Enterprises with virtual environments should be intrigued by DataCore Software's developments for its venerable software-with upcoming SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 storage virtualisation releases due for general availability around month end. These include a massive boost to SAN-wide performance and improvements to high availability...
Both SANmelody and SANsymphony will now support for 64-bit "mega-caches" providing up to one terabyte (TB) of cache memory per node; so performance will scale linearly with each node added to the fabric. It means that the entire SAN operation for many virtual machines can be kept in SAN-wide caches avoiding the vast majority of disk I-O.
"This is a solid state SAN," James Price, vice president channel and product marketing told me, adding that this would dwarf anything in the market. "There will be a 600-1200% performance increase."
He explained that while the number one bottleneck for virtualisation was memory (CPU cycles and pure capacity), next came storage performance-limited by I-O to virtualised disk. So the need was to scale and deliver I-O at native speeds or more. This boost should be worth watching!
Previously DataCore has offered up to 20 GB of cache, which Price said had been competitive, but, driven by increasing virtualisation, 16-32 GB cache would be a common requirement with a lot of customers. That's a long way from the TB maximum so provides oodles of expansion for those who find they need more...
In fact, it looks like DataCore is thinking especially of large enterprises and cloud storage environments. It refers to immense storage pools which will be in constant flux-and the product enhancements have been fully integrated into DataCore's high availability solutions for Citrix disk farms. DataCore is claiming maintenance, upgrades, expansion, and failures to parts of the storage infrastructure can occur without application disruption.
There's also optional 'before- and after- the fact' thin provisioning of virtual disks for SANmelody and SANsymphony to avoid tying up physical capacity. Since virtual machines typically use only a small fraction of the total volume assigned to them, the software will automatically reclaim thinly provisioned space previously occupied in the background after applications or file systems zero it out. So the SAN gives back capacity temporarily needed to optimise resource usage.
DataCore's "Transporter" migration facility is another new option designed to cut out long backups and restores caused by complicated format conversions. It migrates disk images and workloads between different operating systems, hypervisors and storage subsystems.
Finally (for now because there is more), a re-architecting of SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 has been needed to fully exploit the power and scalability of 64-bit Windows Server 2008-both virtual and physical platforms-to provide universal storage controllers. Everything in these solutions will now support x64 technology.
So it all sounds good but the proof will be in the eating; only a few weeks to wait.
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