Storage Virtualization and Cloud Computing - DataCore and External IT

http://www.oncloudcomputing.com/en/2009/06/datacore-software-announces-external-it-to-deliver-storage-virtualization-into-private-clouds/
"I was first exposed to DataCore at a Brian Madden conference," said Joseph Stedler, senior engineer and Dallas data center manager, External IT.

Stedler summarizes the value of a storage virtualization approach as follows, "I have worked with traditional SANs for eight years and have had firsthand experience with every major hardware SAN under the sun - EMC, HP, NetApp, etc." he said. "There are various, major drawbacks to hardware SANs. One is the fact that there is a single point of failure at the disk level. This is particularly the case when doing, for example, firmware upgrades - on the controllers, on the disks, on the shelves - whereby you have to take the SAN down to perform that task. The second most irksome characteristic of hardware SANs is their cost. These EMC SANs, these HP EVAs are inherently expensive, particularly during upgrade time."

The Value of DataCore: Uptime, Performance and Much More

"There are capabilities that DataCore brings to the table that I absolutely love," commented Stedler. "The concept of having two SANs as your one SAN environment is just elegantly simple. You have an 'A' side and a 'B' side." The beauty of this is that if you need to do hardware maintenance or firmware upgrades, an administrator can actually take down half of the SAN and still have the other half serving production traffic - completely uninterrupted. The second, major benefit of DataCore for External IT has to do with performance. "With DataCore, you will experience enormous performance gains," noted Stedler. "The performance that DataCore delivers is nothing short of awesome."

DataCore Unveils Advanced Site Recovery Solution for Virtual and Physical IT Infrastructures

DataCore Unveils Advanced Site Recovery Solution for Virtual and Physical IT Infrastructures
http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/news-full.php?id=11927%26result=datacore

Advanced Site Recovery (ASR): This new component of DataCore's comprehensive business continuity portfolio allows central IT organizations to cost-effectively spread disaster recovery (DR) responsibilities among several smaller sites. Furthermore, the solution makes no distinction between virtual and physical servers, unifying their restoration in a common, automated process. DataCore is also using the occasion to demonstrate how expanded 64-bit features in the newest releases of SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ benefit Microsoft users.

"The industry is conditioned to think of DR as a one-to-one proposition. They place unreasonable demands on a single recovery site, asking them to suddenly take over much larger workloads under very stressful conditions," argues James Price, vice president channel and product marketing, DataCore Software.

"But most organizations aren't structured that way. They look more like a hub and spoke, with smaller branches emanating from the central data center. For this reason, DataCore's Advanced Site Recovery distributes the disaster recovery workloads among these smaller entities, allowing each of them to accept a more manageable role in keeping the business going."

Distributed DR
DataCore's unique one-to-many approach fits well within the networking, computational and storage capacity constraints found in branch locations. And it also factors in staff and real estate limitations.

Same for Virtual and Physical Systems
As importantly, the solution is not confined to virtual servers. It operates identically with the many physical systems that make up large part of IT infrastructures today. Offering a congruent DR method for all of these environments eliminates catastrophic misalignments that plague divergent processes.

Central Site Restoration
Built-inDataCore's Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) software also addresses the rapid restoration of the central IT site from the widely dispersed branches through ongoing bi-directional replication. Other DR alternatives don't account for this critical aspect and end up prolonging the crippling effects of an outage long after the central machines could take over their original chores.

Universal Coverage for Heterogeneous Scenarios
ASR works whether the servers are purely physical, or have been virtualized with Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware or other popular hypervisors. Moreover, it supports the use of dissimilar storage devices between the data center and its branches. In contrast, lack of such heterogeneous features in competing, and much pricier, disk array-based replication products makes them unsuitable for many customers.

DataCore: Essential to Microsoft Hyper-V Configurations
DataCore yields the highest availability, fastest performance and fullest utilization from storage assets, making it an essential element of Microsoft Hyper-V configurations.

The newest, 64-bit versions of DataCore's flagship SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ storage virtualization solutions include advances in performance, migration, thin provisioning, and high-availability.
Among the new features in SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 that will certainly serve to benefit the demanding needs of Microsoft users are large ‘mega caches' to accelerate SAN performance, non-stop high-availability, universal storage controllers that are Windows Server 2008-based, a simple and fast ‘Transporter' option, and ‘waste-free reclamation' of storage space.
For more details on these newest versions of DataCore's high-performance storage solutions, please visit: www.datacore.com/software2009.

ASR Availability, Pricing and More Information
Advance Site Recovery implementation services will be available through DataCore ASR-certified implementation partners beginning June 2009.

DataCore and StorageLink - storage management for the Citrix and Microsoft Hypre-V virtual infrastructure worlds

http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/05/06/datacore-announces-citrix-essentials-storagelink-integration-and-showcases-non-stop-storage-solutions-for-microsoft-hyper-v-and-xendesktop-vdi.aspx"
StorageLink provides a rich integration point between DataCore's Storage Virtualization Software and Citrix Essentials," stated James Price, vice president of product and channel marketing, DataCore Software.

Citrix StorageLink is a component of the new Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V products - enabling simpler, integrated deployment of virtualization and storage solutions.

"Most virtual environments encompass diverse storage devices with disparate or non-existent management tools," continued Price. "DataCore consolidates the configuration, control and monitoring of these dissimilar disk subsystems under one unified management interface. This reduces complexity and costs by allowing administrators to satisfy the varied capacity, availability and performance needs of XenServer and Hyper-V virtual machines through coordinated and consistent requests, irrespective of the underlying storage hardware."

DataCore makes high availability SANs practical - offering non-stop storage and high performance for Citrix and Microsoft Hyper-V environments

"Many customers are stunned by the high costs and major overhaul generally proposed to put a new shared storage configuration in place," cautions Price. "And there's no getting past the sticker shock after hearing that 90% of their virtualization budget will be chewed up just to roll in a new SAN.""Instead, DataCore storage virtualization software recasts all of their storage and any extra servers they may have into a fully virtualized, highly available, shared storage pool at a fraction of the cost, without compromising performance, functionality or peace of mind."