DataCore Ships 64-bit SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0; Advances in Performance, Migration, Thin Provisioning, and High-availability Improve Storage for Virtual Servers

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=10691

For more details on the newest versions of SANmelody and SANsymphony, access the following presentation: www.datacore.com/software2009

'Mega Cache' for SAN performance, Simple & Fast 'Transporter' Option, 'Waste-free Reclamation' of Storage Space, and Non-Stop High-availability are now shipping

DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced the general availability of the newest versions of its flagship SANmelody(tm) and SANsymphony(tm) storage virtualization solutions. SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 deliver SAN-wide performance boosts, radically simple, high-availability, and optimum disk utilization for virtual server and virtual infrastructure users. Product highlights include x64 versions, a new "Transporter" feature allowing for conversion between the different flavors of physical and virtual servers, a pioneering, waste-free space reclamation capability for thin provisioning, and ground-breaking support for "mega caches" that deliver lightning-fast (electronic memory speed), storage performance.

For more details on the newest versions of SANmelody and SANsymphony, access the following presentation: www.datacore.com/software2009 .

DataCore: Non-stop, Lightning Fast, Waste-Free Storage Solutions

"The x64 versions of SANmelody and SANsymphony materially improve performance, and utilization for virtual infrastructure shared storage especially through their ability to create very large memory-based caches," said Jack Fegreus, CEO, openBench Labs, a Southborough, Mass.-based consultancy and product testing firm. "More importantly innovations such as the new Transporter continue to make DataCore a leader in simplifying and consolidating virtual infrastructure management, which is the most critical area for IT cost savings. DataCore's combining these features into a server-centric approach is the wave of the future for virtual infrastructure as integration increases between SANs and servers."

Save More. Do More.

"DataCore is one of a few vendors that is answering user demand to do more with less. With solutions like this you can not only drive down capital [CapEX] costs while improving reliability you can also improve administrator and operational [OpEX] efficiency by centralizing storage operations to a single platform," states George Crump, founder and senior analyst, Storage Switzerland.

DataCore solutions offer incredible value since they enable customers to enhance, optimize and consolidate their storage infrastructure and to get more productivity out of their existing systems. DataCore consolidates and optimizes storage resources by 60%, while greatly accelerating performance. For lightning-fast performance, DataCore enables memory speed caching to accelerate read/write access so more work can be accomplished in the same given time. Learn more about ROI and cost savings with DataCore at: www.datacore.com/costsavings .

New features in SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 include:

* Lightning-fast, 64-bit "Mega Caches" Boost SAN-wide Performance

Leading the list of new features in SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 are native 64-bit controller software with support for mega cache capacities, which is ideal for Database, Exchange and other I/O demanding applications "In large scale, consolidated data storage, cache is king," commented James Price, vice president channel and product marketing, DataCore Software. "DataCore's solutions will now support up to a terabyte (TB) of cache. They dwarf anything in the market and scale linearly with each node that you add to the fabric." The entire working set of a large number of virtual machines can now be kept in SAN-wide cache for unprecedented performance. Behind the cache, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and other virtual server customers can grow their storage pools from a few hundred gigabytes to multiple petabytes.

* Non-stop, Radically Simple, High-Availability for Non-Stop Storage Virtual Infrastructure

Only DataCore allows maintenance, upgrades, expansion, and failures to take place throughout portions of the storage infrastructure without disrupting applications. According to George Crump, "The result is that you can confidently take half of your storage infrastructure out-of-service for routine maintenance any time of day without suffering downtime. And of course, you can sustain a major storage hardware failure without disturbing users" (Excerpted from George Crump's article "Are you serious about high availability?"). Link to full article: www.datacore.com/downloads/SeriousHA.pdf .

* Waste-free, Efficient Space Reclamation for Thinly Provisioned Storage

Both SANmelody and SANsymphony offer the choice to thinly provision virtual disks and storage (independent of vendor brand name) rather than tie up physical capacity when LUNs are first created. In the new releases, previously allocated or thinly provisioned space can be reclaimed in the background after applications or file systems no longer need it.

* Windows Server 2008-based, Universal Storage Controllers

Configuring DataCore software on x86/X64 Windows servers transforms them into universal storage controllers. The new SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 releases have been re-architected to exploit the power and scalability of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 for either virtual or physical x86 and x64 platforms as universal storage controllers.

* New Hypervisor Migration Support and Tighter Integration to VMware Virtual Center

DataCore's "Transporter" time saving migration facility is a new option in SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0. Transporter migrates disk images and workloads between different operating systems, hypervisors and storage subsystems - eliminating lengthy backups and restores due to complicated format conversions. A plug-in for VMware's Virtual Infrastructure Client is a no-charge option that allows administrators to non-disruptively provision, share, clone, replicate and expand virtual disks among physical servers and VMs.

SANmelody and SANsymphony Make Non-stop High Availability Practical

DataCore does high-availability better - making business continuity and disaster recovery solutions practical.

* Simple, fail-safe SAN data protection
* Unique, automatic failover and failback
* Priced right for Small and Mid-size Business
* Full-featured, HA SAN software (Thin provisioning, Snapshots, Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication)
* No-penalty upgradeability and a "future proofed" growth path

For more information, please go to www.datacore.com/SANpackages .

Thin provisioning and Reclamation

From Informationweek's Storage Blog
What keeps many organizations from seeing significant improvement generally centers on two areas that have plagued some thin provisioning implementations; conversion to thin and reclamation.

...The second issue that has plagued thin provisioning is that during use, deleted items do not properly get reclaimed. This is because most file systems do not really delete data when you give the delete command, they just set the data as eligible to over write. If you go through a big house cleaning operation on a volume, that freed up space is not reallocated to the global storage pool that thin provisioning storage systems count on. It stays with the volume.

The result of these two factors is that thin provisioned systems put on a little weight both initially and over time. While some thin provisioning is better than no thin provisioning these challenges lead to the poor results on the survey. Companies like 3PAR, HDS and DataCore have all announced technologies that can address both the conversion to thin issues as well as the ongoing space reclamation issues.

With these technologies companies can intelligently convert to thin to see immediate storage savings and can keep their volumes thin over time. Thin provisioning is more than a check mark feature, it is a serious technology that when all the challenges are properly addressed can save significant storage costs in the enterprise.

See also: Full Use with Space Reclamation for Thinly Provisioned Storage

DataCore's 'Transporter' Hypervisor Migration Option

DataCentre Times - DataCore demonstrates new SAN solutions
Tony Lock, Programme Director and Analyst of Freeform Dynamics states:
...the most interesting announcement concerns DataCore's "Transporter" which supplies Hypervisor Migration capabilities and better Integration to VMware Virtual Center." These functions could prove to be very useful as organisations begin to look at using multiple hypervisors in their environments and try to manage them as a pool rather than as a number of isolated islands of virtualisation. However DataCore needs to be very active to educate interested parties in how such functionality, and indeed the capabilities of its entire portfolio, can be exploited."

To learn more about DataCore migration capabilities, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/solutions/migration.asp

The Storage Management Gap

ENT News Special Report: The Storage Management Gap
http://entmag.com/reports/article.asp?EditorialsID=142
In the world of storage solutions, management remains a huge gap in the administration of storage subsystems. It's a challenge to manage storage at any level, because data center hardware growth is typically heterogeneous.

Although many strategies exist to help manage the terabytes, the proprietary solutions available today only rarely interoperate. "To date," says Jon Toigo, an expert on storage management, "the industry has shown only limited interest in making products work together in any sort of coherent management scheme. Until some of the incompatibilities in array controllers and fabric switches are fixed, the success of a storage virtualization strategy in delivering these values may be limited. As with most technologies, try it before you buy it."

Solutions for these incompatible systems range from simple backup, to archives and replication, to single-instancing. But one of the tools that has seen growth is storage virtualization. In fact, more and more products such as SANmelody from DataCore Software Corp. and Network Storage Server from FalconStor Software have been positioned by vendors as virtualization solutions...

DataCore SANmelody Storage Virtualization Software Wins 2009 Network Computing Award for 'Software Product of the Year'

DataCore SANmelody Storage Virtualization Software Wins 2009 Network Computing Award for 'Software Product of the Year'

UK's leading networking awards recognize SANmelody's dramatic impact on software storage management, provisioning and utilization for network managers.

DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced that it has scooped the Software Product of the Year Award at Network Computing Magazine's prestigious 2009 Annual Awards dinner held last week at the Tower Hotel in London, beating stiff category competition from finalists EMC, CA and Attempo, among others.

Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, Northern Europe, DataCore Software, commented, "It's great to receive this award as it demonstrates that network managers are moving away from the traditional hardware-based solutions that disk manufacturers advocate in favor of a software storage solution that operates on anything and reutilizes the storage and disk already in the network to provide greater utilization, manageability, productivity, uptime and performance."

The Awards, voted on by thousands of Network Computing Magazine's readership, signifies the readers' appreciation of SANmelody and how it easily and cost-effectively converts physical Intel/AMD servers -- as well as virtual machines (VMs) -- into fully capable, virtual storage servers that are able to optimize, protect and manage storage over existing networks to fulfill the needs of application servers.

Other features that enticed winners' votes include SANmelody's thin provisioning for disk space capacity automation, point-in-time snapshots for fast disk-based backups, and powerful data protection services that provide auto failover across redundant disk servers and long distance, asynchronous replication for disaster recovery over IP WANs.

The Network Computing Awards were established in 2004 to recognize best-in-breed, easy-to-use solutions that make the working lives of network managers easier and more effective.

Do more, save more - try DataCore for your storage today!

For more information on the full-line of Feature-Packed Virtual Storage Solutions, please visit: www.datacore.com/SANpackages.

Are you serious about high availability?

Check out the new white paper by noted storage expert George Crump of Storage Switzerland:Are you serious about high availability?

How can we entertain such mirrored HA configurations when budgets are tight?
A possible solution is found in storage virtualization. DataCore Software, as an example, offers a straightforward and affordable software solution for organizations of all sizes. It runs on standard x86 servers, or on a virtual machine in an existing server virtualized by one of the popular hypervisor products from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Parallels and Virtual Iron. Solutions like these enable non-stop data access using commodity-priced storage devices from vendors of your choosing. Each side of the mirror can use different types of storage; they need not be from the same supplier. In fact, some of the solutions can reconfigure the equipment that you already have to eliminate storage downtime.

What are the performance implications when mirrors are stretched?
DataCore as an example employs advanced caching techniques that enable data to be written simultaneously to a perfectly mirrored pair at higher speeds than you would experience with the standalone array. When one side of the pair has to be taken down or suffers an unexpected outage, all the storage I/O is sustained from the second mirror without manual intervention. Nothing needs to be scripted or reconfigured. Read more...