In the Las Vegas spotlight of VMworld 2008, DataCore™ will unveil four newsworthy developments in its SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ storage virtualization product set. To make these “virtual” developments very real for those attending the event, they will be incorporated into a full blown, high-availability, SAN environment on the show floor from September 15 through 18th at The Venetian Hotel Resort and Casino.  

VMware Virtual Center Integration – Click for Simple and Comprehensive SAN management

At VMworld, DataCore will introduce a management plug-in for VMware Virtual Center. It gives system administrators the option to allocate and manage capacity from their DataCore virtualized SANs directly to their ESX virtual machines from the same console they use to control other VMware virtualization parameters. It also accesses a powerful and extensive SAN management control center that meets the needs and objectives of even the most demanding virtual and physical storage consumers.

Time Saving Migration – Transport System Images between Physical and Virtual Machines Quickly and Automatically in VMware, Citrix and Microsoft Virtual Environments

Migrating disk images and workloads between different operating systems, hypervisors and storage subsystems has always been a difficult and time consuming task involving lengthy backups and restores followed by complicated format conversions. James E. Price III, Vice President, Product and Channel Marketing, DataCore Software, notes, “Unlike inferior alternatives, DataCore takes advantage of its intrinsic ability to generalize virtual disks to make source images from one Windows environment immediately available to a dissimilar physical or virtual platform.” The migration takes place in background without modifying the original source, avoiding potentially irreversible migrations.

These new and advanced capabilities have been packaged as a $998 “Transporter” option to SANmelody and SANsymphony software licenses. Transporter can be used to perform an unlimited number of migrations. Transporter is the quickest and most general way to import Windows images, including the boot drive, between dissimilar physical or virtual platforms without waiting for lengthy disk-to-disk copies or error prone conversions.

Best of VMworld - Data Protection Software Nominee - SANsymphony Fault Tolerance & CDP Recovery 

This year, DataCore is nominated for “Best of VMworld” in the Data Protection Software category for the best software solution to achieve data backup, replication, fault tolerance and disaster recovery in virtualized configurations. Those in attendance will have the opportunity to observe the demonstration of a DataCore mid-size, high-availability configuration with a dozen VMware ESX virtual machines accessing a fault-tolerant 10 TB SAN. In a VMworld “first,” this multi-vendor configuration will combine fast Sun servers powered by AMD, different storage arrays from Xiotech and Promise Technologies, Pano Logic desktop computing and the latest QLogic high-speed 8 Gbps Fibre Channel host bus adapters into a highly resilient virtual SAN infrastructure. The live audience will experience non-disruptive online backup and recovery using snapshots, efficient thin provisioning and real-time synchronous replication for fail-safe data protection between physically separate disk arrays.

With its Traveller™ continuous data protection (CDP) feature, DataCore SANsymphony goes beyond high-availability by allowing network and system administrators to “dial back the clock” to recover a previous state of any VM that resides on a DataCore virtual volume. “Here is a way to go back in time and recover virtual machines or data,” explained Price. “What if you have a VMware server with 20 different VMs on it and the machine dies? With DataCore SANsymphony and its time Traveller CDP capability, you can easily and quickly roll back time and save those 20 virtual machines.”

VMware SAN Compatibility Guide Certification – DataCore High-Availability and Automatic Failover

The latest release of DataCore SANmelody software has been certified with the newest release of VMware ESX Server 3.x. The certification covers base iSCSI connectivity as well as the more rigorous automatic storage port failover scenarios required in high-availability configurations.

DataCore and VMware – Get the Fullest Use, the Highest Availability and Fastest Performance

Mr. Price goes on to say, “It’s surprising to see how people take great pains to virtualize their servers, desktops and applications, but completely overlook their storage infrastructure. Come learn how to remove the remaining restrictions and vulnerabilities by visiting DataCore at VMworld Booth #1420.”