DataCore Enhancing SANsymphony-V to VR9.0.4

DataCore Software Corporation announced enhancements to its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform.

The latest version sets a new standard in software-defined storage, extending the architecture’s scalability and scope beyond traditional storage and SANs.

Drawing from experience with more than 10,000 customer deployments worldwide, SANsymphony-V R9.0.4 provides universal management services and comprehensive infrastructure-wide features to improve on the native capabilities of different storage devices and brands, helping organizations overcome vendor-specific and hardware-related shortcomings.

The new SANsymphony-V comes at a time when technology pundits are declaring the traditional storage model broken. Major storage hardware vendors have been impacted and are trying to reshape offerings or buy time by touting a move to a software-defined world; hoping to counter IT department buyers who no longer accept the ‘throw more hardware at the problem’ approach. SANsymphony-V answers IT concerns with powerful features and a long-term strategy for controlling costs, especially addressing new technologies such as high-speed flash and the need to curtail purchases of disk storage capacity.

“DataCore continues to set the bar in software-defined storage,” said founding analyst for SSG-NOW, Deni Connor. “While other vendors take small steps or hold out future promises, DataCore builds upon its field-proven storage virtualization technology with this new release of SANsymphony-V. The latest enhancements deliver real benefits – offering greater scalability, expanded scope, higher performance and richer management tools for today’s diverse data centers, using an approach free from hardware manufacturer biases to derive maximum value from storage investments.”

The Software-Defined Storage Architecture
that Runs on the Server-side, the SAN or Both
DataCore expands its scope to automate and optimize the performance and use of both flash and spinning disk storage resources on the application server-side, within the SAN or across both.

Additional new features and benefits of SANsymphony-V include:

• Twice the Scalability: Now federates and combines up to 16 nodes into a centrally-managed, storage grid to speed application response and increase system throughput. The scalability level and ability to federate across many vendor brands of devices and storage are unmatched in the industry. This adds resiliency to the entire IT infrastructure by easily accommodating temporary loss of nodes or back-end devices, be it for routine maintenance, upgrades or hardware failures.
• Self-healing Storage: Along with synchronous mirroring of data between nodes, SANsymphony-V detects and bypasses storage hardware resources that fail or have been intentionally taken out-of-service. Volumes residing on devices are transparently migrated to alternative equipment without disrupting applications. Customers not only gain continuous availability, repairs are automatic.
• Failsafe Non-Disruptive Data Mobility: Provides the ability to move virtual disks non-disruptively between different pools. For example, volumes allocated from a test or development pool can be relocated to the production pool in the background without disrupting application access.
• Faster Performance and Data Movement with VMware VAAI and Microsoft ODX: Customers can dedicate more host resources to application processing by offloading large data movements to the virtual SAN. This is coordinated with the host hypervisor or OS using either VMware VAAI commands or Microsoft ODX APIs. Rather than tie up the host and network when moving disk blocks, the hypervisor asks SANsymphony-V to do it and notify the host when done.
• New Reclamation Services to Reclaim Unused Capacity: Infrastructure-wide use of VAAI and ODX APIs play another important role in recovering disk space. Hosts signal when they have erased (zeroed-out) large number blocks, enabling SANsymphony-V to reclaim that capacity for other uses. Without this coordination, empty blocks would remain allocated and be wasted. Thin provisioning along with smart reclamation techniques get the best use of capacity and often help IT organizations defer or avoid expensive new storage acquisitions.
• Change-Control Management and Audit Logs for Error Prevention, Fast Troubleshooting: Larger IT organizations operating 24×7 on multiple shifts often have several individuals provisioning storage and fine-tuning configurations. To avoid any confusion, SANsymphony-V now records each administrative action in a time-stamped audit trail which tracks who did what and when. The audit log also helps troubleshooting by revealing actions that led to a problem.
• Next Gen Remote Replication for Speedy DR: The new SANsymphony-V incorporates optimizations to drastically reduce the time needed to copy volumes to remote sites, while streamlining the transfer of subsequent updates to keep remote copies up to date. These innovations are particularly welcomed by customers with distant DR sites, as well as those who frequently migrate volumes between branch offices and central data centers.

“With DataCore we can provide better solutions and choice to our customers, increasing their efficiency and buying power,” said Dan Molina, CTO, NTH Generation, an IT solutions provider. “The new enhancements in SANsymphony-V are right on target; DataCore understands what organizations need right now to reap the benefits of a software-defined datacenter. Equally important, the ability to span all types of hardware means customers not only get the most from storage investments, they avoid vendor lock-in and gain the flexibility to take advantage of future market developments.”

Real World Answers for a Software-Defined World
The new storage ‘world order’ is driving the urgency for DataCore’s device-independent software layer, especially among IT organization’s eager for ways to pool, provision and centrally manage unlike storage assets. A key driver is the need to optimize lightning fast solid-state memory technology with multiple tiers of lower cost, higher capacity disk drives used to balance application performance objectives against budget constraints. Often, the manufacturer for each class of storage will be different or the tools to control each disparate. Various generations of incompatible equipment are also found in data centers. Where the software needs to reside to optimize performance and capacity is also undergoing a change.

DataCore believed that software portability and hardware interchangeability are the essential elements of a software-defined architecture. The new world order requires smart, vendor agnostic storage virtualization and management software that can automate and optimize storage workloads to span both the application server side and the SAN, and SANsymphony-V answers these new demands.

“EMC’s recent ViPR announcements have focused the spotlight on the severity of the broken storage model and this has incited a search for suitable alternatives,” noted Paul Murphy, VP marketing, DataCore. “Since its inception, DataCore has set the standard for software-defined storage. Unlike ViPR, DataCore has no hardware bias or API-dependencies. SANsymphony-V not only federates varied devices, regardless of make or model, it goes further by shaping them into a cohesive, responsive and continuously available storage infrastructure.”

“ViPR is limited in functionality and is designed more like an add-on translator and dispatcher of API commands in order to reconcile EMC’s family of incompatible storage devices. This only propagates the ‘keep buying more hardware’ model and delays customers from an inevitable move needed to achieve the full value of software-defined storage,” continued Murphy. “DataCore accelerates IO performance and auto-tiers storage across application servers and storage networks. It automatically balances both fast ‘in memory’ technologies and spinning disks for optimal performance and cost efficiency. According to ‘real-world’ customers, our platform delivers the right software automation for productivity and makes storage interchangeable, enabling them to shop for the best value from suppliers, now and into the future.”

SANsymphony-V R9.0.4 software will be available November 4, 2013.