Friday, 6 February 2015
Friday, 23 January 2015
Software-defined Storage in action at Transdev
Please watch our three minute video below, with Transdev's IT Infrastructure Manager, Mark Naidoo, speaking about his decision to deploy DataCore Software and the improvements DataCore has made to Transdev's storage infrastructure.
Since putting DataCore in three years ago, Transdev has had zero downtime. Transdev not only increased availability– but also satisfied its DR requirements. Plenty more benefits are relayed below :)
To read Trasndev's case study click here.
SUMMARY of what Mark says...
High-performance Storage
Transdev has seen a sixfold improvement in performance for its storage with DataCore. DataCore supports new, highspeed, solid state storage that was required for a mission-critical Microsoft SQL database that serves Microsoft Dynamics AX.
Five Nines (99.999%) Reliability
Since putting DataCore in three years ago, Transdev has had zero downtime. Transdev not only increased availability – but also satisfied its DR requirements.
Reduced Storage Costs
The ability to choose best-of-breed storage and combine that using one platform has decreased costs significantly.
Resiliency and Flexibility
DataCore has enabled Transdev to combine its existing storage with new, flash-based storage very easily. Transdev’s IT infrastructure also consists primarily of HP hardware, a virtualised platform based on VMware & Citrix XenApp for application deployment.
Since putting DataCore in three years ago, Transdev has had zero downtime. Transdev not only increased availability– but also satisfied its DR requirements. Plenty more benefits are relayed below :)
To read Trasndev's case study click here.
SUMMARY of what Mark says...
High-performance Storage
Transdev has seen a sixfold improvement in performance for its storage with DataCore. DataCore supports new, highspeed, solid state storage that was required for a mission-critical Microsoft SQL database that serves Microsoft Dynamics AX.
Five Nines (99.999%) Reliability
Since putting DataCore in three years ago, Transdev has had zero downtime. Transdev not only increased availability – but also satisfied its DR requirements.
Reduced Storage Costs
The ability to choose best-of-breed storage and combine that using one platform has decreased costs significantly.
Resiliency and Flexibility
DataCore has enabled Transdev to combine its existing storage with new, flash-based storage very easily. Transdev’s IT infrastructure also consists primarily of HP hardware, a virtualised platform based on VMware & Citrix XenApp for application deployment.
Monday, 19 January 2015
How Software-defined Storage, Converged Virtual SANs and Hybrid Clouds Will Disrupt the Storage Industry
How Software-defined Storage, Virtual SANs and Hybrid Clouds Will Disrupt the Storage Industry in 2015
article by George Teixeira, President and CEO, DataCore Software
In 2015, IT decision makers will need to wrestle with a number of difficult questions dealing with data storage: What solutions can be put in place to reduce disruptive changes and make IT more adaptable to dynamic business needs? How can they easily add flexibility and scalability to existing IT infrastructure in order to meet growing storage demands? What can be done to better safeguard business information wherever it resides and provide continuous availability to the data for critical applications? How to meet the responsiveness levels and performance demands needed to sustain critical business applications and next-generation workloads? What can be done to reconcile the use of cloud storage, flash and converged virtual SANs with existing investments? And how can this all be accomplished cost-effectively without disrupting current IT systems and taking on greater business risk?
In 2015, IT decision makers will need to wrestle with a number of difficult questions dealing with data storage: What solutions can be put in place to reduce disruptive changes and make IT more adaptable to dynamic business needs? How can they easily add flexibility and scalability to existing IT infrastructure in order to meet growing storage demands? What can be done to better safeguard business information wherever it resides and provide continuous availability to the data for critical applications? How to meet the responsiveness levels and performance demands needed to sustain critical business applications and next-generation workloads? What can be done to reconcile the use of cloud storage, flash and converged virtual SANs with existing investments? And how can this all be accomplished cost-effectively without disrupting current IT systems and taking on greater business risk?
Prediction #1: Software-defined storage will break through and finally go mainstream in 2015.
Software-defined everything and software-defined storage (SDS) will break through in 2015, driven by the productivity benefits it can provide to customers and the need to prepare IT infrastructures to meet next-generation needs. Software-defined storage will continue to disrupt traditional storage hardware system vendors and, especially, their outdated yearly ‘rip and replace' model of doing storage business.
Interestingly, while SDS will greatly disrupt the industry and shake up traditional storage vendors, it actually benefits users significantly by reducing disruption, costs, and risks for those implementing and managing IT environments, as these SDS customers will attest.
Software-defined storage promises to commoditize underlying storage devices and raise the scope and span of storage features and services to a higher, more productive level versus being locked down to specific devices. True software-defined storage platformswill allow these devices to ‘do more with less' by increasing utilization and working cross-platform and infrastructure-wide. Software-defined storage can reconcile the use of flash and converged virtual SANs with existing investments, and provide the essential foundation for hybrid cloud deployments. It is the solution for a range of use cases, managing data placement according to cost, compliance, availability, and performance requirements. It can be deployed on different hardware platforms and extend to cloud architectures as well. Bottom-line, the compelling economic benefits, better productivity, and the need for greater agility to meet future requirements will drive SDS to become mainstream in 2015.
Other storage-related predictions include:
#2: Servers in 2015 will increasingly displace traditional storage arrays.
Servers will combine with software-defined storage and continue to build momentum for a new class of ‘storage servers' and hyper-converged virtual SANs. The latest generation of servers is powerful and will continue to support even larger amounts of storage. Software-defined storage software solutions such as DataCore's Virtual SAN software are designed to eliminate the hassle and complexity of traditional storage networks while still providing a growth path. Virtual SAN software is maturing rapidly, and it will further drive the transformation of servers into powerful storage systems that go beyond today into full blown enterprise-class virtual SANs. The Dell Enterprise Blog post, "Dell PowerEdge Servers Make Great Software-Defined Storage Solutions," and the "Software-Defined Virtual SAN Solutions Powered by FUJITSU PRIMERGY Servers" are examples of this trend.
As a footnote, I should point out that the world is not all virtual and cloud. Major refresh cycles are underway and on-premise physical servers will continue to do well in 2015. Both trends will impact SDS and the use of converged virtual SANs. How much is still unclear, but both will stress migrations and open up rethinking on use cases and how to better deploy servers. More than 300 million PCs are sold every year. Despite the hype around the cloud, there will always be a need for a dependable local server that does not need to rely on an external Internet connection, provides total control, enables a greater deal of customization, and protects sensitive data. Also, major refresh cycles are underway in 2015. Windows Server 2003 goes end-of-life in July, 2015 and yet, according to Microsoft, organizations worldwide are still running more than 24 million physical and virtual instances of Windows Server 2003. Other studies indicate that as much as 45 percent of on-premise servers are still running WS2003 and 41 percent of servers are seven years or older. Software-defined storage can help work across generations and ease the transitions and migrations to refreshed server systems or to converged virtual SANs.
#3: Disk and flash must play nicely together in 2015; software stacks must span both worlds.
This past year saw the continuation of the "flash everywhere" trend, with flash devices rapidly moving along the growth path from being utilized in servers to being used across the board. This brought a lot of new storage companies into the market initially, but has now also brought on a high degree of consolidation, as evidenced by SanDisk's acquisition of Fusion-io and the number of start-ups that have disappeared. As flash finds its place as a key technology and is further commoditized, the market can't sustain the number of companies that were introduced in the early stages of the market, so further consolidation will happen.
The foreseeable future - despite the hype - is not all flash. Cost matters, and SSDs will likely be 10 times more expensive than the least expensive SATA disks through the end of the decade.
The coming year will show us that flash can be used as a more practical technology, and that it needs to be reconciled with how it will work with existing disk technologies. Flash is excellent for specialized ‘hot data' workloads that require high speed reads such as databases. However, it is not a cost-effective solution for all workloads and still makes up a very small fraction of the installed storage base overall. On the other side of the spectrum are low-cost SATA disk drives that continue to advance and use new technologies like helium to support huge capacities(up to 10 TB per drive), but they are not highly performant and are slow. Write-heavy transaction workloads also need to be addressed differently. (See New Breakthrough Random Write Acceleration and Impact on Disk Drives and Flash technologies). The industry would have us believe that customers will shift 100% to all flash, but it is not practical due to the costs involved and the large installed base of storage that must be addressed.
In 2015, we will need smart software that has the feature stack that can optimize the cost and performance trade-offs and migrate workloads to the right resources needed whether flash or disk. Software-defined storage done right can help unify the new world of flash with the existing and still-evolving world of disks. Both have a future.
#4: Hybrid clouds and cloud-based disaster recovery solutions will thrive in 2015.
Businesses are continuing to struggle to figure out how best to use the cloud. Increasingly, enterprises are dealing with managing both on-premise storage and off-site cloud storage (hybrid cloud). This will become a much bigger issue in 2015 as customers become smarter about which workloads are practical to plan in the cloud and which are not. On-premise storage is usually allocated for active data such as databases and transaction-oriented business. The cloud continues to be used typically for back up, archive, and disaster recovery versus production workloads because of the speed of the internet. Disaster recovery remains one of the more costly and critical projects for IT, which makes the cloud a particularly attractive alternative to in-house deployments.
The ability to integrate off-premise capacity is a critical capability for SDS according to analyst firms such as Neuralytix. They predict that in 2015, all software-defined storage solutions will need to manage both on-premise and cloud-based capacity as a unified data storage architecture.
New solutions are emerging such as DataCore and Microsoft StorSimple, which combine to allow data from any storage to be seamlessly migrated from on-premise to a cloud such as Microsoft Azure. This will fuel the larger trend, which is for enterprises to do a mix of on-premise and cloud. In addition, while doing disaster recovery from the cloud remains complex, new integration tools and more automated processes are well on the way to make this a more practical solution.
#5: Managing internal investments with a cloud model will become a bigger trend in 2015.
Enterprises want to emulate the productivity of what cloud providers can achieve. However, to do so, they need to move to a Quality of Services (QoS) model providing comprehensive virtual data services. For example, as storage needs continue to grow, enterprises must be able to manage, regulate and create a segregation of storage resources to match the utilization patterns of different departments. A case in point might be finance, which may need a higher level of performance than those simply doing word processing. Quality-of-Service settings are needed to ensure that high-priority workloads competing for access to storage can meet their service level agreements (SLAs) with predictable I/O performance. These QoS controls enable IT organizations to efficiently manage their shared storage infrastructure. Storage resources can be logically segregated, monitored, and regulated on a departmental basis.
Software-defined storage must continue to evolve to address these needs. New capabilities like support for VMware VVOLs and OpenStack capabilities will be helpful and will make an impact in 2015. However, more powerful virtual data services need to be created that provide data services without regard to the storage devices; providing capabilities to regulate how resources are being utilized across the infrastructure while making the overall process as automated as possible.
#6: Business continuity, multi-site data protection and workload management demands grow in 2015.
Virtual servers, clustered systems and new workloads will further increase the demands on data storage. Therefore, the fundamental capabilities- provisioning, performance and data protection - must be simple and transparent to users and must be rock solid. Users don't want to think or worry about their data storage; they just want their applications to run, without disruption. New generation workloads will demand continuous data availability protection that can stretch distances and work across multiple sites and multiple platforms, and non-disruptively fail-over and failback without any impact or disruption to critical applications. System admins will want an ‘easy' button that delivers powerful but simple continuous data protection solutions that allow systems to be rolled-back in time, allowing for recovery prior to ‘bad events' happening. In addition, the ability to scale, regulate and align performance to business workloads will drive the need for more management tools and capabilities such as ‘Heat maps' for performance monitoring,adaptive caching, multi-tiered data migration, flash and disk performance optimizers, powerful capabilities that will set the new criteria for success.
Final thoughts on 2015: Convergence or storage islands?
VMware announced Virtual SANs that only work with VMware, Microsoft's Azure StorSimple allows easy migration to the cloud but only for iSCSI storage, ignoring the base of fibre-channel based storage. Each new storage array comes out with new device-specific features that don't work across other platforms, each flash device has its own unique feature stack, and hyper-converged systems may be simple to set up -- but what happens when they need to work with other vendors or with existing investments?
The talk is convergence but, in reality, everyone seems to be selling proprietary divergent solutions. The result is leading to a sprawl of disjointed software stacks that create "isolated islands of storage." Virtual SANs, converged systems, and flash devices have continued to proliferate, creating more separately managed machines and ultimately resulting in discrete islands of storage in the IT organization. The capability to unify and federate these isolated storage islands by treating each of these scenarios as use cases under a unifying SDS architecture can help solve this by driving a higher level of management and functional convergence across the enterprise.
Time to transform the disharmony of different solutions into a fluid data storage symphony
As a result, once-isolated storage systems -- from flash and disks located within servers, to external SAN arrays and public cloud storage -- can now become part of an enterprise-wide accessible virtual pool, classified into tiers according to their unique characteristics. Different brands of storage, standalone converged systems and hypervisor dependent Virtual SANs and external storage systems no longer need to exist as ‘islands' -- they can be integrated within an overall storage infrastructure. The system administrator can easily provision capacity, maximize utilization, and set high-level policies to allow the software to dynamically select the most appropriate storage tier and paths to achieve the desired levels of performance and availability.
Software-defined storage is disruptive to traditional storage models which are static and broken. But for IT decision makers, it offers a way to ‘do more with what they have,' gain more control, and achieve true convergence, greater adaptability and improved productivity in a dynamic world. DataCore developed its SANsymphony-V and Virtual SAN software solutions with this thinking in mind and is now shipping its 10th generation solution. DataCore was founded on the premise of software-defined storage being a disruptive force and its time has come. It is DataCore's primary focus for 2015.
Wednesday, 14 January 2015
Sunday, 4 January 2015
Dell PowerEdge Servers and DataCore Make Great Software-Defined Storage Solutions
As applications and data become more important, companies are transforming their data centers into private cloud infrastructure. This move will enable companies to provide high levels of availability, reliability and performance to applications, while dramatically reducing costs and simplifying management of the infrastructure.
Servers and, to a large extent, networks have moved to a private cloud model where the underlying infrastructure has been abstracted, pooled and automated.
But sometimes companies take a different approach to storage. Walk into any data center and you’re sure to find different types of storage systems, each bought to satisfy specific requirements and sometimes for different projects. For customers with disparate storage environments or lacking a strategically implemented hybrid SAN environment, often times high-performance storage was justified for latency-sensitive applications, while lower-cost, high-capacity storage made better sense for less-critical applications.
Unfortunately, sometimes companies find themselves with different storage systems, each in an “island” with different functionality and managed separately. Such diversity can complicate how storage resources are allocated and managed. Storage is the next big step in private cloud infrastructure.
DataCore has created a solution that virtualizes, pools and manages all storage from any vendor, regardless of model. Once-isolated storage systems can now become part of an enterprise-wide capacity pool, classified into tiers according to their unique characteristics. The system administrator can easily provision capacity and set high-level policies to allow the software to dynamically select the most appropriate storage tier and paths to achieve the desired levels of performance and availability.
View DataSheet: DataCore Software-Defined Storage on Dell PowerEdge Servers
This solution utilizes the latest generation Dell PowerEdge servers and DataCore SANsymphony™-V software, transforming isolated storage systems into a centrally managed storage infrastructure, helping you derive the most value from your storage investments, present and future. Using DataCore’s storage virtualization technology, Dell Storage MD Series, SC Series and PS Series arrays can be easily integrated with existing storage.
- Dramatically improves performance of all applications: High-performance caching algorithms intelligently anticipate reads, evaluate usage patterns and transform random writes into sequential writes. In addition, auto-tiering software dynamically matches workloads to the most appropriate class of storage from the virtual pool.
- Instantly reduces storage costs by increasing capacity utilization and reducing management complexity: Eliminates wasted storage capacity by pooling all of your storage, regardless of make/manufacturer. Each storage device is used in a way that best matches its capacity and performance capabilities.
- Prevents storage outages from affecting applications: Synchronous mirroring with “zero touch” failover and failback between any types of storage ensures that applications are not disrupted by storage or site outages. Easily migrate data between unlike systems, during production, with zero impact to applications.
- Quickly meets the needs of the business: Centralized management using a common set of commands across disparate systems, together with extensive automation and orchestration, simplifies administration and allows IT to respond to business needs easily and without disrupting other applications.
Bottom line: DataCore’s SANsymphony-V Software-defined Storage platform together with Dell PowerEdge servers combine to empower your storage to new levels of performance, availability, automation and orchestration.
Monday, 29 December 2014
Disruptive Technologies for 2015: Software-defined Storage, Virtual SAN, Flash and Hybrid Cloud Predictions
From StorageNewsletter
George Teixeira
President and CEO, DataCore Software
Major storage hardware vendors saw flat growth or significant sales declines as a result of all the disruptive forces hitting the data storage market this year. Virtual SANs, hybrid clouds, flash for performance and software-defined storage have become the rage but enterprises are still struggling to implement these new technologies in a practical manner.
Below are four related enterprise software predictions for 2015.
#1: Software-defined Storage Will Go Mainstream in 2015
The value proposition for Software-defined storage is inevitable. It will continue to disrupt enterprise storage in 2015. It will further commoditize underlying storage devices and raises storage features and services from being locked to those devices. True software-defined storage platforms like DataCore will deliver comprehensive storage services that allow devices to achieve a new level of productivity by being able to work cross-platform and infrastructure-wide. Bottom-line, the compelling economic benefits, better productivity and the need for greater agility to meet future requirements will drive software-defined storage to become a mainstream solution in 2015.
#2: Hybrid Clouds will become Practical in 2015
Enterprises are dealing with both on-premise storage and off-site cloud storage (hybrid cloud). This will become a bigger issue as customers become smarter about what cloud workloads are practical. On-premise storage is usually allocated for active data such as transaction-oriented business. The cloud will still be primarily used for cold data, back-up and disaster recovery due to internet speeds. New solutions are emerging such as DataCore and Microsoft StorSimple, which combine to allow data (from any storage) to be seamlessly migrated from on-premise to a cloud such as Microsoft Azure. This will fuel the larger trend, which is for enterprises to do a mix of on-premise and cloud. In addition, while doing disaster recovery from the cloud remains complex, new integration tools and more automated processes are on the way to make this a more practical solution.
#3: Disk and flash software stacks must span both worlds. Flash is excellent for specialized workloads that require high speed reads such as databases, but it is not a cost-effective solution for all workloads and still makes up a very small fraction of the installed storage base overall. On the other side of the spectrum are low-cost SATA disk drives that continue to advance and use new technologies like helium to support huge capacities, up to 10 TB per drive, but they are not highly performant and are slow. Write-heavy transaction workloads also need to be addressed differently. (See New Breakthrough Random Write Acceleration and Impact on Disk Drives and Flash technologies). All flash is still not practical due to the costs involved, and the large installed base of disk storage that must be addressed. Comprehensive software stacks will rise in importance in 2015, since users must be able to optimize the cost and performance trade-offs and migrate workloads to the right resources needed whether flash or disk. Software-defined storage done right can help unify the new world of flash with the existing and still-evolving world of disks. Both have a future.
#4: Servers as Hyper-converged Virtual SANs will Continue to Displace Traditional Storage Arrays
The latest generation of servers are powerful and will continue to support even larger amounts of storage. Software defined storage software such as DataCore’s Virtual SAN software will further drive servers to be transformed into powerful storage systems and, in effect, enterprise-class virtual SANs.
See the Dell 4Enterprise Blog post, “Dell PowerEdge Servers Make Great Software-Defined Storage Solutions,” and the “Software-Defined Virtual SAN Solutions Powered by FUJITSU PRIMERGY Servers” as examples of this trend.
Thursday, 25 December 2014
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
DataCore's New Random Write Accelerator for Databases,SQL, ERP, OLTP and RAID-5 workloads
Accelerate Performance Up to 30X for Random Write Intensive Applications such as OLTP
To Learn more, see our webinar series and demo:
SSD-like Speeds from Spinning Disks; Faster Response and Reduced Write-wear for Flash
The remarkable write performance speed-ups are most pronounced when using low-cost spinning disks (e.g., SATA disk drives) where each write incurs significant rotational and seek delays to mechanically update blocks on spinning platters. Higher speed flash-based technologies (SSDs), especially prone to write-amplification and rapid wear, benefit from the Random Write Accelerator as well, delivering up to 3.6 times more IOPS.
Double the Scalability – Hyper-Converged Systems up to 64 Nodes and Over 100 Million IOPsThe new version of DataCore Virtual SAN supports larger scale configurations that can be managed centrally and organized to match business operational needs. With these latest enhancements, customers can now spread their workloads over more servers in a cluster and share resources across multiple clusters in order to improve their response and throughput.
Doubling the possible number of nodes in a DataCore Virtual SAN is particularly valuable for latency-sensitive applications distributed over large-scale clusters, as well as virtual desktop (VDI) deployments for thousands of users.
Scaling out the configuration across more nodes enables better distribution of the workloads and segmentation of the physical storage capacity. DataCore’s zero-touch failover capabilities ensure workloads and applications are not disrupted in the event of a node or storage failure. The internode mirrors can also be stretched over metro-wide distances up to 60 miles (100 kilometers) to improve overall availability and business continuity. Scaling out to more nodes also enhances the overall resiliency of the infrastructure.
Friday, 12 December 2014
SearchVirtualStorage: DataCore boosts performance, adds Storage Accelerator and QoS to SANsymphony-V10 and Virtual SAN
DataCore Software's SANsymphony-V10 now features a random write accelerator to improve performance of write-intensive workloads.
...The DataCore software runs on standard x86 servers and manages the capacity of their internal disk and/or solid-state drives (SSDs) as a shared storage pool.
DataCore Software Corp. updated its SANsymphony-V10 storage virtualization software to boost performance and scalability, add quality of service capabilities and provide tighter integration with Microsoft Azure cloud services.
...The DataCore software runs on standard x86 servers and manages the capacity of their internal disk and/or solid-state drives (SSDs) as a shared storage pool.
One of the key features in the SANsymphony-V10 PSP1 update is the random write accelerator. DataCore said the new technology converts random writes into sequential writes to improve the performance of write-intensive workloads such as databases, ERP and online transaction processing systems, and workloads that use RAID 5 data protection.
Jon Toigo, CEO and managing principal at Toigo Partners International LLC, said DataCore could also position the random write accelerator to address the performance-degrading I/O blender phenomenon. The I/O blender effect occurs when multiple virtual machines try to write data at the same time.
"It's basically doing some log-file structuring and some write coalescence that turns a whole bunch of random writes into sequential writes so that you speed up the performance of your storage," said Toigo, who is a user of DataCore software.
Updates boost performance, management
Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing at DataCore, said Iometer testing of 100% random write workloads with a 4K block size showed 33 times faster performance, with low-cost SATA hard disk drives (HDDs) running on Dell servers. According to Gonzalez, using identical test conditions, the random-write-accelerated SATA HDDs outperformed multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs that did not use the new "turbo charger" feature.
Gonzalez said, when using the random write accelerator, the SSDs also saw performance 3.6 times faster than without the write accelerator. The acceleration technology, coupled with the product's caching mechanism, also helps to reduce the write-induced wear-out factor of SSDs, he said.
SANsymphony-V10 PSP1 increases the maximum number of server nodes supported in hyper-converged configurations from 32 to 64. That allows customers to spread workloads across more servers in a cluster to boost throughput. The company said each server can support more than 1 million IOPS, and the extra scalability can be especially helpful with distributed latency-sensitive applications and large virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments.
"Let's say the production cluster is running out of space," Gonzalez said. "Before this customer can stand up another server and put more storage on it, they've got to get over this afternoon's processing window. Their test and dev cluster has extra space. Normally those two couldn't touch each other. In the case of DataCore, having a common storage pool, we can basically loan that production cluster some temporary capacity."
SANsymphony-V10 PSP1 also introduces quality of service (QoS) controls to enable customers to manage and regulate the system to ensure that low-priority workloads don't monopolize resources that more critical applications need. The new release features host group access control to let administrators assign different application hosts to different segments of the storage pool.
"The combination allows you to segregate local partitions of the data to where you need it but also to remap it when you need to," DataCore CEOGeorge Teixeira said.
Gonzalez noted that DataCore's QoS applies not only to capacity but also to Fibre Channel and iSCSI connections with the host. With PSP1, the company has added utilization tracking capabilities and chargeback reports to enable customers to manage their storage infrastructure as a private cloud.
Another new option in SANsymphony-V10 is the ability to have a standby node to enable full performance during software updates, equipment refreshes and maintenance tasks or to offload responsibilities from an overtaxed node. The product already supported automatic failover between nodes in the event of a storage or device failure, but there was a performance impact. DataCore customers will now have the option to shift workloads to a standby node without disrupting the applications or degrading performance and throughput.
Teixeira said the standby node will be especially helpful for customers such as banks or hospitals that use metro clusters or metro mirroring stretching across different locations. While this type of feature traditionally appeals to customers with no tolerance for failure, and who are willing to pay for an extra server to get an even higher level of availability, falling server prices could bring it to more midmarket IT organizations.
DataCore looks to public cloud for backup and DR
With the PSP1 update, DataCore also gives customers additional options to send data to public cloud storage for off-site backups, archives and disaster recovery. The company tightly integrated and certified its SANsymphony-V10 to work with on-premises Microsoft StorSimple hybrid cloud arrays, which can serve as a bridge to Microsoft's Azure public cloud storage.
"One of the advantages we bring to Microsoft is that their array only works with iSCSI storage," Teixeira said. "We work with both Fibre Channel and iSCSI, so we can virtualize all the storage on-premises, whether it is Fibre Channel or iSCSI based, and we can automatically tier and migrate it to the StorSimple gateway."
...Teixeira said he is especially focused on Windows Azure because the service caters to business use involving databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server.
"When we talk to our customers, what they're looking for is a rock-solid commercial capability out there, and Windows Azure seems to be that platform for most of them," Teixeira said. "So, getting it jointly certified was key for us. I think it's probably where we're going to see the most pickup from our customer base."
See Full Article at: http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240234858/DataCore-boosts-performance-adds-QoS-to-SANsymphony-V10
Wednesday, 3 December 2014
ComputerWorld: House of Travel Australia finds value in DataCore Software-defined storage
Travel agent firm can scale its storage environment up or down when required
The company has a network of 460 personal travel managers based around Australia.
House of Travel Australia has used a software-defined storage services platform to reduce capital expenditure and improve the resilience of its storage environment.
The company has a network of 460 personal travel managers based around Australia.
House of Travel Australia's director of IT, Matthew Harris, said it implemented DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software in May 2014 to manage virtualized storage for its VMware ESX systems.
“The expenditure on this software solution saved significant capital expenditure while providing a stable operational environment,” he said.
“The biggest benefit is peace of mind for our future. We can scale [storage] up or down and scale to multiple sites. DataCore can handle any level of workload that I need to give to it."
House of Travel operates two business units, which are TravelManagers and HOOT Holidays. Both business units store their data on the DataCore solution.
Aside from giving Harris peace of mind, the system proved its worth when there was a hardware failure with one of its IBM servers earlier in 2014.
“The beauty of the DataCore system is that it keeps all of my data on two different servers. The [IBM] server went totally dead and there was no chance to do anything,” he said.
“DataCore indicated that the data was on another server and made it available to the VMware ESX system. As far as the VMware system was aware, it lost some processing and random access memory [RAM] power but all of its storage was still there. It automatically re-started our virtual machine on to the other hardware storage. The business suffered about one minute of sluggish performance but there was no downtime or data loss,” said Harris.
He is now looking at using DataCore’s Asynchronous offsite replication. This will provide an exact copy of House of Travel Australia’s data offsite so the firm can recover information quickly in an emergency. Harris plans to implement the software in Q1 of 2015.
Tuesday, 2 December 2014
The Register: DataCore lifts baton, strikes up the 64th SANsymphony with latest update release for SANsymphony-V and Virtual SAN
Comment DataCore has updated its SANsymphony and Virtual SAN software products to reach 100 million IOPS and 64PB capacity. It's also getting into bed with Azure.
SANsymphony-V10 PSP1 builds a SAN from a cluster of servers, aggregating each server's storage into a central virtual pool. The company has built its product on virtual SAN technology which VMware has now blessed as a concept with its VSAN technology...
...DataCore says that - unlike VMware's ESXi-only VSAN - its Virtual SAN supports any hypervisor and any storage.
Its software enhancements mean the following things:
- Systems can scale out to 64 nodes, up from 32
- They can scale up to 64PB configurations
- Notionally they can deliver more than 100 million IOPS
Claiming a 64PB and 100 million IOPS capability is bold; achieving it will be impressive.
The SANsymphony V10 PSP1 product has quality of service (QoS) features providing policies which manage access to storage tiers divided between on-premise and public clouds, defining storage resource allocation and providing Service Level Agreement capability. This ensures high priority applications aren't slowed by less important ones whose consumption of resources is controlled by capping their data transfer rate and IOPS.
DataCore says storage resources can be logically segregated, monitored and regulated on a departmental basis. This SW release also adds utilisation tracking capabilities and chargeback reports.
Random Write Accelerator technology has been added, which - DataCore says - benefits ERP, OLTP and database applications with up to 30 times faster writes. This secret sauce is said to provide a greater than 30x random write improvement on RAID-5 protected datasets with data and metadata - reconstruction information - spread across multiple locations on different disk drives.
It is also said to be especially effective with slower SATA disk drives exhibiting longer rotational and seek delays when updating data blocks. And flash can benefit too, with SSDs having lower write amplification and less wear, as well as a claimed 3.6x increase in IOPS.
This sound to us like some kind of random write buffering transforming many random writes into fewer sequential ones.
Doubling the node count in Virtual SANs helps increase the number of applications they support or the number of users in the VDI use case. DataCore says resources can be shared across multiple clusters as well.
There is zero-touch failover to provide non-disruptive failover if either a storage or server component fails. Internet mirrors can span 60-mile (100 kilometre) distances.
Microsoft Azure integration
SANsymphony-V can use Microsoft's Azure cloud core via a Microsoft StorSimple array with a very, very long name - the DataCore-ready certified Azure StorSimple Hybrid Cloud Storage Array.
In a hybrid cloud scheme Azure provides backend geo-redundant cloud storage, with SANsmphony-V auto-tiering on-premise storage to StorSimple Arrays and hence Azure. The StorSimple arrays can be pooled like any other SanSymphony storage.
Working set backups (snapshot copies) can be sent to Azure through the StorSimple gateways. They can be retrieved from separate locations by other StorSimple arrays or by Azure-hosted applications.
If accessing hosts use Fibre Channel, SANsymphony-V converts this protocol to iSCSI.
Bits and bobs
There's more; SANSymphony V10 PSP1 gets performance-monitoring capabilities, wizards to automate processes such as software updates, and enhanced CDP capabilities for restoring from known good points-in-time.
There is now a standby node capability whereby workloads can be redistributed when an existing node is taken out of service or gets overburdened in a SANsymphony-V group.
The latest Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX and CX servers are certified as DataCore Ready Software-defined Storage servers. Fujitsu's ETERNUS DX arrays have gained DataCore Ready Certification.
SANsymphony V10 PSP1 and VirtualSAN are shipping now with the enhancements above. DataCore's 10,000 customer sites should be pleased with this raft of new features as their mature product gets significantly extended.
Friday, 28 November 2014
DataCore Offers Pre-Tested Software-defined Storage Solutions Based on Dell PowerEdge Servers and is Named a Certified Dell Technology Partner
DataCore, a leader in software-defined storage and converged virtual SAN solutions, is now a certified Dell Technology Partner. The program certification recognises DataCore for successfully passing the rigorous testing process required to validate the integration and interoperability of its software on Dell PowerEdge server platforms. The partnership instills customer confidence and gives enterprise IT greater flexibility and more freedom to choose certified, pre-tested platforms and infrastructures that combine industry-leading Dell PowerEdge servers and storage with DataCore’s software-defined storage software solutions.
DataCore SANsymphony™-V and Virtual SAN software transform Dell PowerEdge servers into fully featured software-defined storage servers that are able to virtualise, enhance and derive the utmost productivity from a company’s present and future storage investments. DataCore’s powerful software solutions enable Dell’s PowerEdge servers and the full range of Dell’s storage products to be easily integrated with all the popular brands and models of installed storage and solid state disk technologies regardless of the original vendor. With DataCore software, it is easy to leverage Dell PowerEdge performance acceleration over the entire infrastructure of storage assets. The combination supports powerful features like metro-wide shared storage for clusters and business continuance, and automates tiering, provisioning and migration of data storage across the diversity of new or installed disk and flash-based technologies.
Dell and DataCore solutions combine to deliver enterprise-class performance and highest levels of availability. In addition, Dell PowerEdge servers and DataCore Virtual SAN software make an ideal solution for the mid-market, especially for Microsoft virtualisation projects and mixed Hyper-V and VMware environments running business critical applications such as SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, Dynamics, SAP, Oracle and VDI. In these use cases, DataCore users report nearly a 100 percent reduction in storage-related downtime, storage costs decreased by up to 75 percent and I/O performance improvements of virtualized applications by up to 10x.
DataCore is showcasing its DataCore Ready Software-Defined Storage (SDS) software running on Dell PowerEdge servers at the Dell World 2014 conference this week in Austin, Texas. Attendees, please stop by DataCore’s Booth, #3E20A, to meet the DataCore team and learn more about the newest DataCore and Dell solutions.
For more information on the DataCore and Dell partnership, please see:
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