
Welcome to The Virtual Viewpoint: Storage Virtualization - A Contributed Series by DataCore Software
Software-defined Storage is a 'Must Have' for a Software-defined Data Center; Movement Driven by Need to Optimize Tier 1 Business Applications
I
had expected a lot of buzz at VMworld 2012 and afterwards around
“Software-defined Data Centers” and it makes me chuckle to think of all
the different ways we have found to state the obvious – “Software
is what matters.”’ The software model and business applications have
redefined the foundation of architectures from being “static” to
“dynamic.” Software is the basis for agility, user interactions and for
building a long-term architecture that adapts to change. Yes, hardware
continues to innovate rapidly, but it is software that defines an
infrastructure’s flexibility to evolve, to enhance productivity and to
optimally align resources and services to meet the dynamic needs of
application use cases.
As I blogged earlier this year:
Software will take center stage for storage, empowering users to a new
level of hardware interchangeability and commodity-based "buying power."
Clearly, this new found positioning and characterization in the
virtualization industry around “software-defined” is much more than just
new buzz words. It is a continuation on the trend to capture a few
hard-hitting words to frame the mindset evolution from hardware-centric
to software-centric that is happening in the real world. As users have
to deal with the new dynamics and faster pace of business, they can no
longer be trapped within yesterday’s more rigid and hardwired
architecture models. Infrastructure is constructed on three pillars –
computing, networking and storage – and in each area hardware decisions
are taking a back seat to a world dictated by software and driven by
applications. See DataCore announcement at VMworld 2012:
DataCore Storage Hypervisor Makes Mission-Critical and I/O Intensive
Tier 1 Business Applications Run Up to 5X Faster Virtualized.
The
terminology and marketing hype has clearly evolved over the years from a
conversation about software code, to emulators, to supervisors, to
virtualization, to hypervisors, to management platforms, to private
cloud infrastructures and now to “Software-defined.” VMware certainly
has been on the forefront of this journey and their CTO Steve Herrod has
been blogging away on advancing the software-defined data center. Most recently when VMware purchased Nicira, the tag line of the day became software-defined networking
for the software-defined data center. And at VMworld 2012, there were a
lot of announcements around this theme. I see this new conversation as a
positive driver of momentum for true virtual infrastructure software
suppliers, like VMware and DataCore Software, but more importantly, the
real value is that the talk leads to a compelling value proposition for
customers in terms of flexibility and risk mitigation in how they build,
purchase, upgrade and scale their infrastructures for the long-term.
This trend to software-centric thinking is inevitable and it is the
foundation and the basic premise that led to the formation of DataCore
Software. So we see this “new conversation” and mindset as vindication
that our vision on redefining storage as software was ahead of its time.
We have never wavered on this direction. Therefore, we certainly
support “software-defined storage” becoming a meaningful new mantra for
how the industry redefines infrastructures and advances the state of
storage within a “software-defined data center.”
Software-defined means ‘Future-proof’ adaptability and Hardware Interchangeability
The
whole concept of software-defined data centers is based on how we view
and manage holistically all of the different resources – Computing,
Networking and Storage – and how we make them equally accessible to a
lot of different application types. Hardware interchangeability is
fundamental at each level; it becomes a “must have” in order to gain
flexibility, improve productivity, and optimize cost savings on an
on-going basis. Likewise, software-defined architectures can absorb new
innovations without complete redesigns – in effect allowing
infrastructures to adapt and become “future-proofed” to device changes
that “come and go” as new generations and models come along. This is the
compelling value proposition that DataCore delivers with its software-based storage hypervisor.
Software-defined Storage and Tier 1 Applications
It
is smart software that abstracts and transforms the many different
device types (servers, switches, disk arrays, etc.) into pools of
resources that can be provisioned and mapped to application systems as
needed. Automation and management tools make it easier to achieve much
greater levels of productivity and all this is thanks to software
innovations that have redefined the infrastructure level.
Infrastructure is simply a means to an end. It's the way that you run
applications that ultimately matters. The idea of the software-defined
data center is to optimize that application experience. DataCore
understands that in the end, it is all about how the software makes
business applications more productive. To learn more, please see how
DataCore’s storage hypervisor Optimizes Your Application-centric Storage and how
DataCore Storage Hypervisor Makes Mission-Critical and I/O Intensive
Tier 1 Business Applications Run Up to 5X Faster Virtualized. In this recent announcement, I state the following:
"DataCore
fundamentally changes the economics of performance, cost-effectively
enabling application owners to virtualize their tier 1 applications as
they transform into private clouds and software-defined data centers.
The DataCore storage hypervisor works hand in hand with VMware to
intelligently and economically harness the full power of server caches,
solid state disks (SSDs) and existing storage assets so that application
owners no longer need to 'rip and replace' storage infrastructures and
pay much higher costs to meet their performance and uptime objectives."
SANsymphony™-V 9.0,
the newest release of DataCore’s flagship product, boosts the speed,
throughput and availability of virtualized, I/O intensive tier 1
applications like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange.
Customers report up to 5x faster response time performance and achieve
better than 99.999% uptime after virtualizing their existing storage
with SANsymphony-V.
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Come back next week for part 2 of this blog posting.