Ideas International Compares Three Storage Hypervisors

Ideas International, Inc. (IDEAS) has released a functional comparison of three storage hypervisors, including DataCore SANsymphony-V, IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center, and Virsto.

The comparison evaluates these storage hypervisors based on more than 20 functional details, including storage features, manageability, interoperability, and deployment factors. The results of the review have been published as a Collaborative Product Evaluation (CPE), an online tool that allows visitors to compare the functionality of complex technologies at multiple levels of detail. Visitors can customize the comparison by weighting the different functions based on their importance so they can see which product is best for their specific requirements. CPE also allows visitors to contribute their own ratings of individual storage hypervisor functions, should they choose to agree or disagree with the assessment of IDEAS analysts in a particular area. Using CPE is free, but registration is required to set weights and see the summary ratings.

The chart above shows summary ratings for the evaluated products, based
on an average of their ratings for 23 technical details.

This evaluation compares the functional capabilities of several leading storage hypervisor platforms, including:

DataCore SANsymphony-V is a storage virtualization solution for SAN and NAS environments, supporting storage arrays that are compatible with Windows Server 2008 R2. It is installed on Windows servers and primarily relies on IP infrastructure for communication and management. A DAS solution is also available for Hyper-V that virtualizes internal server storage.

SANsymphony-V is marketed by DataCore as a storage hypervisor (DataCore itself is branded The Storage Hypervisor company). DataCore defines a storage hypervisor as a solution that aggregates heterogeneous storage into a common pool with a central management platform and additional value-added features. SANsymphony-V includes many performance, protection, and management functions such as automated tiering and CDP. The solution scales out by adding additional server nodes to the infrastructure in pairs for redundancy. SANsymphony-V also has the unique ability to convert an amount of the server’s RAM into disk cache for additional performance gains.
    
IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center is a suite of products that includes SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC), Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager, Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager, Tivoli System Automation Application Manager, and Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery. Some of these products are themselves bundles of other software items.

This evaluation focuses primarily on the capabilities of SVC and TPC. IBM defines its SVC product as a storage hypervisor platform and TPC as storage hypervisor management. The platform has the ability to pool resources together, divide the pool into parts, and nondisruptively move data across tiers, vendors, and/or sites. The management framework can be used to centralize and automate management of the platform. SVC is a storage virtualization appliance providing a host of options such as automated tiering, replication, thin provisioning, and online migration in addition to supporting a number of SSDs within the actual appliance. TPC is a storage resource management facility with drill-down management and analytics for individual arrays and components. TPC offers a number of automated functions to simplify management and speed deployment. It also features a number of integration points with SVC such as replication management and performance monitoring.
    
Virsto is storage virtualization software that plugs into a server hypervisor and modifies the manner in which it communicates with storage. By sending I/O requests to a log, immediately acknowledging the request, and arranging I/Os into sequential blocks before writing them to back-end storage, Virsto maximizes the performance of storage while maintaining important protection and capacity features such as snapshots and thin provisioning.

Virsto is unique in that it works only in a virtual environment and is managed entirely through a plug-in for the management console of a particular server hypervisor. Virsto mirrors the style of the hypervisor’s management console in order to simplify and integrate the overall user experience. Virsto defines storage hypervisors as a solution that dramatically improves the utilization and flexibility of existing storage. Virsto markets its product as a VM-centric storage hypervisor, meaning that is has been designed specifically to operate on and maximize the capability of virtual machines. Because of its integration with server hypervisors, Virsto is able to perform operations at the VM level rather than at the volume level, which can translate to performance, operational, and capacity savings.

Note that HP is leveraging the concept of a storage hypervisor in the marketing of its 3PAR Storage Systems. However, HP does not officially qualify any of its solutions as a storage hypervisor offering to directly compete with other vendors, so it is not included in this evaluation.