DataCore today announced significant performance enhancements to two of its product lines: DataCore SANsymphony Software-Defined Storage (SDS) platform and DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN. In addition to incorporating the latest advances in DataCore's record-breaking Parallel I/O technology, the new upgrades include deeper hypervisor integration; certified VVOLs support; richer performance monitoring, charting and capacity planning tools; more granular Quality of Service (QoS) and access controls; and lower cost bulk storage options. 

"EMA has previously awarded DataCore with top honors as Best Enterprise Solution for Software-Defined Storage and our research has shown that their most recent Parallel I/O optimizations significantly lower server and storage costs," said Jim Miller, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "They are raising the bar once again with this latest software release."

DataCore Parallel I/O technology and application-adaptive software solutions exploit the full potential of servers and storage to solve data infrastructure challenges and elevate IT to focus on the applications and services that power business. DataCore's solutions revolutionize the performance, cost-savings, and productivity gains that businesses can achieve from their servers and data storage - delivering greater value, industry-best performance, availability and simplicity. Powerful enhancements in the new software release (Version 10 PSP5) include:

Faster Performance and Next-Gen Connectivity Meet Enterprise Workload Demands

The new software release offers several major performance enhancements to speed up applications and handle more demanding workloads.

Foremost among the new capabilities are technology optimizations for DataCore Parallel I/O, yielding up to 50% faster performance, compared to previous releases, when running SANsymphony and DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN products on multi-core x86 servers.

Objective measurement of Parallel I/O's performance benefits for enterprise-class OLTP and database workloads is illustrated in DataCore's previously published SPC-1 benchmark results. In head-to-head comparisons with long-established storage manufacturers, DataCore achieved audited results that included record-setting numbers for the fastest response time at 100% load: 0.320 Milliseconds; best price performance: $0.08 per SPC-1 IOPS; and  highest IOPS per rack unit: 459,290.87 SPC-1 IOPS in a 2U enclosure (approximately 3.5 inches or 89 millimeters) -- a small fraction of a standard 42U rack. All of these numbers rank three to ten times better than popular storage products from leading manufacturers, including all-flash arrays and many multimillion-dollar systems. The PSP5 release further elevates DataCore's revolutionary Parallel I/O performance advantage.

The maximum high-speed cache in PSP5 rises from 1TB to 8TBs per node. Bigger RAM caches accelerate applications such as larger databases, where the amount of data being actively referenced typically exceeds 1TB. Speeding up I/O response by servicing more I/O requests from memory (RAM) masks the latency of slower back-end devices such as SSDs and spinning disks, so transactions and analysis complete quicker. Both reads and writes benefit from larger caches.

Additionally, DataCore adds support for higher speed, next-gen, Qlogic 32 Gbps fibre channel host bus adapters (HBAs), allowing more concurrent requests to be serviced over the same physical channel, and I/Os to travel quicker over the faster connections. The new HBAs are backwards compatible with 16 Gbps, 8 Gbps, 4 Gbps and 1 Gbps HBAs to smooth the upgrade from prior generations of the network fabric.

Hyper-converged for the Enterprise

While growing in popularity, it is well-known that in the real world, many hyper-converged systems are underpowered and can't meet high-end workload demands; plus they lack essential high-speed fibre channel connectivity, the backbone of database and tier-1 business applications. In contrast, DataCore Parallel I/O takes hyper-converged performance to another level -- and its proven ability to support fibre channel at thousands of customer sites and lead the industry in fabric connectivity make DataCore an ideal enterprise solution.

Deeper Microsoft and VMware Hypervisor Integration and Universal VVOLs support

The new release features deeper integration with the two most popular hypervisors from VMware and Microsoft. Server administrators can now create policies and self-provision storage that suits their needs using VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). DataCore is the only certified software vendor for VVOLs and its capabilities allow VVOLs to work universally across all types of storage (disk subsystems, flash/SSD arrays, DAS, etc.).

PSP5 includes enhanced support for VVOLs VM-centric storage policy-based management (SPBM) using multi-tiered storage pools. The new virtual disk templates can be tailored to establish different classes of service (storage profiles) that the vSphere administrators can choose from when creating virtual machines (VMs) or adding disks to those VMs. 

Richer Performance-Monitoring, Charting and Capacity-Planning Tools

Additional tools have been added to highlight key indications of system behavior, making it easier to pinpoint the heaviest loads and their impact on response and capacity. This capability is especially beneficial in larger and more dynamic storage environments. PSP5's richer performance-monitoring, charting and capacity-planning tools help ensure that I/O-intensive applications will run faster and require fewer servers and disk space to achieve SLAs.

More Granular Quality of Service (QoS) and Access Controls

PSP5 introduces fine-grained control over QoS and administrative access privileges at the virtual disk level. These are especially valuable in multi-tenant/shared storage environments where it is important to differentiate between multiple consumers and administrators. Shared physical resources such as channels, storage networks and disk capacity may be logically prioritized so the highest value applications get preferential treatment.

Lower Cost SANsymphony Bulk Storage Options

While many of the enhancements in PSP5 focus on high-performance workloads, data ages quickly and rapidly piles up. Colder data and online archives are best placed on lower cost, bulk storage. DataCore now offers a new alternative for these scenarios with less expensive and deep storage options for on-premises as well as offsite cold data, long retention files shares, backups and archives. These secure in-house alternatives for multi-tiered data pools can be quickly rolled out with cloud-like convenience and economics.

"Our proven solutions have already been validated by thousands of customers worldwide for their record-breaking price performance, fastest response times, enterprise-class high availability, and lowest total cost of ownership, among other notable benefits," said Robert Bassett, vice president of engineering DataCore. "The new features in the latest software release open the door to even more demanding use cases such as larger scale virtualization clusters, database storage, ERP applications, financial on-line transactional systems and enterprise clouds. Our customers are eager to deploy the latest software in converged, hyper-converged and SAN environments as well as in private and hybrid clouds to solve their most pressing storage challenges."

The enhancements will be generally available in June, 2016. Current DataCore customers may upgrade their software to the new release (Version 10 PSP5) at no-charge under their existing software update service and support contracts.