DataCore Enhancing SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor

DataCore Software Corporation introduced enhancements to its SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor.

The new capabilities come at a critical time as CIO reactions to a barrage of data, coupled with the need to make business-critical application response times faster and continuously available, are determining competitiveness and which companies come out on top.
 
"What matters most to a business is the ability to compete, so we deliver an industry-leading user experience with fast, constantly available applications for the greatest possible productivity," explains George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore. "Customers clearly want to get more from their tier-1 apps and infrastructure. Whether they’re running SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, SharePoint, Exchange or VDI, they quickly realize SANsymphony-V maximizes performance like no other technology, providing them with a clear business advantage."
 
More visible technology innovations:
 
Enterprise and Cloud Scalability X 8
As data grows the ability to easily scale performance and capacity also grows; a critical need is sizing which is often unknown at the start of a new project. DataCore provides the freedom to choose and define cost-effective nodes, and with the enhanced SANsymphony-V, the maximum number of storage virtualization nodes in a centrally managed group doubles from four to eight. This enables large scale data centers and cloud service providers to non-disruptively expand into the additional nodes, extending capacity, throughput and connectivity. Most clients managing capacities in the petabyte range will configure the software in an N+1 redundant grid to achieve continuous availability while reducing the cost of redundancy.
 
Performance: 50% Quicker, Optimized for Flash
Lack of performance or overprovisioning due to unpredictable demands are major cost drivers and throwing costly hardware at the problem is not an optimal or sustainable solution. SANsymphony-V maximizes existing resources, while incorporating the technologies like SSD cost effectively. The software adds several new features to its adaptive caching algorithms aimed at virtualized, mission critical applications, yielding close to 20% faster IOPS and throughput than earlier versions. These refinements, along with special multi-threaded developments, better leverage processor parallelism to make I/O response approximately 50% quicker for transactional workloads.
 
Equally important, performance spikes are ‘smoothed’ for more predictable application response times, with users benefitting from a more linear performance growth curve as memory or the latest flash/SSD innovations are incorporated.
 
New Tuning and Troubleshooting Options
DataCore offers a set of management tools including ‘heat maps’ to optimize performance and cost-effective tiering of storage assets. The software adds an ability to do trend analysis over time with a recording feature that compiles and displays a running chart of metrics gathered from the environment. Workload spikes or potential bottlenecks can then be addressed. The historical collection may also be exported as a CSV file for further analysis, planning and reporting with Excel and other tools.
 
Customized Control for Better Resource Utilization
and Storage Tiering
Every environment is different, so greater control allows even more optimizations to improve costs and performance. Storage profiles for virtual disks may be customized to control how the dynamic policies for auto-tiering, remote replication and synchronous mirror recovery are prioritized. These custom profiles supplement default policies built into the software. The importance of virtual disks can be set to critical, high, normal, low, or archive to control which volumes take precedence when competing for shared resources. This ensures important applications benefit from more valuable resources such as flash memory and SSDs, with less demanding tasks using lower cost, higher density storage.
 
Fast, Simple ‘Undo’ Continuous Data Protection
Rapid Restore for Critical Applications
Business critical applications need to be up-and-running and SANsymphony-V now offers a greater degree of CDP and near instant restoration. In addition, conventional nightly back-up windows either no longer exist or are difficult to schedule, therefore, the ability to do non-disruptive backups and do them when time permits is a major business benefit. The recovery window and running log for continuous data protection has been extended from hours to two weeks. This helps IT rapidly restore virtual volumes to a point in time before malware, logic errors or user mistakes occurred, even if detected several days later. System administrators may also rewind a virtual disk image to any point within the 14 day rolling window. As a result, the rollback image can be mounted to recover specific files accidentally deleted, and/or, the current disk can be replaced with the rollback image to completely undo changes that transpired after malware infection or logic errors began.
 
New Windows Server 2012 Platform
SANsymphony-V now runs on the Windows Server 2012 OS in addition to Windows Server 2008 R2. The storage hypervisor can run on dedicated physical Windows servers to virtualize storage over a SAN for numerous hosts. It can also co-reside with virtualized applications hosted by Hyper-V 3.0 and vSphere 5.x. In either case, DataCore maximizes the performance, availability and utilization of internal and DAS, as well as external disk arrays.
 
Lower Cost to Unify Storage and Clustering
Highly Available NAS/SAN
DataCore takes advantage of new capabilities in the Windows Server 2012 platform for more powerful and cost-effective unified NAS/SAN capabilities. Redundant and available configurations scale out to more nodes and quickly switchover NFS and CIFS SMB clients despite hardware and facility outages. Customers will find the storage solution more attractive since Microsoft has made failover clustering available in its lower cost Standard Edition, allowing files to be de-duplicated to save disk space.

Pricing and Availability
The latest version of SANsymphony-V R9 will be available starting February 2013. Pricing starts under $10,000 for two licenses used in highly available configurations and includes 24×7 annual technical support and new version rights. Existing DataCore SANsymphony-V customers under annual support contracts may upgrade at no-charge.