Abstract
Decades of growth of applications, storage, and complexity have delivered unprecedented economic, operational, and flexibility challenges to the world of IT. To meet these demands today’s IT is turning to virtualization, not just of systems and applications, but in every facet of IT. When broadly and carefully deployed, virtualization has the ability to ensure that management focus is where it should be: on applications and organizational results rather than on hardware choices.
The data center as we know it is in the midst of a significant transformation; the data center of tomorrow is virtualized. Server virtualization, while still maturing its overall capabilities, is here to stay. Desktop virtualization is on the same trajectory. Both are logical and compelling, operationally and financially, and both make business sense. IT is beginning to accelerate virtualization of its server and desktop infrastructure. The more advanced an organization in terms of virtualization deployments, the greater the level of benefit and value that organization can expect. With systems virtualization becoming ubiquitous, storage, at least storage as it has been deployed and used for decades, can be a significant obstacle that is slowing or stalling the successful and optimal advance of IT. And yet the tools exist to capably address the issue—with the virtualization of storage being a crucial element.
DataCore Software
DataCore has been providing software-based storage virtualization for over 13 years with more than 6,000 customers and over 20,000 licenses deployed. DataCore’s mission is to enhance the value of the storage hardware users prefer to own.
Their software-based virtualization approach works across all popular brands and models of disk and storage arrays, providing an integrated and consistent set of provisioning, data protection and performance acceleration functions on an infrastructure-wide basis, regardless of device and without requiring the purchase of expensive add-on software for each array in an environment.
SANsymphony-V
DataCore SANsymphony-V is designed as a flexible software platform which runs on physical or virtual industry standard x86-64 Windows servers. The product is agnostic with regard to the underlying storage hardware and can effectively virtualize whatever storage is on a user’s floor, whether direct-attached or SAN-connected. Running on industry standard server hardware and Windows Server 2008 R2 enables SANsymphony-V to support a wide array of storage devices and SAN connectivity options, including iSCSI, Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) determined by the HBA’s or NICs installed in the DataCore nodes.
SANsymphony-V can be installed on dedicated servers to manage very large multi-petabyte, physical storage pools, or scaled down for smaller environments by co-residing in the same physical server hosting the virtual machines. Since SANsymphony-V is a native Windows application, it can be installed directly on Hyper-V, without having to live inside a virtual machine.
SANsymphony-V offers users a rich set of enterprise-class functionality, with workflow-oriented wizards to ease administration and management. High-speed caching, synchronous mirroring, snapshots, continuous data protection (CDP) rollback, online migration and upgrades, asynchronous replication with compression, (for bi-directional remote site recovery), and thin provisioning all can span heterogeneous storage because SANsymphony-V sits between the storage hardware and hosts. The goal of the balance of this Lab Validation report is to examine exactly how DataCore SANsymphony-V virtualizes storage and provides compelling business value to users.
