DataCore SANsymphony-V9.0 Boosts Performance “Up to 5X”

At VMware’s VMworld Europe 2012, DataCore Software Corp. showed how SANsymphony-V 9.0, new release of its product, boosts the speed, throughput and availability of virtualised, I/O-intensive tier 1 applications like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange.

Customers report up to 5x faster performance and achieve better than 99.999% uptime after virtualising their existing storage with SANsymphony-V.

"DataCore fundamentally changes the economics of performance by cost-effectively enabling application owners to virtualise their tier 1 applications as they transform into private clouds," said George Teixeira, CEO and president of DataCore. "The DataCore storage hypervisor works hand in hand with VMware to intelligently and economically harness the full power of server caches, SSDs and existing storage assets so that application owners no longer need to ‘rip and replace’ storage infrastructures or pay much higher costs to meet their performance and uptime objectives."

Eliminating I/O Bottlenecks in Virtualised Data Centers
Slow performance and downtime caused by I/O bottlenecks are the number one reason why enterprises are holding back from virtualising their I/O-intensive tier 1 applications. SANsymphony-V overcomes this by using device-independent adaptive caching and performance boosting techniques to absorb wildly variable workloads so that applications run faster virtualised.

"DataCore’s impact on performance was dramatic in every metric we measured. Even more impressive is how SANsymphony-V simplifies management and how easily it can make data centre 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 HA get done auto-magically," said Tony Palmer, senior engineer and analyst with ESG Lab.

Video on Palmer’s observations

In the ESG Lab Validation report, the benchmark tests confirmed that SQL Server and Exchange workloads were able to improve their performance by nearly 5x. As a proof point for performance and cost efficiency, the SANsymphony-V empowered systems were able to support more than 1,500 users as compared to only 322 users on the non-virtualised physical servers.

Harnessing Flash Storage Cost Effectively
for Greater Application Performance
To further increase tier 1 application responsiveness, companies often spend excessively on flash memory-based SSDs. SANsymphony-V’s auto-tiering feature optimizes the use of these resources alongside more modestly priced, higher capacity disk drives. SANsymphony-V constantly monitors I/O behaviour and intelligently auto-selects between server memory caches, flash storage and traditional disk resources in real-time to ensure that the most suitable class or tier of storage device is assigned to each workload based on priorities and urgency. The result is tier 1 application performance and cost efficiency.

Ensuring Fast and Always Available Applications
Without Major Storage Investment
Once I/O intensive tier 1 applications are virtualised, SANsymphony-V ensures HA, eliminating single points of failure and disruption through application-transparent physical separation stretched across rooms or off-site with full auto-recovery capabilities for the highest levels of business continuity. It effectively virtualises whatever storage is on a user’s floor, whether direct-attached or SAN-connected, to achieve the responsive shared storage environment necessary to support highly dynamic virtual IT environments.

Customers Around the World Increasing Performance,
Improving  Availability and Reducing  Storage Costs
of Their Virtualised Tier 1 Applications
"SAP was the critical element in the project because the SAP system places the highest load and the greatest demand on both performance and on the need for availability," said Jurgen Bechtel, CIO of MENNEKES Elektrotechnik GmbH & Co. KG, in the manufacturing of electrical products with headquarters in Germany. "The result was very positive – SAP runs on DataCore, with more performance than on our previous storage systems. The DataCore solution simply proved itself."

"Since we started using DataCore on the storage side to virtualise our tier 1 applications, we got back on track with our virtualisation project," said Pablo Palma, information technology manager at The MLS.com, a US real estate advertising and marketing service company. "Before that, I/O bottlenecks and the pesky outages were hitting us at every turn, especially with web servers, file servers and SQL Server. Now we can handle about 300% more transactions than before – all on the same hardware. Moreover our disk pool is completely redundant, giving us the opportunity to upgrade and expand without taking users down."

"We have virtualised Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint on all of our DataCore/VMware projects and consistently the performance of these applications has been outstanding," said Jim Krantz, president of Krantz Secure Technologies, a service professional IT services company based in the US. "The performance has been so good that we have not even considered expanding the amount of cache we use, though we could do this easily and inexpensively. Of course DataCore’s automated HA and Disaster Recovery solutions are equally as important for these critical applications. The technology is awesome."

"We’ve been able to support far more VMs and far more I/O requests than the IT team had originally expected. Performance has been nothing short of phenomenal," said Craig Beetlestone, lead systems engineer at Ports of Auckland, New Zealand’s 24×7, 365-day-a-year seaport. "With SANsymphony, we have seen the benefits first-hand of improved uptime and being able to do operational maintenance without affecting the business. Lastly, we have peace of mind. We know we don’t have to throw away any functionality intelligence because we get to keep using SANsymphony software even as the hardware underneath changes."

To download a 30-day free trial of SANsymphony-V (registration needed)