Performance Enhancements of DataCore SANsymphony and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN

DataCore Software Corporation announced significant performance enhancements to two of its product lines: SANsymphony Software-Defined Storage (SDS) platform and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN.

In addition to incorporating the latest advances in company’s Parallel I/O technology, the new upgrades include deeper hypervisor integration; certified VVOLs support; richer performance monitoring, charting and capacity planning tools; more granular QoS and access controls; and lower cost bulk storage options.

“EMA has previously awarded DataCore with top honors as Best Enterprise Solution for Software-Defined Storage and our research has shown that their most recent Parallel I/O optimizations lower server and storage costs,” said Jim Miller, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates. “They are raising the bar once again with this latest software release.“

Company’s Parallel I/O technology and application-adaptive software solutions exploit the potential of servers and storage to solve data infrastructure challenges and elevate IT to focus on the applications and services that power business. Firm’s solutions revolutionize the performance, cost-savings, and productivity gains that businesses can achieve from their servers and storage – delivering greater value, industry-best performance, availability and simplicity. Powerful enhancements in the software release (version 10 PSP5) include:

Faster performance and next-gen connectivity meet enterprise workload demands
This software release offers several major performance enhancements to speed up applications and handle more demanding workloads.

Foremost among the new capabilities are technology optimizations for firm’s Parallel I/O, yielding up to 50% faster performance, compared to previous releases, when running SANsymphony and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN products on multi-core x86 servers.

Objective measurement of Parallel I/O’s performance benefits for enterprise OLTP and database workloads is illustrated in company’s previously published SPC-1 benchmark results ^[1]. In head-to-head comparisons with long-established storage manufacturers, the firm achieved audited results that included record-setting numbers for the fastest response time at 100% load: 0.320ms; best price performance: $0.08 per SPC-1 IO/s; and highest IO/s per rack unit: 459,290.87 SPC-1 IO/s in a 2U enclosure (approximately 3.5 inches or 89mm) – a small fraction of a standard 42U rack. All of these numbers rank three to ten times better than popular storage products from leading manufacturers, including all-flash arrays and many multimillion-dollar systems. The PSP5 release further elevates Parallel I/O performance advantage.

The maximum high-speed cache in PSP5 rises from one to 8TB per node. Bigger RAM caches accelerate applications such as larger databases, where the amount of data being actively referenced typically exceeds 1TB. Speeding up I/O response by servicing more I/O requests from memory (RAM) masks the latency of slower back-end devices such as SSDs and spinning disks, so transactions and analysis complete quicker. Both reads and writes benefit from larger caches.

Additionally, the company adds support for higher speed, next-gen, Qlogic Corp.‘ 32 Gbps FC HBAs, allowing more concurrent requests to be serviced over the same physical channel, and I/Os to travel quicker over the faster connections. These HBAs are backwards compatible with 16, 8, 4 and 1Gb/s HBAs to smooth the upgrade from prior generations of the network fabric.

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Hyper-converged for enterprise
While growing in popularity, it is well-known that in the real world, many hyper-converged systems are underpowered and can’t meet high-end workload demands; plus they lack essential high-speed FC connectivity, the backbone of database and tier-1 business applications. In contrast, firm’s Parallel I/O takes hyper-converged performance to another level – and its proven ability to support FC at thousands of customer sites and lead the industry in fabric connectivity make DataCore an enterprise solution.

Deeper Microsoft and VMware Hypervisor integration and universal VVOLs support
The release features deeper integration with the two most popular hypervisors from Vmware, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Server administrators can now create policies and self-provision storage that suits their needs using vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) and Microsoft System Center VM Manager (VMM). The companye is the only certified software vendor for VVOLs and its capabilities allow VVOLs to work universally across all types of storage (disk subsystems, flash/SSD arrays, DAS, etc.).

PSP5 includes enhanced support for VVOLs VM-centric storage policy-based management (SPBM) using multi-tiered storage pools. The new virtual disk templates can be tailored to establish different classes of service (storage profiles) that the vSphere administrators can choose from when creating VMs or adding disks to those VMs.

Richer performance-monitoring, charting and capacity-planning tools
Additional tools have been added to highlight key indications of system behavior, making it easier to pinpoint the heaviest loads and their impact on response and capacity. This capability is especially beneficial in larger and more dynamic storage environments. PSP5’s richer performance-monitoring, charting and capacity-planning tools help ensure that I/O-intensive applications will run faster and require fewer servers and disk space to achieve SLAs.

More granular QoS and access controls
PSP5 introduces fine-grained control over QoS and administrative access privileges at the virtual disk level. These are especially valuable in multi-tenant/shared storage environments where it is important to differentiate between multiple consumers and administrators. Shared physical resources such as channels, storage networks and disk capacity may be logically prioritized so the highest value applications get preferential treatment.

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Lower cost SANsymphony bulk storage options
While many of the enhancements in PSP5 focus on high-performance workloads, data ages quickly and rapidly piles up. Colder data and online archives are best placed on lower cost, bulk storage. The company offers a new alternative for these scenarios with less expensive and storage options for on-premises as well as offsite cold data, long retention files shares, backups and archives. These secure in-house alternatives for multi-tiered data pools can be quickly rolled out with cloud-like convenience and economics.

“Our proven solutions have already been validated by thousands of customers worldwide for their record-breaking price performance, fastest response times, enterprise HA, and lowest TCO, among other notable benefits,” said Robert Bassett, VP, engineering, DataCore. “The new features in the latest software release open the door to even more demanding use cases such as larger scale virtualization clusters, database storage, ERP applications, financial on-line transactional systems and enterprise clouds. Our customers are eager to deploy the latest software in converged, hyper-converged and SAN environments as well as in private and hybrid clouds to solve their most pressing storage challenges.“

The enhancements will be available in June, 2016.

Current company’s customers may upgrade their software to the release (version 10 PSP5) at no-charge under their existing software update service and support contracts. ^(*)

^(*) Some new features are separately-priced options.
^[1] SPC Benchmark 1 Full Disclosure Report DataCore Software Corporation SANsymphony-V 10.0
(Current as of 11/30/2015)