the risks associated with those initiatives. More companies are virtualizing more servers than ever before, but a notable faction of users – about a third – are underestimating the storage costs associated with server and desktop virtualization projects as well as the storage costs associated with private clouds.

“Rather than simply continuing to expand traditional storage solutions, IT managers would be well advised to consider addressing performance and downtime issues with a storage virtualization solution that enables them to apply a simplified management approach to manage their storage resources in a single, logical storage pool. For the respondents in DataCore's survey – and others – who are not using storage virtualization, I would say that logic, availability, and need are all aligned to say it's time to take a serious look.”

Government Computer News: 2 virtualization worries that keep admins up at night

http://gcn.com/articles/2012/05/01/datacore-storage-virtualization-survey-top-concerns.aspx

System downtime and slow application performance related to storage in virtualized environments are the primary concerns of IT administrators surveyed in a new report on the state of private clouds.

IT administrators are more concerned about performance issues and less about the cost of storage than they were a year ago, according to the report, “2012 State of the Private Cloud Survey” by DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization software.

DataCore’s survey, which polled 289 IT administrators in the private and public sectors worldwide, revealed that 63 percent of respondents consider system downtime and slow application performance to be their primary storage-related virtualization concerns, up from 36 percent in 2011. About 10.8 percent of the respondents state they work with government.

IT administrators still consider the rising cost of storage to be a problem with virtualization initiatives, but overall it is declining as a major concern, with just over half (51 percent) describing increasing storage costs as one of their biggest problems (down from 66 percent in 2011), the report states.

While increasing storage costs may be less of an issue than last year, storage-related costs continue to comprise a significant portion of virtualization budgets, with 44 percent of respondents saying that storage costs represent more than a quarter of their total budget for virtualization, the report states

Many companies are allocating more money for storage, with 37 percent saying their storage budgets have increased this year, while just 13 percent say they have been cut.

Despite this, more than one in three respondents (34 percent) admit they underestimated the impact server/desktop virtualization would have on their storage costs. For those deploying a private cloud, more than one in four (28 percent) underestimated how storage costs would be affected.

...“As virtualization moves from theory to practice, storage-related performance and availability are becoming of greater concern to businesses, but cost concerns haven’t gone away,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software, who recommends the use of storage hypervisors.

Storage hypervisors ensure high performance and availability in the storage infrastructure through features such as auto-tiering, device interchangeability, thin provisioning and continuous data protection, Teixeira noted. “A storage hypervisor solves the cost issue by enabling enterprises to make greater use of existing storage infrastructure, while reducing the need for large-scale storage hardware,” he said.

The online survey was conducted in March 2012. The survey asked a series of questions about virtualization and its impact on storage.

DataCore Software Partner Program Awarded Third Consecutive 5-Star Rating in CRN’s 2012 Partner Program Guide

DataCore was recently awarded a 5-Star Partner rating. The 2012 CRN Partner Program Guide and CRN 5-Star Rating is the definitive listing of manufacturers and software publishers that service solution providers or provide products to the IT Channel. CRN’s Partner Program Guide recognizes those vendors who have channel programs and derive a portion of their sales through the indirect IT Channel.

DataCore is enabling partners to take advantage of the lucrative opportunities in storage by providing access to the foremost software of its kind - the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor. Demonstrating the company’s continued commitment to the channel, DataCore has simplified the process of selling and implementing the storage hypervisor by announcing significant new tools and enhancements to its Partner Program, which will help create new revenue streams and provide enhanced tools to global channel partners. For more information on DataCore’s recent enhancements for channel partners and volume resellers please turn to: “DataCore Software Expands Channel Partner Ecosystem to Capitalize on Fast Growing Storage Hypervisor and Virtualization Market Opportunity” and “DataCore Software Targets Volume Resellers, System Integrators, SSD Vendors and System Builders with Fast-Start Business Development Programs.”

“The companies listed in CRN’s 2012 Partner Program Guide represent a comprehensive list of the best channel programs in the market today,” said Kelley Damore, VP and Editorial Director, for UBM Channel’s CRN. “The 5-star award is reserved for vendors that understand that a successful partnership does not rely solely on the technology. By offering their partners tools, education and regular updates, vendors on this list go above and beyond traditional support to ensure a mutually beneficial partnership.”

The 2012 Partner Program Guide and 5-Star Partners listing are featured on CRN.com and are included in the recent 2012 issue of CRN. See the DataCore Software listing here:
http://www.crn.com/partner-program-guide/ppg2012-details.htm?c=33

Texas Memory Systems bundles DataCore storage hypervisor and RamSAN solid state storage to supercharge virtualization performance

Bundle supercharges virtual environments http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/19/tms_datacore/print.html

TMS flash arrays are being bundled with SANsymphony-V software from DataCore to provide fast flash-based SAN array support to virtualised servers.

The combination of RamSan [1] flash appliances from TMS with the DataCore [2] storage hypervisor software is aimed at VMware servers and accelerating them by adding an automatically tiered flash storage pool on top of their existing disk drive storage. The RamSan hardware, using either SLC or MLC flash, is attached directly to a server host or accessed through a fabric link with users setting up policies for their virtual storage pools.

TMS says that "when provisioning a virtual machine disk format (VMDK) on a LUN presented to the SANsymphony-V cluster, the virtual guest can utilise internal paging mechanisms with sub-millisecond response times," to the flash while still using the existing disk drive storage...

"By organising disks with different performance levels into separate tiers and using RamSan appliances as the fastest tier with SAS or SATA drives on the lower tiers, customers benefit from the optimised throughput delivered by SANsymphony-V’s automatic storage tiering technology. [It] dynamically adapts to the …. application workloads to deliver unparalleled performance for physical and virtual environments."

TMS president Dan Scheel said: “Rather than go with a rip-and-replace upgrade ... the TMS/DataCore bundle will provide better utilisation of existing storage infrastructure while ... improving the efficiency, performance, provisioning, data protection, availability and management of that infrastructure.”

Hardware support is available from TMS with software support being supplied by DataCore.

Configuring a DataCore Storage Hypervisor as a NAS/SAN Unified Storage Solution

Tech Bulletin #18 DataCore has Updated its Technical Bulletin:Configuring a DataCore NAS/SAN Unified Storage Solution Download pdf

The SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor makes it feasible to employ the widely used NAS services already built into the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 platform in those environments. DataCore’s powerful feature set can be easily configured to enhance these Microsoft services. The integrated combination cost-effectively speeds up performance and adds a new level of fault tolerance to file sharing.

 

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

Enterprise-wide Auto-Tiering Storage Hypervisor: SSDs, Fast Disks, Capacity Disks and Gateway to Cloud Storage

Learn more:
http://www.datacore.com/Software/Features/List-of-Features/Auto-Tiering.aspx

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


“Moving a storage infrastructure into a cloud paradigm can be a struggle for data center operators. The use of a heterogeneous storage virtualization solution provides a transition path that preserves investments and adds cloud operating semantics,” said Gene Ruth, research director and senior storage analyst for Gartner. “This particular solution combines storage virtualization, tiering of diverse devices and a bridge capability, allowing organizations to choose and offload less critical storage, backup and archive data onto cloud storage providers.” http://tinyurl.com/6vdekou

Law Firm Achieves High Availability in a Virtualization Environment With DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

Rennert Vogel Mandler & Rodriguez, P.A. (Rennert Vogel), has deployed the latest version of its SANsymphony -V storage hypervisor. The law firm enlisted DataCore’s technology to cost-effectively achieve high availability (HA) in its virtual environment, allowing for non-stop business operations and greater staff productivity, while improving network performance and storage capacity management.

“We often come into contact with people from larger law firms that have bleeding-edge systems and they are envious of our virtual infrastructure,” said Mike Ferguson, IT director for Rennert Vogel. “They learn about our HA, the centralized management, performance - even across Layer 2 transport - and are amazed at the benefits the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor offers. Add to this savings from not having to refresh hardware and it’s clear we made the right choice with DataCore.”

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

Rennert Vogel’s relationship with DataCore began in early 2008 with a foray into storage virtualization that entailed the onsite deployment of a SANmelody storage hypervisor (the precursor to the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor). Pleased with the results, Rennert Vogel acquired another storage hypervisor from DataCore and set up a standalone node in what is known as a “cage” at Host.net, a co-location, managed services and cloud services provider in nearby Boca Raton. An ensuing phase moved almost all of Rennert Vogel’s production environment servers to the virtualized infrastructure at Host.net.

Today, Rennert Vogel has two DataCore™ SANsymphony-V storage hypervisors running as synchronously mirrored copies in the same cage, meeting a prime objective of data redundancy. These “front” two storage arrays from Promise Technology, with four Dell PowerEdge R610 servers located on the iSCSI SAN fabric. VMware vCenter runs within that setup. Three VMware ESX hosts are on the Dell servers, connected to the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisors, running a mix of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and slower Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives. All the virtual disk capacity for the firm’s IT needs is carved out and served from the virtual infrastructure as an HA configuration. The system supports over 25 virtual machines and Rennert Vogel is connected via a 100 MB dedicated internet access (DIA) line.

Rennert Vogel has virtualized all the systems one would associate with a dynamic, knowledge-based enterprise, including the accounting system, case management system, file servers, a Citrix server for remote access, a fax server, as well as two Linux servers. A Microsoft Exchange server will also soon go from physical to virtual, protected by the HA configuration powered by SANsymphony-V. The virtualized databases and applications are literally the lifeblood of the firm, with the file servers supporting the Corporate, Tax, Real Estate and Litigation departments.

Rennert Vogel’s virtualized infrastructure also ensures the availability of multi-media files and depositions that represent hours of transcribed audio files. Moreover, the mandate at the firm is to store nearly everything -- files, emails and all attachments. This great volume of documents has also been addressed through virtualization; stored and made readily available with a capacity that now supports 8 terabytes (TBs) of data. Additionally, Florida’s hurricane season used to be cause for real trepidation because if the building operator needed to close the building, the entire firm was required to leave the premises. Now, work no longer has to grind to a halt; employees can easily work remotely and Rennert Vogel is truly prepared for disaster with two copies of its data and HA.
Equally important, the availability “hiccups” Rennert Vogel had encountered prior to embracing storage virtualization -- relying on lone servers that routinely failed to work -- have gone away. Moreover, the virtualized environment has accelerated performance. The centralized management functions of both VMware (through vCenter) and SANsymphony-V have made management very easy. Server consolidation has freed up hardware for reuse, saving money, and because underlying disk and server hardware is interchangeable with the storage hypervisor software, Rennert Vogel can swap out any device at any time for added investment protection.

“The gains we have achieved by deploying DataCore technology to virtualize storage resources include increased reliability, performance, and peace-of-mind for all of us,” added Ferguson. “We benefit from centralized management, from being able to consolidate servers, less refresh of hardware and more. Using SANsymphony-V for storage virtualization has improved the utilization of the firm’s existing hardware one-hundred times over, while future-proofing us for easy expansion down the road.”

A full case study of the Rennert Vogel deployment is available here: http://www.datacore.com/Testimonials/Rennert-Vogel-Mandler-Rodriguez.aspx .
For more info on High-Availability, please visit:
http://www.datacore.com/Software/Benefits/High-Availability.aspx

Video: IDC on the Importance & Business Value of the DataCore Storage Hypervisor & Auto-tiering

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJQXX5VzWOw

This video interview with IDC summarizes the benefits of a storage hypervisor and auto-tiering and the business value DataCore's SANsymphony-V delivers as a comprehensive, yet hardware-independent solution.

DataCore – Consistently Championing Storage Hypervisors ...

http://rainmakerfiles.com/2012/03/datacore-consistently-championing-storage-hypervisors/

DataCore is storage software company which has remained steadfastly focused on storage virtualisation since its inception in 1998. The main proposition is that different vendors’ storage arrays can be virtualised and managed behind commodity servers, (these days x64 servers). A couple of key reasons why customers consider this approach are the desire for a uniform management suite and acquiring features and functions that are more open than a proprietary array vendor’s solution. The array market has got plenty of competition in it, but once a customer selects a particular vendor’s storage platform it can be argued that there is an element of customer lock-in.

DataCore’s SANsymphony has by virtue been a storage hypervisor from the outset and by name some 12 months when the marketing term was fully adopted. With a mature software core, SANsymphony has evolved into embracing the key features of the array vendors and SANsymphony has also been qualified to embrace a wide variety of those very arrays. The use cases quoted range from customers acquiring commodity arrays to the more sophisticated high QOS array types. At the commodity end DataCore has the potential to add features that would otherwise be costly, while at the other, customers can apply the data management techniques which they are familiar with across their entire storage estate. Another justification for a multivendor solution lies in storage specialists’ on-going challenge of data migration. The ability to efficiently migrate data non-disruptively is not trivial.

It is interestingly the emergence and maturity of server hypervisors that is making storage hypervision more apt. We anticipate that more tools will emerge that bridge and orchestrate workloads across servers and storage. DataCore is supporting VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xenserver, and we speculate that the integration into server hypervisors will be strengthened. SANsymphony is as mentioned the core proposition of DataCore and its customer prospects choose the appropriate licensing scope in terms of nodes & capacity.

IT professionals should first of all evaluate how a unified approach to storage management can benefit them. The ability to extend different storage tiers behind a storage hypervisor has the potential to simplify storage provision & data protection, but also the performance of the entire storage pool. A larger storage tier exploiting commodity storage may also be attractive.

IT industry decision makers ought to explore how the storage hypervisor proposition is adapting itself to a world of high server virtualisation penetration. Workloads will be deployed and orchestrated differently in the years ahead and customers may well adopt some important lessons from service providers’ experiences with cost effective multi-tenancy implementations.

CeBIT 2012: DataCore Software Showcases the Storage Hypervisor and New Capabilities

http://www.prlog.org/11817047-cebit-2012-datacore-software-showcases-the-storage-hypervisor-and-new-capabilities.html

DataCore Software is demonstrating the latest innovations of its storage hypervisor SANsymphony-V at the world's largest IT event, CeBit. DataCore is being shopwcased at the CeBIT’s "Virtualization & Storage Forum" (Hall 2, Stand A40). DataCore presented its solutions for the integrated management of virtual infrastructures.

The results of a recent survey conducted by IT industry analyst firm, IDC, at the end of 2011 that storage and virtualisation are in the top investment categories. At the same time, general challenges such as Private Cloud, “Big Data,” storage cloud services and storage efficiency boost the market outlook for storage virtualisation.

At CeBIT, DataCore showcased a rapid configuration wizard which simplifies the installation and configuration of SANsymphony-V storage servers, especially for system builders, and system integration firms. In particular, DataCore solution partners and their SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) customers will benefit from a fast and seamless implementation of the DataCore solution into existing infrastructures.

At the event, DataCore also presented further product developments from collaborations with other leading virtualisation vendors. For example, with the Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer from Hitachi Data Systems the use of storage resources in a virtual infrastructure can be more effectively monitored and analysed via a single management console. Moreover, availability and performance bottlenecks can be diagnosed more quickly and effectively eliminated.

In addition, a powerful new storage management plug-in for VMware vSphere and a Monitoring pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager will be showcased to ensure a higher level and more seamless integration.

"Recent customer wins, such as Kaspersky Lab, a high availability solution which is deploying ten petabytes storage under DataCore, show that large scale storage virtualisation empowered by storage hypervisor software is becoming a standard for large enterprises,” says Stefan von Dreusche, Director Central Europe at DataCore. “With thousands of customer success stories, the time is right for this proven technology to gain momentum with the more mainstream partner and customer base".

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor centralises manages and optimises the use of heterogeneous storage devices, regardless of price, performance, model or hardware and integrates flash memory, SSDs, hard drives and cloud storage. The auto-tiering functionality automates the progression and demotion of data across different storage devices – based on performance and cost criteria. Also, by integrating a cloud array gateway, DataCore expands auto-tiering to the cloud level, so non-critical backup and archiving data can be outsourced.

Amnet Deploys DataCore's SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor to Expand Its Cloud Platform

http://it.tmcnet.com/topics/it/articles/2012/03/08/274363-amnet-deploys-datacores-sansymphony-v-storage-hypervisor-expand.htm

Amnet has used the DataCore's storage virtualization software from 2009 and has benefitted from its VMware and EMC environments and made a successful transition to cloud computing. Walsh continued, "I've never seen a product as versatile as DataCore's storage hypervisor. Performance acceleration gives us more 'bang' for our storage buck. We get a disaster-proof backup and replication system at a fraction of the cost. And, the ability to change SAN storage vendors at any time gives us the future-proofing on tech investments we need to support continued rapid growth."

...Walsh went on to say, "Today, we support thousands of users running within multiple private cloud computing grids across the country. We are 100 percent virtualized, with multiple backend storage models and varied vendor technology, all underpinned by DataCore's technology. And now, we've got a backup and replication platform that'll allow us to continue to grow, while maintaining the performance and reliability our customers expect, built at a fraction of the cost of a purpose built system. This has been a great partnership.”

Virtualization World 365: Amnet Technology Solutions enlists DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

http://virtualizationworld365.info/news_full.php?id=21597&title=Amnet-Technology-Solutions-again-enlists-DataCore-Software’s-SANsymphony-V-Storage-Hypervisor
Amnet Technology Solutions has deployed the latest version of SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor (version 8.1) to meet an increasing demand for offsite replication and disaster recovery. A cloud based IT and audio/video technology service provider (SP), Amnet enlisted DataCore’s newest technology to build a scalable, easy-to-use backup and replication platform that rivals the speed of purpose-built backup systems at a cost savings of 30 percent.

“We looked at a lot of backup appliances and found they can be very expensive, particularly when you get in the 100 terabyte range,” explained Ed Walsh, director of engineering at Amnet Technology Solutions. “DataCore’s SANsymphony-V can replicate remotely to any device. The performance acceleration it offers shrinks backup times, allowing many more jobs to be completed in a specific window. Furthermore, the cost savings - compared to the purpose-built solutions we evaluated - is phenomenal.”

Big Data Is Almost Here -- Using a Storage Hypervisor as an Agent of Change

There weren’t any telescopes on earth 65 million years ago when the six-mile-wide asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs approached. Even if there had been, there’s not much to be done about a gazillion tons of rock moving faster than a speeding bullet.

Big Data – ultra large scale data storage and analysis – is the data center equivalent of that big rock, but it’s not arriving without warning and it doesn’t have to be an extinction-level event for IT professionals. To the contrary, it offers a unique opportunity to re-architect your storage management infrastructure in a way that makes it more adaptable in every respect and more easily aligned to business needs.

As profiled in the New York Times last Sunday, Big Data is transforming business, government, and education. One researcher reported that a study of 179 large companies showed that those adopting the data-driven decision-making that Big Data makes possible “achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.”

This shows that Big Data is more than just big. It’s restless, too, best used when hot. Let it cool off and you lose the situational awareness that can lead to big-time financial rewards. It’s not just a matter of storing a gazillion bytes – you can’t possibly store it all, so your retention policies have to change, and the need to widely share it as quickly as possible means your networking strategies have to change as well.

Fortunately, there’s a fundamental storage technology that can be a big help in adapting to Big Data: the storage hypervisor. Even better, the benefits of this software layer, which insulates you from all the hardware variables that Big Data can throw your way, kick in long before Big Data arrives. A storage hypervisor is an agent of change: you get the pay-off today and a future-proof storage infrastructure.

A storage hypervisor enables you to pool resources, automatically allocate space and direct traffic to the optimal tier, cache data near applications for higher performance, and manage it all centrally.

Resource pooling has the most immediate impact, because you can aggregate all of your storage capacity, without regard for brand, model, or interface, and easily reclaim unused space. Looking forward, this capability is key to integrating on-premise storage with cloud storage – a necessity to keep from getting squashed by Big Data.

The automation offered by a storage hypervisor gives you just-in-time storage allocation for highly efficient use of disk space, and the ability to dynamically direct workloads to the right storage resource (auto-tiering), based either on access frequency or business rules, so that the hottest data gets the most attention. With auto-tiering and bridging capabilities like Cloud gateways, the right storage resource includes not only disk devices, but solid state disks or flash memory devices for performance, or Cloud storage providers for virtually unlimited capacity. This makes it easy to balance data value and the need for speed against price/capacity constraints, something that Big Data is going to make ever more necessary.

A storage hypervisor can also cache data in main memory for rapid retrieval and fast updates. This turbocharges native disk array performance, especially if it’s combined with self-tuning algorithms. The result is that even off-premises storage can look local – again, a big “win” for Big Data.

Finally, with Big Data, your storage infrastructure is only going to get bigger, so centralized management of all your storage resources is a must-have. It gives you the equivalent of a universal remote for storage, no matter what it is or where it’s located, and is key to managing the mirroring and replication needed for high-availability, disaster-proof storage.

The fallout from Big Data is going to transform business computing at every level, so if you don’t want to end up a data dinosaur, now’s the time to transform your infrastructure with a storage hypervisor. A good place to start is Jon Toigo’s Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars series, starting with Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency, which will give you a good overview of how a storage hypervisor can help you increase engineering, operational, and financial efficiency.

[Photo Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Impact_event.jpg]

DataCore Software Joins Microsoft Partner Solutions Center

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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