DataCore Software, the premier provider of storage
virtualization software, today
introduced major enhancements to its SANsymphony-V
Storage Hypervisor. The new
capabilities come at a critical time as CIO reactions to an extraordinary
barrage of data, coupled with the need to make business-critical application
response times faster and continuously available, are determining
competitiveness and which companies come out on top.
“What matters most to
a business is the ability to compete, so we deliver an industry-leading user
experience with fast, constantly available applications for the greatest
possible productivity,” explains George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore
Software. “Customers clearly want to get more from their tier-1 apps and
infrastructure. Whether they’re running SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, SharePoint,
Exchange or VDI, they quickly realize SANsymphony-V maximizes performance like
no other technology, providing them with a clear business
advantage.”
Several of the more
visible technology innovations of the new SANsymphony-V are as
follows.
Enterprise and Cloud
Scalability X 8
As data grows the
ability to easily scale performance and capacity also grows; a critical need is
sizing which is often unknown at the start of a new project. DataCore provides
the freedom to choose and define cost-effective nodes, and with the enhanced
SANsymphony-V, the maximum number of storage virtualization nodes in a centrally
managed group doubles from four to eight. This enables large scale data centers
and cloud service providers to non-disruptively expand into the additional
nodes, extending capacity, throughput and connectivity. Most clients managing
capacities in the petabyte range will configure DataCore™ software in an N+1
redundant grid to achieve continuous availability while reducing the cost of
redundancy.
Faster & More
Predictable Performance: 50 Percent Quicker, Optimized for
Flash
Lack of performance
or overprovisioning due to unpredictable demands are major cost drivers and
throwing costly hardware at the problem is not an optimal or sustainable
solution. SANsymphony-V maximizes existing resources, while incorporating the
latest technologies like flash/solid state disks (SSD) cost effectively. The
software adds several new features to its adaptive caching algorithms aimed at
virtualized, mission critical applications, yielding close to 20 percent faster
IOPS and throughput (Megabytes/sec) than earlier versions. These refinements,
along with special multi-threaded developments, better leverage processor
parallelism to make I/O response approximately 50 percent quicker for
transactional workloads.
Equally important,
performance spikes are “smoothed” for more predictable application response
times, with users benefitting from a more linear performance growth curve as
memory or the latest flash/SSD innovations are incorporated.
Application
Performance & Storage - New Tuning and Troubleshooting
Options
DataCore offers an
extensive set of management tools including “heat maps” to optimize performance
and cost-effective tiering of storage assets. The new SANsymphony-V adds an
ability to do trend analysis over time with a recording feature that compiles
and displays a running chart of metrics gathered from the environment. Workload
spikes or potential bottlenecks can then be easily addressed. The historical
collection may also be exported as a CSV file for further analysis, planning and
reporting with Microsoft Excel and other tools.
Customized Control
for Better Resource Utilization and Storage Tiering
Every environment is
different, so greater control allows even more optimizations to improve costs
and performance. Storage profiles for virtual disks may be customized to control
how the dynamic policies for auto-tiering, remote replication and synchronous
mirror recovery are prioritized. These custom profiles supplement default
policies built into the software. The importance of virtual disks can be set to
critical, high, normal, low, or archive to control which volumes take precedence
when competing 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.
Fast, Simple “Undo”
Continuous Data Protection, Rapid Restore for Critical Applications
Business critical
applications need to be up-and-running and SANsymphony-V now offers a greater
degree of Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and near instant restoration. In
addition, conventional nightly back-up windows either no longer exist or are
difficult to schedule, therefore, the ability to do non-disruptive backups and
do them when time permits is a major business benefit. The recovery window and
running log for continuous data protection has been extended from hours to two
weeks. This helps IT rapidly restore virtual volumes to a point in time before
malware, logic errors or user mistakes occurred, even if detected several days
later. System administrators may also rewind a virtual disk image to any point
within the 14 day rolling window. As a result, the rollback image can be mounted
to recover specific files accidentally deleted, and/or, the current disk can be
replaced with the rollback image to completely undo changes that transpired
after malware infection or logic errors began.
New Windows Server
2012 Platform
SANsymphony-V now
runs on the Windows Server 2012 operating system in addition to Windows Server
2008 R2. The storage hypervisor can run on dedicated physical Windows servers to
virtualize storage over a SAN for numerous hosts. It can also co-reside with
virtualized applications hosted by Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 and VMware vSphere 5.x.
In either case, DataCore maximizes the performance, availability and utilization
of internal and directly attached storage (DAS), as well as external disk
arrays.
Lower Cost to Unify
Storage and Clustering- Highly Available NAS/SAN
DataCore takes
advantage of new capabilities in the Windows Server 2012 platform for more
powerful and cost-effective unified network attached storage/storage area
network (NAS/SAN) capabilities. Fully redundant, highly available configurations
scale out to more nodes and quickly switchover network file system (NFS) and
common Internet file system (CIFS) SMB clients despite hardware and facility
outages. Customers will find the storage solution even more attractive since
Microsoft has made failover clustering available in its lower cost Standard
Edition, allowing files to be de-duplicated to save disk
space.
Pricing and
Availability
The latest version of
SANsymphony-V R9 will be generally available starting February 2013. Pricing
starts under $10,000 for two licenses used in highly available configurations
and includes 24x7 annual technical support and new version rights. Existing
DataCore SANsymphony-V customers under annual support contracts may upgrade at
no-charge.