DataCore - New releases for server virtualization support

...SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 will ship next month with 64-bit software architectures and new features for virtual server users.
SANsymphony virtualizes enterprise storage-area networks (SANs), while SANmelody is aimed at Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI SANs up to 32 TB. Both provide management features such as virtual disk pooling, synchronized mirroring for high availability, load balancing and thin provisioning.
The native 64-bit controller software lets SANmelody and SANsymphony support a large cache on the physical server. Previous releases were limited to a 20 GB cache, but the new versions can theoretically support up to 1 TB.

A terabyte of cache "is at the far edge of reality for most normal sites today," said Jack Fegreus, CEO at Southborough, Mass.-based openBench Labs, a consultant and product testing firm. But a large site with big servers and a lot of virtual machines (VMs) might have 256 GB of cache. In a few years time, given Moore's Law, 1 TB of cache may well be average, Fegreus said.
Fegreus said the increased cache will allow for denser consolidation of servers into virtual machines, and could improve the performance of VM backups by minimizing I/O to disk.

Another new feature for virtual server support is the DataCore Transporter Option for SANmelody and SANsymphony, which performs conversion between physical and virtual servers. This utility allows a server to be converted from a physical Windows box to a Microsoft Corp. Hyper-V image, then to a VMware ESX image, and then back to a logical unit number (LUN) mapped to a physical server.

...DataCore customer Themis Tokkaris, systems engineer at Tucson, Ariz.-based international pest control company Truly Nolen of America Inc., said he was looking for something that would convert his virtual machine images back to physical servers. "It's also an open idea," he said. "If I'm not happy with ESX in the future, I'm not stuck with it."

Also with the releases: Organizations running VMware ESX have the option of using a new free plug-in for VMware Inc.'s Virtual Infrastructure Client, which offers "cleaner visibility and easier-to-understand mappings and paths," according to James Price, DataCore's vice president of product and channel marketing.

Plus: The DataCore releases also add a way to reclaim free capacity on volumes using thin provisioning.
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