DataCore Updates SANsymphony and Traveller CDP

Get more details & technical info at: http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_070207.asp

DataCore Software has updated its SANsymphony enterprise-class, open storage networking platform and its Traveller CDP (continuous data protection) add-on capability. The new update releases are available immediately.

Notable Enhancements: New 8GB Fibre Channel SAN Support, Faster CDP and Replication, Better Usability, Improved Thin Provisioning Monitoring, Live Data Migration Services and Greater Virtual Server Integration

Announcement info release is at: http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_live.asp?date=08/25/2008

Some highlights:

1. With this update DataCore has qualified its dual-mode driver solution for SANsymphony enabling both host initiator and target connectivity support for the latest Emulex and Q-logic high speed 8Gb/s HBAs. These new HBAs offer twice the performance of today's leading products, providing the I/O scalability necessary to support an increase in the number of applications running on a virtualized server.

2. Over-subscription monitoring services for thin provisioning. Customers want to know while they are creating and configuring thin provisioned virtual volumes if they are about to oversubscribe in terms of physical disk space. This enhancement has been requested by customers to enable them to be more cognizant of physical usage while they are configuring their systems as opposed to when they are running hot that they have oversubscribed. Thereby they will know in advance of hitting the thin provisioned pool threshold about to be out of disk space early notification wall that they will need to add more physical disks as opposed to finding out after pool space has been actually allocated. While SANsymphony already has the ability to provide threshold alerts for growth rates and level of storage, this new service is built into the SAN configuration manager interfaces and shows users what they have requested against the physical amount of storage before hitting a threshold alert under actual use conditions. This enhancement goes a long way to showing users just how much of the physical resource they have requested to use, as opposed to having already physically-used.

3. Thin provisioning Hot-Swap migration. This is the ability to migrate data on physical disk devices within a thin provisioning pool from one device to another and then hot swap (replace) that device. If you imagine a storage pool with existing devices, the thin provisioning migration facility is of great value when it comes to adding new disks or storage arrays to the pool. This facility enables users to take the data that resides on existing disks and migrate it to the new added disks. The old devices can remain in the pool for new uses, or they can be removed from the pool and repurposed for other uses in the system. Either way, system and network administrators need not worry about impacting high availability, disrupting the application servers, or interfering with virtual machines that have access to the data.

4. Live data migration. Live Data Migration enables an administrator to move data (Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc) to any other storage device under management of SANsymphony in real-time. Data can come from a disk volume (a logical unit number or LUN) on any storage array IBM, EMC, Hitachi, HP, etc. The real benefit with these services is that the Live Data Migration provides users with the ability to move data from any platform to any other storage device, live, and to do so non-disruptively. Let's say a company has an application server and it is being fed by multiple LUNs from an IBM server. When DataCore is brought into the picture, the DataCore system gives an administrator the ability to literally take the IBM LUN, and serve the volume to the DataCore system, and SANsymphony will pass it straight back to the original owning application server. By using DataCore's virtual volume management services, those volumes can be mirrored to another SANsymphony system providing the enterprise with all of the benefits DataCore is known for: data is mirrored, system speed is increased by way of DataCore caching algorithms, administrators have the advantages of being able to work with thin-provisioned volumes, etc. All of the inherent capabilities and benefits of SANsymphony can be available to an enterprise, if it simply passes the volumes containing the live application data through DataCore's SANsymphony, said John Bocskor, vice president of product development, DataCore Software. When that data volume is passed through SANsymphony it is simply remapped to the application server so the server can immediately run the server applications. While the application server is running DataCore's software adds value to those volumes ? Caching performance, High Availability, Snapshot, AIM, etc.