DataCore,
the leader in Parallel
Powered Software-Defined
Storage and Hyper-converged
Virtual SAN solutions, today announced the results of a new hands-on
evaluation and testing recently performed by Enterprise Strategy
Group (ESG) Lab on its DataCore SANsymphony and Hyper-converged Virtual
SAN software. The report also highlights ESG’s survey results on the
“Top 10 Biggest Storage Challenges.” The lab testing, performed
independently, was done to assess the value of DataCore’s
infrastructure-wide storage virtualization and hyper-converged solutions
for the data center, and the tests were designed to validate the
flexibility and ease of management in a heterogeneous, highly
virtualized environment. ESG also examined DataCore Software’s
performance, efficiency, and availability in fully virtualized and
hyper-converged configurations.
“DataCore’s SANsymphony and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solutions proved
to be robust, flexible, and responsive. The company now finds itself
with incredibly relevant capabilities that truly matter to users. We
found the software easy to implement and manage, virtualizing any
storage infrastructure with enterprise-class features and functionality
while enhancing performance,” said Tony Palmer, senior lab analyst, ESG
Lab. “ESG Lab was especially impressed with DataCore’s parallel I/O
technology and its ability to deliver enterprise-class performance
running on low-cost commodity hardware.”
After completing the testing, Palmer added, “It would benefit any
organization considering or implementing an IT virtualization project to
take a long look at DataCore Software.”
ESG Lab Validation Highlights:
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Enables Enterprise-class Hyper-converged Data Infrastructure
ESG Lab found that virtualizing infrastructure with DataCore
Hyper-converged Virtual SAN was intuitive and straightforward. During
the evaluation, a pair of servers running a hypervisor and DataCore
Hyper-converged Virtual SAN provided a highly available platform to run
multiple simulated applications and enterprise workloads. When a server
failure was simulated with a hard power off, virtual machines and
storage failed over to the surviving node immediately and automatically.
A new server was installed and added to the Failover Cluster–seamlessly
and painlessly–while applications remained online and continously
available.
ESG also tested, reviewed and reported on DataCore’s ability to go
beyond traditional hyper-converged performance limits and run demanding
enterprise-class application and storage workloads. DataCore’s
hyper-converged solutions provide a range of performance and application
adaptive acceleration capabilities, the most significant being its
parallel I/O software.
“DataCore has been hyper-converged since before there was such a term in
the industry, so it’s no surprise that its hyper-converged offering is
robust, highly available, and offers very impressive price-performance
with the full complement of enterprise-class functionality that DataCore
has been honing for nearly two decades,” added Palmer.
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Drives Fastest Response Times and Industry-best Price Performance
DataCore’s parallel I/O software technology is designed to adaptively
harness available multi-core processors to optimize and schedule I/O
processing across many different cores simultaneously. It actively
senses I/O load being generated by multiple VMs concurrently and
dynamically assigns CPU cores as needed to process the I/O load. This
enables DataCore to take full advantage of modern multi-core server
technologies to eliminate I/O bottlenecks, speed up application
performance, and drive greater workload and virtual machine density per
server.
ESG Lab reviewed DataCore’s recently-published Storage Performance
Council SPC-1 benchmark results. “DataCore has published an excellent
result of 459,290 SPC-1 IOPS at 100% load with an average response time
of only 0.32 milliseconds in a hyper-converged configuration1,”
continued Palmer. “The 0.32 millisecond result at 100% load is the
fastest response time ever reported by SPC-1, and showcases the power of
parallel I/O software to significantly reduce the time it takes for
applications to access, store, and update their data.”
DataCore set a new SPC-1 price-performance
record. At full load, SANsymphony was responding at nearly two
orders of magnitude below the 30 milliseconds response time threshold
set by the Storage Performance Council and at 0.32 milliseconds, it is
three times faster than the one milliseconds threshold considered to be
the standard for all-flash systems.
ESG stated that the DataCore SPC-1 result proves its suitability for
response time sensitive applications (e.g., Virtualization and Database
workloads, OLTP, ERP, etc.) and demonstrates the headroom available to
scale up and scale out to much larger configurations and capacities.
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Simplifies VMware vSphere Storage Management: Self-Provisioning
with VVols
Administrators crave the simplicity, power and fine-grain control
promised by vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVols); however, most current
storage arrays and systems do not support VVols. With DataCore enabled,
virtually any storage becomes VVol capable allowing VMware vSphere
administrators to self-provision virtual volumes from virtual storage
pools -- and instantly specify the capacity and class of service needed
for their applications without having to know anything about the storage
or underlying hardware.
ESG Lab tested DataCore self-provisioning VVols. In the testing
scenario, ESG set up Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze policies to
define different levels of service. DataCore made provisioning storage a
seamless, integrated part of VM creation, empowering administrators to
provision storage for virtual machines using predefined storage policies
that were able to define performance, availability, and locality of data
without ever having to touch the back-end storage.
DataCore automatically took care of the entire behind-the-scenes
configuration, which is the responsibility of specialized storage
administrators in traditional storage environments. ESG Lab reported
that it was impressed with the speed, simplicity, and completeness of
the DataCore integration. Virtual machines based on these predefined
profiles were created in minutes using native VMware tools. ESG noted
that this capability is particularly of value as much of the existing
storage in data centers can never be retrofitted to support VVols, so
the fact that SANsymphony extends VVols self-provisioning to existing
storage investments and any new devices not yet able to support VVols is
a powerful capability.
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Automates Infrastructure-wide Storage Tiering to Maximize
Cost-Effective Performance
ESG Lab also validated the business value of DataCore’s automated
storage tiering. All performance testing was completed using test tools
to simulate a typical OLTP workload. ESG first measured the performance
on a non-tiered storage pool using a SAS disk. Next, an SSD was added to
the storage pool. The software immediately started the rebalancing
process of tiering, moving hot, or frequently accessed, data blocks from
the SAS disk to the higher performance flash disk.
After completing the rebalancing process, the DataCore solution
dedicated all resources to performing storage operations for the
application. The effect of storage tiering was immediately visible, the
DataCore software reported a total of 1,392 IOPS—a 700% improvement over
the non-tiered storage pool.
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Supports Continuous Availability, Metro-wide Clustering, Remote
Disaster Recovery, Advanced Data Protection and Automated Failover and
Self-healing Functionality
ESG Lab further validated that DataCore SANsymphony and Hyper-converged
Virtual SAN provide an array of advanced data protection capabilities
that can cost-effectively satisfy the most stringent business continuity
and disaster recovery requirements. Synchronous mirroring across
metropolitan areas, automated failover and self-healing, full and
incremental snapshots, roll-back in time Continuous Data Protection
(CDP), and asynchronous remote replication to distant disaster recovery
sites can all be used without being dependent on any specific model or
brand of storage device. For example, customers can take advantage of a
hyper-converged system at a remote site and establish it as a
contingency site for larger data centers.
ESG also noted that DataCore’s CDP capability was easy to configure and
use, enabling rollback to a specific point in time without having to
create multiple snapshots. An ideal solution for recovering the state of
applications and configurations prior to bad events when snapshots were
not invoked or to recreate ‘any-point in time’ restores.
View the ESG Lab Report and the Top 10 Biggest Storage Challenges
In addition to the lab report on DataCore, ESG recently conducted a
survey of 373 IT professionals and respondents who were asked to
identify what they would consider to be their biggest challenges with
respect to their storage environment. As one might expect from a captive
audience of server virtualization users, there was significant focus on
both data growth and data protection (each cited by 26% of respondents),
as well as staff costs and data migration (coming in at 23% each).
Perhaps of greatest interest and significance, however, is that hardware
costs (27%) was the most-cited storage challenge.
Bottom-line, in addition to the added flexibility to deal with growth
and change, overcoming total cost of ownership including the rising
people and hardware costs are now the primary business motivators
driving the increased momentum to deploy software-defined storage
solutions such as those from DataCore.
View the complete ESG Lab Report and Survey Information here.