DataCore Storage Virtualization being used at Universities and Educational Institutes Worldwide

“Most educational enterprises want enterprise-class storage networking functionality but have to settle for a lot less, since they do not have the budgets to implement these solutions due to the high costs and complexity that is involved – especially for fault-tolerant, auto recovery storage systems needed to protect and support virtual server environments,” stated George Teixeira, president and CEO, DataCore Software.

View Education Promotions and Highlighted Storage Virtualization customers from around the world:
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/business/datacore-ww-customers-in-education

Brian Madden looking good in a DataCore Software T-shirt! DataCore Offers StorageLink Adapter for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V

DataCore Offers StorageLink Adapter for XenServer and Hyper-V

www.brianmadden.com/blogs/the_official_citrix_blog/archive/2009/08/03/datacore-offers-storagelink-adapter-for-xenserver-and-hyper-v.aspx

DataCore Software at VMworld 2009

DataCore at Vmworld 2009, for additional information, please visit:
http://www.datacore.com/vmworld2009/

DataCore Software Announces Support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

DataCore Software Announces Support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced support for native Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity for its SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ storage virtualization solutions. The company has added the Emulex and Brocade FCoE converged network adapters (CNAs) and Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches to its FCoE-qualified support list. Additional FCoE CNAs will be announced over the next year. FCoE software drivers are currently available for Microsoft® Windows® and VMware® ESX / vSphere®.

“With the addition of FCoE to our SAN connectivity options, DataCore continues to demonstrate the ease with which our storage virtualization software adapts to new technology and extends the life of existing investments,” stated Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing, DataCore Software. “Our customers can immediately take advantage of FCoE in their highly scalable, non-stop storage pools without having to replace or modify their existing back-end storage, which may well include DAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces."

Serious About High Availability?; Virtual Storage Infrastructure – Can Software Take Center Stage?

Virtual Storage Infrastructure – Can Software Take Center Stage?
We’ve been conditioned to think of infrastructure as hardware. Is it time to rethink?...

Serious About High Availability?
Solutions like DataCore 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…

Virtualize storage through SANs, says IDC

Industry Analyst Articles/Reports on DataCore
http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_industry_analysts_reports.asp

Virtualize storage through SANs, says IDC
Analyst recommends firms create SANs with storage virtualization software rather than shelling out for new equipment
http://www.techcentral.ie/article.aspx?id=13895

The best way to virtualise your storage is through a storage area network (SAN), according to IDC.

In a new report entitled "Removing storage-related barriers to server and desktop virtualisation," the analyst firm claimed there is no need for high-end expensive systems to reap the benefits of virtualisation - just create a SAN with storage virtualisation software.
Carla Arend, analyst for European storage software and services at IDC, said in the report: "This hardware-independent approach complements server and desktop virtualisation without compromising availability, speed, or project schedules."

"Properly implemented, value-added functions like replication and snapshots can be used in a heterogeneous storage environment across storage model and manufacturer boundaries. Just as importantly, it can significantly lower capital and operational expenditure for physical and virtual environments alike."

The report said moving to a virtual environment will simplify management, improve disaster recovery and cut costs, but warned there were pitfalls too. These included initial investment and overlooking needs like shared storage.

Most importantly, IDC said any virtualization software your firm purchases should not be tied to any one set of hardware. As well, make sure the storage virtualisation software you pick properly addresses your physical servers.

"Otherwise, you may end up fragmenting the IT environment that you are eager to consolidate," said Arend.

New from StorageSwitzerland: Virtual Storage Infrastructure - Can Software Take Center Stage?

Virtual Storage Infrastructure - Can Software Take Center Stage?http://www.datacore.com/downloads/SoftwareCentricStorageInfrastructure-Handout.pdf

...Comprehensive storage virtualization software offerings like those from DataCore Software, a pioneer in the storage virtualization space, offer a superset of the advanced feature/functionality found on high-end storage systems, yet can be utilized across disparate disk resources and centrally managed. The same rich set of functions cover direct-attached and SAN-connected storage arrays, regardless of model or manufacturer. This software typically runs on standard x86/x64 servers and is fully portable between hardware generations so that customers are not faced with the usual obsolescence of proprietary storage appliances.

This capability provides data center managers with a number of distinct advantages.

Firstly, whenever a storage asset needs to be retired or upgraded, the migration process is non-disruptive and greatly simplified. The new array is presented to the storage virtualization engine and the data that was contained on the old array is transparently moved to the new array. No scheduled downtime is necessary.

Secondly, since command and control of the storage environment is in the hands of the overarching storage virtualization software, the backend storage can be purchased “bare bones”, without all the costly embedded firmware licenses. This has the effect of commoditizing storage and empowering the IT buyer to negotiate very aggressive discounts from multiple storage vendors.

Another interesting advantage of software-based storage virtualization kicks in when the software leverages “Moore’s Law” through the use of increasingly faster CPUs to speed up I/O processing. In effect, the storage virtualization server puts its internal processors and memory to use as high-speed caches for accelerating disk I/Os from anywhere in the virtual storage pool. Furthermore, this extra processing capacity helps offload advanced functions from the application hosts and the disk subsystems to ensure better quality of service across the board. This insulates the business from needing to incur costly proprietary disk controller storage upgrades and helps greatly extend the usable life of all storage assets on the data center floor.

What’s more, certain storage virtualization software can run as a virtual machine (VM) instance, alongside application VMs helping customers to further improve server resource utilization and truly maximize efficiencies throughout the data center...

Is the sky falling on VMware? Good overview of the Microsoft and VMware Battle

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1364388,00.html#

..."Microsoft is clearly gunning for the virtualization space, and they have a pretty good track record of making a dent in a space that they want to be in," he said. Another real problem for VMware is that Hyper-V R2's management tools now manage VMware's ESX hypervisor, while VMware's tools won't manage Hyper-V R2. That's big for users who want to use both hypervisors, because only Hyper-V R2 will be able to manage the entire environment, Cappuccio said. "

I would hope [VMware is] paying attention," he added. "My fear is that 'good enough' always wins out in the long run, and if it's good enough and pervasive, VMware may lose out."VMware most stands to lose with companies that are not yet using any virtualization and are shopping for the right vendor, Wolf said. Those customers will likely look at VMware, Microsoft and Citrix Systems Inc.'s XenServer to decide on the right choices. "Microsoft and Citrix both, I think, are going to get a reasonable part of the market," said Chris Wolf, Burton Group...

Citrix Web site adds DataCore Links for DataCore Virtual SAN Appliance and StorageLink adapter for Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=1855667

Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, Express EditionSeamless storage integration for Hyper-V:

+ Download the free Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V Express Edition

+ Download the Virtual SAN Appliance for Citrix Essentials from DataCore™

Advanced StorageLink technology
How advanced StorageLink for technology works
http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=1687089

DataCore Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) Solution Delivers a More Flexible and Powerful Approach to DR for VMware vSphere 4

DataCore Advanced Site Recovery -ASR- delivers site recovery in a new and industry-pioneering way. It automates and radically simplifies how one or more, smaller, remote IT facilities take over workloads from a central site in the event of a disaster or scheduled outage. Rather than attempt to fully recreate the central datacenter at another major site, ASR can distribute responsibilities for keeping the business going among a few remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) based on business and operational capabilities. ASR also takes care of returning control of the workloads to the central IT site when the main IT center is deemed capable of accepting them.

For a recorded podcast on DataCore ASR from SearchDisasterRecovery.com featuring commentary from SearchStorage.com's Beth Pariseau and IDC's Rick Villars, click here.

"Unlike some other site recovery approaches that are limited to just virtual machines, DataCore ASR enables both physical and virtual servers to be protected across multiple sites," stated George Crump, president, Storage Switzerland. "This advanced approach to DR - one that encompasses distributed disaster recovery, is an important milestone and I am happy to see companies like DataCore reaching it."

Designed for both virtual and physical IT infrastructures
A new addition to DataCore's comprehensive business continuity portfolio - DataCore ASR enables businesses to embrace Distributed Disaster Recovery (D-DR). The solution allows organizations to cost-effectively spread disaster recovery (DR) responsibilities across several smaller sites. Additionally, the solution makes no distinction between physical and virtual servers, unifying their DR operations in a common, automated process.

DataCore ASR: Solution Highlights for VMware Users
*Supports physical and virtual servers.
*Enables Distributed Disaster Recovery (D-DR) encompassing multiple sites in a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship.
*Delivers storage flexibility and thereby not depending on duplicating expensive equipment offsite, such as top-of-the-line disk arrays and specialized networking gear.
*Embraces a bi-directional approach.
*DataCore ASR has the ability to send the VMs and the storage to a remote site as well as to recover it from the remote site and bring it all back to the primary site. Having central site restoration built-in ensures rapid restoration of the central IT site from the widely dispersed branches through ongoing bi-directional replication.

"DataCore ASR enables users to execute site recovery operations in a way that is fundamentally different from existing solutions in the marketplace today by bringing the data center together into a single solution," commented Augie Gonzalez, Director of product marketing, DataCore Software. "Many other disaster recovery products are limiting in that they assume recovery, from one environment to an identical or very similar environment or they support only a subset of the infrastructure. Often physical servers are not supported or require a separate solution from applications and virtual servers."

ASR Additional Information, Pricing and Availability
To view a complete Backgrounder on DataCore ASR, please Click Here.

Advance Site Recovery software is available today through DataCore ASR-certified implementation partners - starting at $2,000 per site.

DataCore and Citrix Make Advanced Server and Storage Virtualization Easy for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V; Try Citrix Essentials with the New DataC

No New Hardware Required - Free to Try, Downloadable, StorageLink certified, Virtual SAN Appliance Includes Storage Virtualization, Thin Provisioning, High Performance Caching, and Snapshots for Instant Volume Cloning and Fast Disk to Disk Backups.

Download the Virtual SAN Appliance now: http://www.datacore.com/virtualSANappliance/
To find out more information about Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, please visit: http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=1855667.

DataCore, Citrix Combine to Distribute Free VSAN Appliance
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/DataCore-Citrix-Combine-to-Distribute-Free-VSAN-Appliance-818930/

The Virtual SAN Appliance will enable IT shops that use Citrix Systems virtual server tools to test out DataCore Software's storage software at no cost. The Virtual SAN Appliance evaluation software connects Citrix Essentials with a StorageLink-certified, iSCSI shared-storage SAN that can pool up to 1TB of disk space.

The DataCore Virtual SAN Appliance and StorageLink Adapter can be downloaded here.
Storage virtualization and disaster recovery provider DataCore Software said Aug. 6 that it has joined with Citrix Systems to distribute a free virtual storage area network appliance for IT managers to test out.

The Virtual SAN Appliance software will enable IT shops that use Citrix's virtual server tools to test out DataCore's storage software at no cost.

DataCore said Citrix has "released a Citrix StorageLink adapter to integrate its storage virtualization solutions with Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. The Virtual SAN Appliance evaluation software ... [connects] Citrix Essentials with a StorageLink-certified, iSCSI shared-storage SAN that can pool up to 1TB of disk space...

The virtual appliance also features thin-provisioning storage for virtual machines, speeds up application performance and creates snapshots for "Instant Volume Cloning and Fast Disk-to-Disk Backups," DataCore said.Thin provisioning is a method of storage resource management and virtualization that lets IT administrators limit the allocation of physical storage to what applications immediately need. Thin provisioning also enables the automatic addition of capacity on demand up to preset limits so that IT departments can avoid buying and managing excessive amounts of disk storage. The DataCore Virtual SAN Appliance and StorageLink Adapter can be downloaded here.

IT Analysis: DataCore and Citrix Make Advanced Server and Storage Virtualisation Easy.
http://www.it-analysis.com/news_release.php?rel=12544

New Data Sheet on Advanced Site Recovery [ASR] from DataCore

Advanced Site Recovery (ASR): Advanced Site Recovery software enables businesses to embrace Distributed Disaster Recovery (D-DR) that allows organizations to cost-effectively spread disaster recovery (DR) responsibilities across several smaller sites. ASR makes it practical to move IT operations from a central site to one or more distributed contingency locations - and back again. Additionally, the solution makes no distinction between physical and virtual servers, unifying DR operations in a common, automated process.

See Advanced Site Recovery DataSheet

Disaster Recovery News: Rick Villars from IDC and Beth Pariseau of SearchStorage discuss DataCore's Advanced Site Recovery

DataCore Software debuts Advanced Site Recovery for physical and virtual disaster recovery http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid190_gci1361899,00.html
DataCore Software Corp. recently introduced a new product, Advanced Site Recovery (ASR), that allows organizations without a secondary data center devoted to disaster recovery (DR) to fail over physical and virtual servers to multiple remote or branch offices (ROBOs) in a disaster.

Beth Pariseau, senior news writer for SearchStorage.com
Rick Villars, vice president of storage systems and executive strategies at IDC
They will answer questions about Advanced Site Recovery such as:

What are the main features of Advanced Site Recovery, and what do users need to set it up?

This product is meant for organizations without a secondary data center devoted to disaster recovery, so is DataCore going after the SMB market?

Do you think SMBs that may not currently have a DR plan in place need this level of protection?

What are the drawbacks of this setup?

What are the differences between Advanced Site Recovery's functionality and what VMware is working on?

Play the Interview

DataCore Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) Solution Delivers a More Flexible and Powerful Approach to DR for VMware vSphere

http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20090723/bs_prweb/prweb2672574_3
Nearly 1000 attend New England VMware User Group Meeting - DataCore Showcases ASR

DataCore ASR enables distributed disaster recovery (D-DR) for both physical and virtual infrastructures. DataCore Software is using the occasion of the fourth annual summer VMware VMUG in New England to highlight the power of its new ASR solution for VMware environments. DataCore ASR allows organizations to leverage readily available IT assets between different sites, to minimize or eliminate business disruptions and data loss attributed to planned and unforeseen site outages.

DataCore Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) Software

Article: DataCore Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) Software
Some approaches to high availability and disaster recovery require that an organization maintain a separate datacenter, DataCore’s approach is to utilize excess capacity in current datacenters. This approach is likely to be appealing to small to medium sized organizations that don’t have the luxury of maintaining a separate datacenter for disaster recovery...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/virtualization/?p=1028

For more information on ASR, see:
http://www.datacore.com/pressroom/pr_live.asp?date=05/11/2009

FUJIFILM Focuses on DataCore's SANmelody for Storage Virtualization Cost Savings and Disaster Recovery

“Consolidation was becoming increasingly necessary to stem the pressure on the team having to backup, manage and ultimately move redundant servers,” stated Manish Amriwala, network and desktop support team manager, FUJIFILM UK. “We needed a dedicated SAN and virtualized servers that would accommodate our growth and transition us from the restrictions of disk space provided by direct-attached storage.”

Rollout commenced in March 2008 and within two months all major applications were transferred onto the 12 virtual servers. The network carries 3.4 TB of data – with a further 50% expansion remaining available. Installation was a seamless and relatively painless process noted Manish. “Within just 2-3 hours we had an operational business continuity and disaster recovery solution up and running,” he said. “Now maintenance and allocating storage is much easier. Using SANmelody in a mirrored configuration, patches and new applications and servers can be easily uploaded; as one SANmelody box can be taken down without any interruption to business applications as the other SANmelody takes over.”

In addition, there have been notable financial benefits in terms of cost savings managing the new virtualized data center environment. The team has equated the reduction of costs for the entire virtualization campaign to be roughly $75,000 to over $100,000 per annum – in terms of reduction of man days for management and maintenance.

http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/07/01/fujifilm-uk-focuses-on-datacore-s-sanmelody-for-storage-virtualization-cost-savings-and-disaster-recovery.aspx

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."

DataCore unveils Advanced Site Recovery Solution

DataCore Unveils Advanced Site Recovery Solution for Virtual and Physical IT Infrastructures
http://www.it-director.com/technology/data_mgmt/news_release.php?rel=11135

DataCore Announces Advanced Site Recovery Solution
http://www.echannelline.com/usa/brief.cfm?item=16552

"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," said 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."

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.

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.

Who is eating who? NetApp acquires Data Domain for $1.5 Billion

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ahI4wDIR9EUw&refer=home

May 21 (Bloomberg) -- NetApp Inc. Chief Executive Officer Daniel Warmenhoven announced plans to buy Data Domain Inc. for $1.5 billion and disputed the notion that his own company was a takeover target.

Analysts have named Sunnyvale, California-based NetApp as a possible takeover target by Cisco Systems Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. Warmenhoven said in a telephone interview yesterday that reports of his own company being acquired soon are “greatly exaggerated.”

Infoworld Virtualization Report: DataCore Software advances independent storage virtualization

http://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/datacore-software-advances-independent-storage-virtualization-098

InfoWorld: DataCore Software advances independent storage virtualization

VMware may be expanding into thin provisioning and virtualized storage, but DataCore Software has been at this now for 10 years...

As the hypervisor continues to reach commodity, companies like VMware are going to continue to stretch themselves into the application world in order to generate revenue and to further enhance their own core product. One of the areas that VMware is moving into is the virtual storage space and thin provisioning. While perhaps new to the VMware product or feature lineup, this technology is far from new. Like VMware virtualization technology, thin provisioning and virtualized storage goes back to about 10 years for DataCore. Over the last 10 years, DataCore has been developing a shrink-wrapped rich set of functions in software to address the mechanical constraints of disk storage manufacturers. In a manufacturer-independent way, DataCore has provided disk storage with enhanced speed, resiliency, and utility.

...Fast-forward, and the company is announcing new versions of its software: SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0. But with VMware now getting into this business, I decided to speak with DataCore's CEO, George Teixeira, to find out what this means to the Florida-based virtualized storage provider.

InfoWorld: What does DataCore think about VMware's new role in trying to enter storage virtualization and thin provisioning. And where DataCore fit, differ, or enhance? And are you doing anything with Citrix XenServer or Hyper-V?
DataCore: The big barrier to virtualization is storage, so it should be no surprise that VMware is trying to do more in this area; however, it is not their primary area of expertise. Thin provisioning is a good thing and is the centerpiece of the vStorage announcement. However, DataCore was doing thin provisioning 10 years ago, and we have continued to evolve and enhance the capabilities, but it is just one component of doing a comprehensive storage virtualization capability. Most shops have a combination of systems that are not virtualized and VMware does nothing for those. In truth, the world contains a mix of physical and virtual systems and storage virtualization that only works for VMs misses the reality of today's environments. Also, virtualization of many servers and the consolidation that comes from it stresses many performance and high-availability aspects of storage. DataCore has been designed to work with both the physical and virtual worlds, provides high-performance caching software (the new releases support Mega Caches) to overcome performance bottlenecks and provides the high-availability (automatic failover and failback) required to enable non-stop storage for business continuity. Whether the applications reside on VMs or on other platforms, DataCore safeguards the storage, makes it faster and more efficient.
DataCore also realizes that the world is not only a mix of physical and virtual worlds but that hypervisors are becoming a commodity, and therefore, the ability to work and support all the major hypervisors and migrate and manage storage for all the brands is essential.

InfoWorld: So tell us, why are DataCore-powered SANs necessary for VMware environments?
DataCore: Virtually everything hinges on storage. Server and desktop consolidation, in particular, place extraordinary demands on it. Too often, disks slow down, interrupt, or endanger these centralized IT operations, not because they are poorly built, but because they are physically constrained. Although VMware virtualization helps you to overcome similar limitations in processors, when it comes to advanced functions such as workload migration, load balancing, fail-over, and disaster recovery, it is completely dependent on highly available (HA), shared storage. You'll be shocked at the high hardware costs and major overhaul generally proposed to put such a storage infrastructure in place.

InfoWorld: Would you go so far as to say that DataCore storage virtualization solutions are essential for VMware environments? And if so, why?
DataCore: DataCore yields the highest availability, fastest performance, and fullest utilization from your storage assets, making it an essential element of your VMware configurations. DataCore's storage virtualization solutions deliver a more practical HA solution to VMware shared storage requirements. They abstract your storage into idealized, virtual disks akin to virtual machines. The software pools and mirrors disk blocks across available devices, despite differences in make and model. In the process, it speeds up I/O response and throughput using extensive SAN-wide caching. This lets you take optimum advantage of VMware's full suite of capabilities without hesitation. A plug-in for VMware's Virtual Infrastructure Client allows you to nondisruptively provision, share, clone, replicate, and expand virtual disks among physical servers and VMs.

InfoWorld: With the new releases of SANmelody (3.0) and SANsymphony (7.0), what is the real market impact here for VMware users?
DataCore: There are five major enhancements to these solutions. They include:

1. 64-bit "mega caches" that 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. In large-scale, consolidated data storage, cache is king. DataCore's solutions will now support up to a terabyte 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 customers can grow their storage pools from a few hundred gigabytes to multiple petabytes.

2. Radically simple, high-availability for nonstop storage virtual infrastructure - Needless to say, storage pools of such immensity are in constant flux. With this in mind, the new product enhancements are fully integrated into DataCore's radically simple, high-availability solutions for VMware. Only DataCore allows maintenance, upgrades, expansion, and failures to take place throughout portions of the storage infrastructure without disrupting applications.

3. Full use: Efficient space reclamation for thinly provisioned storage - Both SANmelody and SANsymphony offer the choice to thinly provision virtual disks rather than tie up physical capacity when LUNs are first created. This is particularly desirable with virtual machines that generally consume only a small fraction of the total volume assigned to them. In the new releases, previously allocated or thinly provisioned space will be automatically reclaimed in the background after applications or file systems no longer need it. With this functionality, the SAN returns unused capacity that may have been temporarily needed for some operations and can now further optimize resource utilization.

4. Windows Server 2008-based, universal storage controllers - Configuring DataCore software on x86/X64 Windows servers transforms them into universal storage controllers. ESX servers and virtual machines (VMs) needing storage connect to the DataCore controllers using iSCSI or Fibre Channel. All of the popular operating systems, including Windows Server 2003, 2008, Unix, Linux, NetWare, and Mac OS can take advantage of DataCore's SAN-wide storage virtualization features. In small configurations, the DataCore controller is hosted on a VM as a virtual appliance alongside application VMs. The SAN is completely virtual needing no external storage. Larger configurations dedicate physical servers to this storage virtualization role and typically include both internal disk drives and external arrays. 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.

5. 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. In addition, a plug-in for VMware's Virtual Infrastructure Client is a no-charge option that allows administrators to nondisruptively provision, share, clone, replicate, and expand virtual disks among physical servers and VMs.

SANmelody 3.0 New Tools and Screenshots

Check out the SANmelody Tunes Blog and see the latest screenshots of SANmelody 3.0

SANmelody Tunes: SANMelody 3.0 New Tools.
Suprise Suprise, there is actually some nice new features/functionality in the newly released SANMelody 3.0. that should make life a little easier for SANMelody administrators.....

DataCore ships 64-bit SANmelody 3.0, SANsymphony 7.0 storage solutions

Computer Technology Review Article
http://www.wwpi.com/storage/storage/7028-datacore-ships-64-bit-sanmelody-30-sansymphony-70-storage-solutions

For presentation on latest capabilities, please see:
DataCore New Release Presentation

The new 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.

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...

Washington Archives: A hardware failure leads to a fresh start on the storage front with DataCore

Washington Archives Management (WAM) is a 50-person archiving service that stores, archives and manages paper records.

A hardware failure leads to a fresh start on the storage front
“Two ESX servers had WAM’s environment virtualized onto them, but the ESX servers had no shared storage,” notes Steve Parlee, Senior Systems Consultant, Moose Logic. “The two servers were running local, internal storage – and one had a direct-attached drive shelf. This was not a very convenient set-up because we could not, for example, VMotion the guests between servers in case of a failure.”

Moving the virtualized guests to the other server (in case of a hardware failure) was difficult because there was no shared storage – no SAN was in place, which is necessary to “motion” the virtual guests. As fate would have it, the firm did experience one ESX server failure and therefore was forced to run on only one ESX server. Without redundancy in the network, if any other component had failed, Washington Archives Management would have been “out of business” until it was fixed.

WAM considered two options. The firm could either go back to where it had been with the two VMware ESX servers and simply try to become more stable, or it could do some forward-thinking and put in place a SAN that would make the consequences of hardware failure a thing of the past. “We could have just replaced the ESX server and stayed on the path we were – risking future hardware failures that would yet again impact business operations,” says Parlee. “The choice Washington Archives Management made was to go with a shared storage approach and to use DataCore as the foundation of that whole strategy.”

Utilizing XenServer and shared, network storage from DataCore– a “no-brainer”
Moose Logic advised WAM to deploy DataCore because it allows the firm to replicate in real time their storage between two nodes. In addition, Moose Logic replaced the ESX servers with Citrix XenServers. With the XenServers, Moose Logic was able to utilize something called multi-pathing. “With muti-pathing, we have been able to take down half of WAM’s network for maintenance – without impacting day-to-day operations,” comments Parlee.

“Because of the shared storage and the fact that the storage is virtual, WAM now has the ability to ‘XenMotion’ the guests back and forth between two different pieces of hardware,” continues Parlee. “The other notable capability is high availability. If any of the Citrix XenServers were to crash, it will automatically restart on the other server. And what makes this possible is the back-end, shared storage.”

What accounts for the storage being “virtual” lies in the fact that DataCore enables a system administrator to take a “volume” (i.e. a piece of disk space for storage) from each of the two SANmelody nodes and mirror them. When these volumes are mirrored together, this creates a single “virtual volume” which is what is then presented to the application server (e.g. XenServer, Windows Server, etc.). By doing this, the application servers only see the one instance of the “virtual volume,” but in reality that virtual volume is tied to the mirrored volumes. It is this key feature – inherent to SANmelody – that enables the system to failover.

A virtualized IT environment – radically simple, high availability storage virtualization solution
The redundant SANmelody SAN servers that are currently in operation on the back-end are mirrored to each other using synchronous replication. “It is all about the redundancy – the fault-tolerance for failover,” explains Parlee. “We can lose up to three components – two servers and a switch – and everything keeps running. You see, either one of the SANmelody servers can present storage. Only one is presenting it at any time, but if one goes down, without impacting the environment whatsoever, the system seamlessly switches over to SANmelody number two and just keeps right on running.”

Summarizes Radford, “The bigger picture here is that technology like this has previously been prohibitively expensive for a small to mid-size business customer. Sure, large companies have been deploying virtual servers and virtual SANs, but they have had to pay a huge price for doing so. DataCore’s SANmelody enables the small business to get this kind of virtualization environment built and to do so without paying for Fibre Channel or paying over $100,000 for the SAN alone, which is what has made having a SAN unattainable for a large number of customers – before DataCore paved the way.”

Citrix XenServer for Free; What does server virtualization for free mean for storage virtualization?

Opinion, more server virtualization projects will feed storage virtualization deployments. Is this a trend? Is server virtualization becoming a commodity?

The battle at the virtual server market is heating up and these are the questions being asked. So what just happened? Citrix is now making XenServer free since it has had a hard time making inroads against the giant VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V initiatives and pricing (see articles below). A benefit of the industry cost battle is that it helps fuel more virtualization projects…which obviously stresses the need for shared storage SANs but the high cost of the SAN (often the largest cost item - typically costing well over $75k) then becomes the major hurdle to virtualization deployments.

This virtualisation and consolidation of servers results in 2 major pain points - it concentrates I/O performance (slows it down) and since all the applications are running on fewer servers it magnifies the impact of interruptions on business continuity -the 'All the eggs in one basket' impact: InformationWeek - Virtualization Driving SMB/SME Storage . This battle at the virtual server level bodes well for DataCore high-availability SAN software solutions… since DataCore overcomes these critical pain points. Citrix XensServer is now Free (XenCenter, XenMotion, Resource Pools, etc. ). Check out this overview: http://www.virtualization.info/2009/02/citrix-xenserver-is-now-free-xencenter.html

DataCore & VMWare Storage VMotion - Solving Troublesome Migration Problems

An interesting day in the life story...submitted today from one of the DataCore Technical Account Managers in the UK...

March always presents an interesting time in local government; the end of the financial year sees the opportunity for the IT managers to get the projects that they've always wanted to do out of the way. This was no different for a large hospital system client that I visited this morning. They have purchased DataCore and were at the stage of the project that most IT Managers dread... Attempting to calculate the downtime and risk of the implementation of a brand new SAN environment.

Lists of application servers had been drawn up, tiers had been assigned, timescales were mooted and several small conversations were taking place amongst the people involved as to what needed to go first and what could be coped without when. The migration was to move from CX300 hardware to a DataCore SANsymphony environment housed upon large storage servers. Initially a 2 node configuration, with a primary production SAN and a DR SAN housed 8 miles away at the sister hospital, the purpose of the project was to provide an initial DR strategy and Storage expansion for a virtualised environment, culminating in the implementation of a Microsoft Sharepoint environment to improve the efficiency and end user experience within the PCT.

So after about 15 minutes of discussion I asked what version of ESX they were on... 3.0.1 came the reply. This quickly turned into a discussion regarding the upgrade path of VMWare from 3.0.1 to 3.5 and when the ease of this became apparent the solution became a no-brainer. Use Storage VMotion! By provisioning the DataCore Virtual Volumes to the ESX hosts as datastores, we can then Storage VMotion from one datastore to the other! There will be NO downtime at all! Having gone through the idea in a little more detail it became obvious that it was watertight and what was a potentially awkward, convoluted meeting with tight schedules became an easy discussion about just how flexible the solution was.

The icing was the cake was the point at which we decided that we could "chuck a 4GB HBA into the storage server" for the time that the 3rd node is to be implemented... "It'll just mean we can bang it in without any downtime again..." was the final comment on the matter.

10 Thin Provisioning Storage Options for SMBs

Another SMB, RealTime Services Group Inc., which provides service and support to small staffing firms, has been using thin provisioning for two years. Jeff Sabotin, director of IT, selected DataCore Software Corp.'s SANmelody software for his 12 servers at an initial cost of $25,000. Prior to the installation, some of RealTime's servers had plenty of storage available and some sorely needed more.

"Expanding and adding partitions took a lot of time, so thin provisioning was a big deal for us," Sabotin said. "We're a small shop, and we don't have a ton of money."

10 Thin Provisioning Storage Options for SMBs

Thin provisioning makes a lot of sense for SMBs. By delivering
rewards such as improved storage utilization, lower costs and
simplified management, thin provisioning appears to be the right tool
for these tough times.

To help you evaluate the viability of thin provisioning, our
editorial team has assembled this market overview, with specific
deployment examples and descriptions of 10 products that are shipping
now:
http://go.techtarget.com/r/6149719/1283994

Storage Managment; Replication; New Features for Datacore SANmelody and SANsymphony

High performance and availability from VMware shared storage

http://www.prosecurityzone.com/Customisation/News/IT_Security/Backup_Data_Recovery_and_Disaster_Recovery/High_performance_and_availability_from_VMware_shared_storage.asp SANmelody and SANsymphony from DataCore provide virtualized storage solutions for maximizing availability in VMware virtual infrastructures

ENTnews: 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.

SearchStorageChannel.com: Remote data replication: Hardware vs. host vs. backup replication - George Crump
Solution provider takeaway: For customers that are shoring up their disaster recovery strategy with remote data replication, storage solution providers can guide them toward the right replication approach -- hardware- vs. host vs. backup-based replication -- by examining a number of key factors.

...An alternative approach is to use a storage virtualization appliance like those available from DataCore and Falconstor to handle the remote data replication services. A storage virtualization appliance allows the customer to replicate from anything to anything. This is an ideal solution to recommend to customers if you don't happen to provide the storage that they already have in place. They can keep their current solution, and you can provide the virtualization appliance as well as the target storage on the remote site.

Using a storage virtualization appliance also drives down the storage costs in the remote DR site. You can provide a lower-performing system with fewer higher-capacity drives, for example. But be careful not to go to cheap. In the event of an actual disaster, your customer may have to run their production environment on this storage. Find out what the customer's tolerance is for running the production environment in degraded mode, and make hardware choices based on their level of comfort.

Finally, a storage virtualization appliance gives you the option to participate in the build-out of storage in the production site. If the customer wants to extend the use of the storage virtualization appliance beyond just remote data replication, the appliance often can provide the same functionality as the storage system itself. Features like logical unit number (LUN) allocation, snapshots and thin provisioning can all be handled by the appliance, freeing the customer to use hardware of their choosing.

The Value of Storage Virtualization Software

..."But at the end of the day, server virtualization is popular because it helps IT organizations get more out of their existing hardware investments. Right now, the only thing that does that in the realm of storage virtualization is a software-only approach to creating virtual pools out of existing storage investments."

http://blogs.eweek.com/masked_intentions/content/storage/the_value_of_storage_virtualization_software.html

The folks at DataCore, which makes software that allows IT organization to turn existing storage arrays from multiple vendors into a shared pool of disk storage, have two theories about why storage virtualization is evolving much more slowly than server virtualization.

The first theory is that most storage hardware vendors require customers to buy new storage arrays that support storage virtualization. In these difficult economic times, it's hard to make an argument that basically says an IT organization should spend a lot of additional capital now in order to save money later.

The second theory is that when IT organizations introduce storage virtualization, they are worried about performance penalties. Too often there are database and e-mail applications that don't perform so well when virtualization is introduced. To specifically deal with storage virtualization performance issues, DataCore is now adding 1TB of cache to a new 64-bit implementation of its SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 software .

DataCore's 'solid state SANs' with mega-caches to make storage virtualisation performance soar

http://www.it-director.com/enterprise/content.php?cid=11109

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.

Storage Virtualization Software

Storage Virtualization Software

http://www.itreselleronline.com/download.mvc/Storage-Virtualization-Software-0001?atc~c=771+s=774+r=001+l=a&VNETCOOKIE=NO

Virtually everything hinges on storage. Server and desktop consolidation, in particular, place extraordinary demands on it. Too often, disks slow down, interrupt or endanger these centralized IT operations not because they are poorly built, but because they are physically constrained. Although VMware virtualization helps you to overcome similar limitations in processors, when it comes to advanced functions such as workload migration, load balancing, fail-over and disaster recovery, it is completely dependent on highly available (HA) shared storage. You'll be shocked at the high hardware costs and major overhaul generally proposed to put such a storage infrastructure in place.

DataCore's storage virtualization solutions deliver a more practical HA solution to VMware shared storage requirements. They abstract your storage into idealized, virtual disks akin to virtual machines. The software pools and mirrors disk blocks across available devices, despite differences in make and model. In the process, it speeds up I/O response and throughput using extensive SAN-wide caching. This lets you take optimum advantage of VMware's full suite of capabilities without hesitation. A plug-in for VMware's Virtual Infrastructure Client allows you to non-disruptively provision, share, clone, replicate and expand virtual disks among physical servers and VMs. DataCore(tm) yields the highest availability, fastest performance and fullest utilization from your storage assets, making it an essential element of your VMware configurations.

Solution Highlights

* Makes business continuity and disaster recovery practical for virtual servers, virtual desktops and general IT consolidation
* Eliminates storage-related disruptions due to inevitable maintenance, reconfiguration, upgrades, expansion and failures
* Speeds up application performance by removing disk I/O bottlenecks
* Maximizes use of available disk capacity
* Centralizes and automates storage administration despite variations in equipment

Server plus Storage Virtualization

Server plus Storage Virtualization [From Jon Toigo's Blog]

I am not a huge fan of the former, but I like the latter. And when I stack up two together, I want my servers virtualized with Virtual Iron (for reasons of cost and stability and functionality) and I want my fabric virtualized with DataCore SAN Sympony - because it freakin' works.

That's why I was delighted to see a press release today that talked about combo low pricing for both kits. And it is why I am reprinting some of the foo here. Worth a look... http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=2247

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.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1349040,00.html

Virtual Infrastructure Tutorial; Oracle rumor on buying Virtual Iron

Oracle apparently is gearing up for a virtualization play

http://localtechwire.com/business/local_tech_wire/opinion/blogpost/4643500/

Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies & Company who closely follows Red Hat, says Oracle is apparently getting ready to acquire Virtual Iron, a virtual server and tools maker.

Virtual Infrastructure Tutorial
http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/virtualization/virtual-infrastructure.html

Virtual Infrastructure

Virtualization Market Impact

Virtualization often comes in the form of portable software which operates on basic Intel/AMD servers ...

DataCore software is a high end provider of virtualization storage software. This software is unique because it has radically changed the ways in which storage is managed, and it does this through usage of a software program which is highly innovative, which brings together services and functions, and combines them with both the agility and the savings of the hardware independence.

DataCore Aims Major Software Enhancements at VMware Shared Storage Requirements

"VMware customers are demanding that the many storage-related interruptions they face while making metro-wide, virtual machine migration, failover and load balancing be eliminated. Solutions like those offered by DataCore are addressing these interruptions and are critical to making these tasks practical," said George Crump, senior analyst at Storage Switzerland.

Visitors to VMworld Europe 2009 will be among the first to learn how new versions of DataCore SANmelody(tm) and SANsymphony(tm) storage virtualization solutions materialize into SAN-wide performance boosts, radically simple, high-availability, and optimum disk utilization for VMware Virtual Infrastructure customers. DataCore's new lineup of VMware Ready Certified(tm) solutions will be showcased at Europe's largest virtualization community in Cannes, France.

DataCore SANmelody and SANsymphony Support 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. "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 customers can grow their storage pools from a few hundred gigabytes to multiple petabytes.

Radically Simple, High-Availability for Non-Stop Storage Virtual Infrastructure Needless to say, storage pools of such immensity are in constant flux. With this in mind, the new product enhancements are fully integrated into DataCore's radically simple, high availability solutions for VMware. Only DataCore allows maintenance, upgrades, expansion, and failures to take place throughout portions of the storage infrastructure without disrupting applications. "VMware customers are demanding that the many storage-related interruptions they face while making metro-wide, virtual machine migration, failover and load balancing be eliminated. Solutions like those offered by DataCore are addressing these interruptions and are critical to making these tasks practical," said George Crump, senior analyst at Storage Switzerland.

Full Use: Efficient Space Reclamation for Thinly Provisioned Storage Both SANmelody and SANsymphony offer the choice to thinly provision virtual disks rather than tie up physical capacity when LUNs are first created. This is particularly desirable with virtual machines that generally consume only a small fraction of the total volume assigned to them. In the new releases, previously allocated or thinly provisioned space will be automatically reclaimed in the background after applications or file systems no longer need it. With this functionality, the SAN returns unused capacity that may have been temporarily needed for some operations and can now further optimize resource utilization.

Windows Server 2008-based, Universal Storage Controllers
Configuring DataCore software on x86/X64 Windows servers transforms them into universal storage controllers. ESX servers and virtual machines (VMs) needing storage, connect to the DataCore controllers using iSCSI or Fibre Channel. All of the popular operating systems, including Windows Server 2003, 2008, Unix, Linux, NetWare and MacOs can take advantage of DataCore's SAN-wide storage virtualization features. In small configurations, the DataCore controller is hosted on a VM as a virtual appliance alongside application VMs. The SAN is completely virtual needing no external storage. Larger configurations dedicate physical servers to this storage virtualization role and typically include both internal disk drives and external arrays. 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. In addition, 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.

What does server virtualization for free mean for storage virtualization?

Opinion, more server virtualization projects will feed storage virtualization.

Is server virtualization becoming a commodity?
The battle at the virtual server market is heating up and this is a question being asked. So what happened? Citrix is now making XenServer free since it has had a hard time making inroads against the giant VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V initiatives (see articles below).A benefit of the industry cost battle is that it helps fuel more virtualization projects…which obviously stresses the need for shared storage SANs and the high cost of the SAN (often the largest cost item - typically costing well over $75k). Implementing a SAN therefore becomes the major hurdle to virtualization deployments. This consolidation of servers results in 2 major pain points - it concentrates I/O performance (slows it down) and since all the applications are running on fewer servers it magnifies the impact of interruptions on business continuity -the 'All the eggs in one basket' impact: InformationWeek - Virtualization Driving SMB/SME Storage . This battle at the virtual server level bodes well for DataCore… since we overcome these critical pain points.Citrix XensServer is now Free (XenCenter, XenMotion, Resource Pools, etc. )Check out this overview: http://www.virtualization.info/2009/02/citrix-xenserver-is-now-free-xencenter.html