Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, and DataCore Software, a leader in software-defined storage and converged Virtual SAN solutions, today announced the launch of a new line of jointly certified Hyper-Converged Solutions. The first result of the strategic partnership between the two companies combines Huawei’s advanced FusionServer series with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V10 software. Optionally, Huawei’s Oceanstor high-performance Flash-based SSD storage systems and existing legacy storage systems can be easily added via iSCSI or Fibre Channel connectivity to grow and extend system capabilities beyond the server attached limitations of most other hyper-converged appliance offerings. The new DataCore and Huawei Hyper-Converged Solutions are available for shipment this month and are designed to address the customer need for simple, high-performance and scalable virtual SANs and hyper-converged solutions required in today’s dynamic data center and IT environments.

“We are pleased to launch our new Hyper-Converged Solutions with DataCore and to take the concept of convergence to the next level. In this digital age, businesses can grow very quickly and they need datacenter infrastructure that delivers scalability and improves resilience. With DataCore’s expertise in the SDS area and Huawei’s experience in providing cutting-edge ICT infrastructure such as high performance servers, storage and SSD cards, our Hyper-Converged Solutions help businesses build a seamless architecture to compete in a fast-changing environment,” said Mr. Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei’s IT product line.

With the combined Huawei and DataCore hyper-converged solutions, customers can realize the comfort of deploying state-of-the-art server and storage technology from Huawei with a flexible and comprehensive software-defined solution from DataCore that has already been proven in mission-critical applications at over 10,000 customer sites.

The new hyper-converged solutions deliver exceptional performance and the highest levels of availability to meet growing business demands within larger-scale enterprises. The Huawei FusionServer series of rack servers, blade servers, and data center servers are designed to address the wide range of customer demands required to build fast, reliable and efficient IT infrastructures that best suit their individual business needs. Combined with DataCore’s software-defined storage services platform, these solutions are able to virtualize, enhance and derive the utmost productive value from a company’s present and future investments.

“The partnership between Huawei and DataCore opens up our ability to target a largely unfulfilled segment of the marketplace and answer the need for hyper-converged solutions at a whole new price performance level,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore. "Huawei and DataCore have teamed together to fulfill the customer need for fast, affordable and simple-to-use Hyper-Converged Solutions and Virtual SANs that support legacy systems as well as new Microsoft virtualization and Hyper-V projects and mixed VMware ESXi environments running critical applications such as SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, SAP, Oracle and VDI.”

Complete end-to-end solutions

DataCore and Huawei partners can now provide 100% Huawei hardware solutions, end to end, covering storage, network, and compute needs in order to provide complete datacenter solutions with state-of–the –art enterprise storage capabilities. These solutions provide enterprise-class storage features for both self-contained hyper-converged solutions as well as architectures that allow independent scaling of storage and compute, all connected by a Huawei-powered network fabric. Optionally, new Huawei OceanStor storage systems or existing legacy external storage arrays from third parties can also be easily integrated and managed as part of these combined solutions when needed to meet current or future business requirements.

DataCore SANsymphony-V combined with Huawei offers multiple solution use cases, including:

An ideal hyper-converged solution for Microsoft and mixed Hyper-V and VMware projects - The certified DataCore and Huawei FusionServer RH Series based hyper-converged solutions include pre-installed Microsoft server software and is delivered optimized to support demanding Microsoft applications and virtualization projects as well as mixed Hyper-V and VMware environments running business critical applications such as Microsoft SQL server, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics ERP, SharePoint, Exchange, SAP and VDI. These solutions are simple and quick to install and easy to use thereafter.

Metro-clustering for business continuity and disaster recovery – The new hyper-converged solutions have undergone rigorous joint testing and are currently scalable to 64 nodes, yet they require only two nodes minimum to provide fault tolerant data protection and data services. Two or more Huawei based server nodes can be used to pool external storage to easily form a stretch cluster over multiple datacenters. With this, organizations can reliably introduce DataCore’s proven zero-touch failover to provide mission-critical resilience and non-stop data in disaster scenarios. Huawei and DataCore partners can easily enable a broader set of enterprise customers with application availability and mobility, regardless of storage infrastructure, by combining DataCore with Huawei technologies. Asynchronous replication can be enabled to provide further protection in DR scenarios, including failover to public cloud services.

Extreme acceleration for mission-critical business applications – Huawei servers provide a multitude of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) hard drive and flash media options. Combined with SANsymphony-V software, these can be used to deliver data via Fibre Channel or iSCSI to external application clients or internally to applications or VMs inside the FusionCube Converged Infrastructure. DataCore’s write optimization technologies can accelerate random IOPS hard drive performance to match performance associated with Flash SSD media capabilities. DataCore’s new breakthrough Random Write Accelerator capability, an innovation designed to highly optimize random write processing, can boost speeds up to 30 times faster depending on workloads, especially for transaction-oriented applications such as databases and ERP systems. DataCore’s real-time auto-tiering capabilities and ‘heat map’ visualization tools automate and simplify the movement and management of data hotspots to high-performance storage media and can be used to accelerate SAN storage with DAS flash.

Infrastructure-wide storage services; hyper-converged plus external SAN pooling via Huawei for end-to-end connectivity and management – Modern IT infrastructures often contain a complex mix of incompatible legacy SAN arrays and emerging storage products. Storage systems can be easily connected to a DataCore-powered Huawei server or rack to eliminate storage silos. Data can be easily replicated, migrated, and tiered across previously incompatible storage products while new products can easily be brought on-line. Thin provisioning, pioneered by DataCore, allows capacity to be added efficiently, automatically or on-demand, as needed.

With DataCore software, Huawei’s servers and storage products are now able to be easily pooled and integrated with existing storage from a variety of vendors, including EMC, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NetApp. DataCore’s automated caching and tiering technologies also make it easy to leverage the power and resources of Huawei’s servers to accelerate performance over a company’s entire infrastructure of storage assets. This combination supports powerful features like metro-wide shared storage for clusters and business continuance, and automates the optimization, provisioning and migration of data storage across the diversity of new or installed disk and flash-based technologies.

Huawei and DataCore -- Partners in Action

“We are excited about DataCore Software's comprehensive enterprise storage software capabilities and how they strongly complement our extensive practice,” states Uwe Kramer, general manager at Systems Integrator Kramer & Crew. “DataCore’s Software-Defined Storage technology combined and certified with powerful Huawei IT systems allows us to help customers achieve business agility with highly flexible and performant hyper-converged solutions. With the cooperation of systems integrators like Kramer & Crew, we are able to provide comprehensive services for implementation, maintenance and monitoring of state-of-the-art IT infrastructure from one single source and help customers to easily meet their objectives around business-critical data.”

Pricing and Availability

The Huawei and DataCore Hyper-Converged Solutions will be available for shipment later this month within EMEA. List prices start at around €20.000.

Additional product information: [Huawei and DataCore Hyper-Converged Solution Brief]