DataCore Ships 64-bit SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0

DataCore Software announced the general availability of the newest versions of its flagship SANmelody and SANsymphony storage virtualization solutions. SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 deliver SAN-wide performance boosts, radically simple, high-availability, and optimum disk utilization for virtual server and virtual infrastructure users. Product highlights include x64 versions, a new ‘Transporter’ feature allowing for conversion between the different flavors of physical and virtual servers, a pioneering, waste-free space reclamation capability for thin provisioning, and ground-breaking support for ‘mega caches’ that deliver lightning-fast (electronic memory speed), storage performance.

Non-stop, Lightning Fast, Waste-Free Storage Solutions
“The x64 versions of SANmelody and SANsymphony materially improve performance, and utilization for virtual infrastructure shared storage especially through their ability to create very large memory-based caches,” said Jack Fegreus, CEO, openBench Labs, a Southborough, Mass.-based consultancy and product testing firm. “More importantly innovations such as the new Transporter continue to make DataCore a leader in simplifying and consolidating virtual infrastructure management, which is the most critical area for IT cost savings. DataCore’s combining these features into a server-centric approach is the wave of the future for virtual infrastructure as integration increases between SANs and servers.”

Save More. Do More.
“DataCore is one of a few vendors that is answering user demand to do more with less. With solutions like this you can not only drive down capital [CapEX] costs while improving reliability you can also improve administrator and operational [OpEX] efficiency by centralizing storage operations to a single platform,” states George Crump, founder and senior analyst, Storage Switzerland.

DataCore solutions offer incredible value since they enable customers to enhance, optimize and consolidate their storage infrastructure and to get more productivity out of their existing systems. DataCore consolidates and optimizes storage resources by 60%, while greatly accelerating performance. For lightning-fast performance, DataCore enables memory speed caching to accelerate read/write access so more work can be accomplished in the same given time.

New features in SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 include:

Lightning-fast,
64-bit ‘Mega Caches’ Boost SAN-wide Performance
Leading the list of new features in SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 are native 64-bit controller software with support for mega cache capacities, which is ideal for Database, Exchange and other I/O demanding applications “In large scale, consolidated data storage, cache is king,” commented James Price, vice president channel and product marketing, DataCore Software. “DataCore’s solutions will now support up to a terabyte (TB) of cache. They dwarf anything in the market and scale linearly with each node that you add to the fabric.” The entire working set of a large number of virtual machines can now be kept in SAN-wide cache for unprecedented performance. Behind the cache, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and other virtual server customers can grow their storage pools from a few hundred gigabytes to multiple petabytes.

Non-stop, Radically Simple, High-Availability
for Non-Stop Storage Virtual Infrastructure
Only DataCore allows maintenance, upgrades, expansion, and failures to take place throughout portions of the storage infrastructure without disrupting applications. According to George Crump, “The result is that you can confidently take half of your storage infrastructure out-of-service for routine maintenance any time of day without suffering downtime. And of course, you can sustain a major storage hardware failure without disturbing users” (Excerpted from George Crump’s article Are you serious about high availability?).

Waste-free, Efficient Space Reclamation
for Thinly Provisioned Storage
Both SANmelody and SANsymphony offer the choice to thinly provision virtual disks and storage (independent of vendor brand name) rather than tie up physical capacity when LUNs are first created. In the new releases, previously allocated or thinly provisioned space will be automatically reclaimed in the background after applications or file systems no longer need it.

Windows Server 2008-based,
Universal Storage Controllers
Configuring DataCore software on x86/X64 Windows servers transforms them into universal storage controllers. The new SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 releases have been re-architected to exploit the power and scalability of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 for either virtual or physical x86 and x64 platforms as universal storage controllers.

New Hypervisor Migration Support
and Tighter Integration to VMware Virtual Center
DataCore’s ‘Transporter’ time saving migration facility is a new option in SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0. Transporter migrates disk images and workloads between different operating systems, hypervisors and storage subsystems – eliminating lengthy backups and restores due to complicated format conversions. A plug-in for VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure Client is a no-charge option that allows administrators to non-disruptively provision, share, clone, replicate and expand virtual disks among physical servers and VMs.

SANmelody and SANsymphony Make
Non-stop High Availability Practical
DataCore does high-availability better – making business continuity and disaster recovery solutions practical.

Simple, fail-safe SAN data protection
Unique, automatic failover and failback
Priced right for Small and Mid-size Business
Full-featured, HA SAN software (Thin provisioning, Snapshots, Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication)
No-penalty upgradeability and a ‘future proofed’ growth path

For the presentation of the new versions of SANmelody and SANsymphony