Datacore SANsymphony V9.0.3

Amidst all the talk and future-looking
promises of software-defined storage from hardware-biased
manufacturers, DataCore Software
Corporation has delivered solutions to thousands of customers
worldwide.

It continues to advance and evolve its
device-independent storage management and virtualisation software,
while maintaining focus on empowering IT users to take back control
of their storage infrastructure. To that end, the company announced
enhancements to its management capabilities within version R9 of its
SANsymphony-V
storage virtualisation platform.

Advancements in SANsymphony-V
include:

• Wizards to provision multiple virtual
  disks from templates

• Group commands to manage storage for
  multiple application hosts

• Storage profiles for greater control
  and auto-tiering across multiple levels of flash, SSDs and hard disk
  technologies

• Database repository option for
  recording and analyzing performance history and trends

• Greater configurability and choices for
  incorporating high-performance ‘server-side’ flash technology and NAS
  file serving capabilities

• Preferred snapshot pools to simplify
  and segregate snapshots from impacting production work

• Improved remote replication and
  connectivity optimizations for more efficient performance

• Support for higher speed 16Gb FC
  networking.

"Storage is undergoing a
sea-change and traditional hardware manufacturers are suffering
because they are in catch-up’ mode to meet the new world order for
software-defined storage’ where automation, fast flash technologies
and hardware interchangeability are standard," states George
Teixeira, co-founder, president and CEO, DataCore. "We
have listened to our customers and stayed true to our vision. With
the latest release of SANsymphony-V, we are well-positioned to help
organizations manage growth and leverage existing investments, while
making it simple to incorporate current and future innovations. Our
software features and flexibility empowers CIOs and IT admins to
overcome the many storage challenges faced in a dynamic virtual
world."

Real-World Software-Defined Storage:

Customer-driven Enhancements Overcome Challenges
Many of the features which extend the
scope and breadth of storage management would not even occur to
companies just developing a software-defined package. They are the
product of 15 years of customer feedback and field-proven experience
the company has had in scenarios across the globe.

The elements introduced take on major
challenges faced by large scale IT organizations and more diverse
mid-size data centres. Aside from confronting explosive storage
growth (multi-petabyte disk farms), organizations are experiencing
massive VM sprawl where provisioning, partitioning and protecting
disk space taxes both staff and budget. Problems are further
aggravated by the insertion of flash technologies and SSDs used to
speed up latency-sensitive workloads. This further compounds the fact
that organizations are struggling to meet application performance
needs on limited budgets, as well as the complexity and time demands
required to manage a growing diversity of different storage models,
disk devices and flash technologies, even when they standardize on a
single manufacturer.

Bottom-line, companies have to deal
with many unknowns in terms of storage. With traditional storage
systems, the common practice has been to oversize and overprovision
storage and hope that it would meet unpredictable demands, but this
drives up costs and too often missed the mark. As a result, companies
have become smarter and realize it is no longer feasible nor sensible
to just throw expensive, purpose-built hardware at the problem.
Therefore, companies are demanding a level of software flexibility
that endures and adds value over multiple generations and types of
hardware devices. What is needed is a strategic versus one time
approach to managing storage.

Advances with SANsymphony-V Update
9.0.3
It is a strategic productivity solution
that works infrastructure-wide across many storage hardware brands
and models. Its auto-tuning cache and auto-tiering software maximize
the use of available CPU, memory and disk resources to increase
overall storage performance, which translates into faster
applications. By better leveraging existing disk storage investments,
organizations can add and benefit from high-speed technologies like
flash memory and SSDs.

The software makes it easier to
incorporate and optimize powerful ‘server-side’ flash memory
technologies. It can operate with any flash and disk devices
connected to application servers or can be used across all connected
SAN assets. Configuration flexibility and options have also been
documented with the latest release to simplify flash integration and
maximize its utilization and performance.

The firm offers a set of management
tools including ‘heat maps’ to optimize performance and tiering of
storage. Auto-tiering prioritizes and applies the right storage to
best fit application and workload needs. Storage profiles provide
greater control, and because environments vary, more optimization to
improve cost and performance. Profiles for virtual disks can be
customized to govern how dynamic policies for auto-tiering, remote
replication and synchronous mirror recovery are prioritized, while
supplementing default policies built into the software. Virtual disk
importance can be set to critical, high, normal, low or archive,
controlling which volumes take precedence 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.

Auto-regulating the best utilization of
resources keeps them from unintentionally being consumed by lower
priority demands, as often happens with backup snapshots and other
replicas of line of business data. Instead, point-in-time copies are
directed to tiers of storage more appropriate for their role, while
SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, Exchange, SharePoint and other apps are
directed to higher speed resources.

Customers can now enjoy recording,
analysis and reporting for continuously available IT services. The
product adds the ability to record historical performance for trend
analysis. By displaying metrics gathered over time, workload spikes
and potential bottlenecks can be addressed. There’s also emphasis on
automating more nuanced aspects of provisioning and advanced storage
services. The difficulty here has not so much been the size but the
number of virtual hosts and volumes to be coordinated in a repeatable
fashion. Admins can kick off and manage these tasks and visualize
their state at a glance. Large scale provisioning using templates
from which virtual disks can be instantiated with the same
characteristics (size, profile, availability, etc.).

For BC, DR and offsite data protection,
the release offers faster asynchronous remote replication to meet
stringent RT and RPO. It also takes advantage of lower speed/lower
cost wide area networks. Safeguarding against regional catastrophes
has raised the urgency for remote replication solutions, even for
smaller firms.

This further leverages the Windows
Server 2012 platform and latest clustering capabilities for faster,
unified NAS file serving and SAN disk services. This allows fully
redundant, highly available configurations to scale out across
multiple nodes and enable rapid switchover of network file system and
CIFS SMB clients despite hardware and facility outages. This
combination makes it a unified NAS/SAN storage platform that is
tailored choice to support Microsoft Clusters and more demanding
Microsoft File Serving environments.

With regards to high performance,
low-latency needs, it supports the 16Gb FC HBAs from Qlogic Corp. These
can be mixed and matched with prior generation HBAs, as well as iSCSI
NICs employed in less demanding areas of infrastructure. FC is often
the preferred interface between databases, high-speed apps and pools
of hybrid and all flash arrays virtualized by DataCore.