Enterprise Strategy Group Benchmarks DataCore SANsymphony-V R8

DataCore Software announced the results of hands-on testing and performance benchmarking conducted on its SANsymphony-V R8 product by the Lab team at leading industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

"DataCore’s impact on performance was dramatic, in every metric we measured," said Tony Palmer, senior engineer and analyst with ESG Lab. "Even more impressive is how SANsymphony-V simplifies management and how easily it can make data center storage more resilient. With a single mouse click disk capacity is served and all the normal error-prone steps to configure, tune, and set best paths for high-availability get done auto-magically."

ESG Lab summarized its test conclusions as follows: "ESG Lab firmly believes that it would benefit any organization considering or implementing an IT virtualization project to take a long look at DataCore SANsymphony-V R8 storage virtualization software. It is robust, flexible, and responsive and delivers major value in terms of utilization, economics, improved response times, high-availability, and easy administration."

Powerful, Intuitive, and Automated
ESG Lab found that the software was "very quick and easy to set up and manage" and "virtualizing storage was intuitive and straightforward." In fact, ESG analysts configured a high-availability SANsymphony-V environment and were serving storage to virtual machines in minutes. "The volume was thin provisioned, mirrored for high-availability, and preferred and alternate paths to storage resources were set without administrator intervention. ESG Lab was impressed with the speed, simplicity, and completeness of the configuration."

SANsymphony-V software enables data centers to use existing equipment and conventional storage devices to achieve the shared storage environment necessary to support dynamic virtual IT environments. This contrasts with the expensive ‘rip and replace’ approaches being proposed to support desktop and server virtualization projects. In its findings, ESG Lab verified that DataCore SANsymphony-V software can be deployed to cost-effectively provide easy-to-configure, performance enhanced, storage virtualization, offering affordable scalability, and performance acceleration for virtualized servers and applications.

"Enterprises have long been concerned about underutilization of servers in their data centers," continued Palmer. "Virtualization helps them consolidate data by reducing the number of servers used and leaving those that remain as a pool of resources to be drawn on as needed. Now, enterprises are turning their attention to storage, and DataCore is tapping into that demand."

SANsymphony-V Delivering
Compelling Value, Innovation and Faster Performance

• The ESG Lab Validation Report on DataCore SANsymphony-V also specifically highlights the following:
• Performance improved for every workload with the File Server workload posting the most significant improvement, more than 6x and the Exchange 2007 workload showing a 5x improvement.
• With one click of a mouse, ESG Lab was able to serve a thin provisioned, performance tuned, fully protected, synchronously mirrored 1TB virtual disk to a Windows server in less than a minute.
• Migrating and importing disk drives from a working physical server into the virtual disk pool was a fast and effortless process. DataCore storage virtualization software provided a seamless transition from physical to virtual infrastructure while actually enhancing performance and availability.
• DataCore synchronous mirroring provided hosts with continuous access to virtual disks through a node outage with zero downtime and no interruptions to service.
• DataCore Continuous Data Protection (CDP) was simple to configure and use, enabling rollback to a specific point in time without having to create multiple snapshots.
• DataCore asynchronous remote replication was also easy to configure; compression and multi-streaming provided a 2x throughput enhancement over a simulated T1 link.

"The results of the ESG Lab test strongly validate the core value proposition we hoped to achieve with SANsymphony-V, which is to cost-effectively shape the shared storage infrastructure required by virtual IT environments," said Alex Earhard, product manager of DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V. "By providing high-availability storage virtualization that multiplies the performance of what’s already in place, we are solving the big problem that is bringing many of today’s server and desktop virtualization projects to a standstill."

To download the full ESG Lab Validation Report (you need the register).