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Tag: storage-virtualization-software

  • INSIGHT: External IT's Joseph Stedler on the Advantages of Storage Virtualization in Private Clouds


    DataCore Software has announced that hosted IT-as-a-service company External IT has standardized on its SANsymphony storage virtualization software to serve as their storage area network (SAN).

    With VMware virtual servers, Citrix XenApp and DataCore storage virtualization, it allows External IT to deliver a complete virtualization infrastructure.

    Joseph Stedler, senior engineer and Dallas data center manager, External IT, said this is in the form of private computing "clouds", tailored individually to a specific client’s needs.

    He said he had worked with traditional SANs for eight years and has had firsthand experience with every major hardware SAN – including EMC, HP and NetApp.

    "There are various, major drawbacks to hardware SANs. One is the fact that there is a single point of failure at the disk level," he said.

    "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."

    Stedler said there are capabilities that DataCore brings to the table that he "absolutely loves".

    "The concept of having two SANs as your one SAN environment is just elegantly simple," he said. "You have an ‘A’ side and a ‘B’ side."

    Stedler said 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," he said.

    "With DataCore, you will experience enormous performance gains. The performance that DataCore delivers is nothing short of awesome."

    Other benefits that make up the "DataCore Difference" for External IT include Seamless Maintenance, Disaster Recovery (through asynchronous replication) and the Flexibility to create your own SANs.

  • DataCore San Software Boosts Server Virtualization Support







    The latest versions of DataCore’s SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 storage virtualization software were under preview at the recent VMWorld Europe 2009.

    The products are due to be shipped later this month with 64 bit software architecture and various new features for virtual servers, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    The company says SANSymphony is geared at enterprises aiming to virtualize their storage area networks, while SANmelody is for small Fiber Channel and iSCSI SANs of up to 32 TB.

    The virtual disk pooling, synchronized mirroring for high availability, load balancing, thin provisioning and other advanced features are exciting and will be welcomed by enterprises using the software.

    The 64 bit controller software supports large cache on the physical server up to a theoretical limit of 1 TB as against the earlier versions which supported only 20 GB cache.

    Jack Fegreus, CEO of Southborough, Mass.-based OpenBench Labs, points out that a terabyte of cache is "at the far edge of reality for most normal sites today", but given Moore’s Law, "1TB of cache may well be average".

    Today many organizations use as much as 256 GB of cache on average.

    This increased cache implies that there will be a denser consolidation of servers into virtual machines and performance of VM backups may improve by minimizing I/O to disk.

    The Transporter Option that comes with SANmelody and SANsymphony can also perform conversions between physical and virtual servers.

    This feature is significant as a server can be converted from a physical Windows box to a Microsoft Corp.Hyper V Image and then to a VMware ESX image.

    It can then be converted back to a logical unit Number (LUN) mapped to a physical server. This feature could be an advantage to people who are running multiple virtual servers with different operating systems.

    Themis Tokkaris, systems engineer with Arizona-based pest control company Truly Nolen, says that "it is also an open idea", adding: "If I’m not happy with ESX in the future, I’m not stuck with it."

    DataCore SAN offers its users the option of using a new free plug-in for VMWare Inc’s Virtual Infrastructure Client.

    James Price, vice president of product and channel marketing at DataCore SAN, claims that it will offer "cleaner visibility and easier to understand mappings and paths".

    He further points out that the upgrades will provide a way to reclaim free capacity on volumes using thin provisioning.

    DataCore SAN is not alone in this storage virtualization space.

    Many of the features offered by DataCore, such as 64 bit support, thin provisioning and so on, have been included in the packages of other vendors.

    Symantec Corp, Double-Take Software Inc and others offer 64 bit support for the data protection space.

    Compellent Technologies Inc also offered free space recovery for thin provisioning about a year ago. DataCore SAN’s offer, however, combines these features into a server-centric approach and appears to have set the trend for the future of networked storage solutions.

    However, Fegreus says DataCore’s combining these features into a server-centric approach looks like the wave of the future for networked storage as integration increases between SANs and servers.