Updated DataCore User Forum - Share Software, Utilities, Lessons learned, Tips and Tricks

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Recent Posts:
New Utility: Filesystem cleaner for Linux
What Thin Provisioning (NMV) Volumes are hogging a pool! NMVhog
How do I: Test DataCore and VMware ESX in Disaster Recovery?

DataCore SANmelody Product Review

http://www.infostor.com/article_display/SANmelody___storage_virtualization_panacea/9898992125/s-articles/s-infostor/s-volume-13/s-issue-1/s-lab_review/s-1.html
In the same way that other forms of virtualization improve on server hardware, the notion behind SANmelody is to make disk configurations fail-safe, go-fast, and waste-free. SANmelody inherits all of its essential features from DataCore's larger-scale SANsymphony software, it can meet SMB requirements without compromising on functionality...

Customer Migration Story - VMware Storage VMotion & DataCore HA - Failsafe Migrations

Recent update from the DataCore UK Blog

While recently on site at a large National Health System [NHS] Customer in the North of England, I gave some serious thought to the process of migrations from physical to virtual storage from an existing physical environment and the ramifications in the case of physical disk failure.

It occured to me that if you utilized VMWare's Storage VMotion and DataCore's High-Avaliability [HA] offering, it was possible to do a seamless, on the fly data migration from physical storage into a DataCore virtual volume, while remaining protected from physical disk failure at the destination.
It is often said that the most common time for a disk drive to fail is within 2 hours of being booted for the first time, and while 99% of us perform rigorous soak testing beforehand, there is still a chance that a disk will fail mid-migration and severely delay a project at the very least. At the very worst, it can potentially corrupt the data being transferred leading to a full recovery scenario.

If physical failure of the destination occured in this DataCore scenario, then the destination volume would merely switch over to it's highly available partner and the migration would continue seamlessly. A large reassurance in the case of this customer, while migrating mission critical, real time data in a 24-Hour environment.

Infostor Lab Review: SANmelody = storage virtualization panacea

The crew at Infostorrecently put SANmelody through its paces in their lab and have just published a comprehensive review of their test methodology and findings. The Article can be viewed here (p.29) and downloaded here.

In brief, their conclusions/key findings were:

· Full virtualization of direct-attached and SAN-connected storage

· Simplified SAN infrastructure management through automation of storage administration tasks using the Windows MMC

· SANmelody caching boosted I/O throughput by 33% running IOmeter

· Round-robin LUN distribution of server I/O traffic benchmarked at 50,000 IOPS using 8KB reads with no I/O bottlenecks

· No single point of failure with support for snapshots, synchronous mirroring, and synchronous replication

DataCore and Riverbed - New White Paper on DR

DataCore has published a new Disaster Recovery white paper that reveals how organizations can reduce bandwidth and achieve more stringent Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) without incurring the expense of higher speed inter-site lines. Storage virtualization with DataCore Software and WAN optimization with Riverbed helps organizations realize up to 20x improvement in throughput and 14x improvement in data transfer for remote sites. The White Paper: http://www.datacore.com/downloads/DataCore_Riverbed_DR_22Sep08.pdf

New High-Availability DataCore Starter SANs for Business Continuity

For more details on DataCore's SAN starter packages, go here.



The new DataCore packages...include normally high-end features, such as thin provisioning, data migration, storage performance caching, snap shots for fast disk backups, remote site disaster recovery replication and DataCore's own data protection.

DataCore Transporter Option for SANmelody and SANsymphony - Migration Software

To download a presentation on the new Transporter option and for more information on Data and Image migration visit:

http://www.datacore.com/solutions/migration.asp

Migrating disk images and workloads between different operating systems, hypervisors and storage subsystems has always been a difficult and time consuming task involving lengthy backups and restores followed by complicated format conversions. James E. Price III, Vice President, Product and Channel Marketing, DataCore Software, notes, Unlike inferior alternatives, DataCore takes advantage of its intrinsic ability to generalize virtual disks to make source images from one Windows environment immediately available to a dissimilar physical or virtual platform. The migration takes place in background without modifying the original source, avoiding potentially irreversible migrations.

SANmelody & SANsymphony Features and Options - Overview

These pages, recently updated provide a quick overview of the major options and features.

New SANmelody Features and Options Page: http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmel_features.asp
New SANsymphony Feature and Options Page: http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANsymp_features.asp