DataCore Adds Enhancements to Storage Platform 

DataCore Software today announced significant enhancements to its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform. The latest version sets a new standard in software-defined storage, extending the architecture's scalability and scope beyond traditional storage and storage area networks (SANs). Drawing from experience with more than 10,000 customer deployments worldwide, DataCore's SANsymphony-V R9.0.4 provides universal management services and comprehensive infrastructure-wide features to improve on the native capabilities of different storage devices and brands, helping organizations overcome vendor-specific and hardware-related shortcomings.

The new SANsymphony-V comes at a time when technology pundits are declaring the traditional storage model broken. Major storage hardware vendors have been impacted and are trying to reshape offerings or buy time by touting a move to a "software-defined" world; hoping to counter IT department buyers who no longer accept the "throw more hardware at the problem" approach. SANsymphony-V answers IT concerns with powerful features and a long-term strategy for controlling costs, especially addressing new technologies such as high-speed flash and the need to curtail purchases of disk storage capacity.

With the new release, DataCore expands its scope to automate and optimize the performance and use of both flash and spinning disk storage resources on the application server-side, within the SAN or across both. Additional new features and benefits of SANsymphony-V include:

• Twice the Scalability: Now federates and combines up to 16 nodes into a centrally-managed, storage grid to speed application response and increase system throughput. The scalability level and ability to federate across many vendor brands of devices and storage are unmatched in the industry. This adds resiliency to the entire IT infrastructure by easily accommodating temporary loss of nodes or back-end devices, be it for routine maintenance, upgrades or hardware failures.
• Self-healing Storage: Along with synchronous mirroring of data between nodes, SANsymphony-V detects and bypasses storage hardware resources that fail or have been intentionally taken out-of-service. Volumes residing on devices are transparently migrated to alternative equipment without disrupting applications. Customers not only gain continuous availability, repairs are automatic.
• Failsafe Non-disruptive Data Mobility: Provides the ability to move virtual disks non-disruptively between different pools. For example, volumes allocated from a test or development pool can be relocated to the production pool in the background without disrupting application access.
• Faster Performance and Data Movement with VMware VAAI and Microsoft ODX: Customers can dedicate more host resources to application processing by offloading large data movements to the virtual SAN. This is coordinated with the host hypervisor or operating system using either VMware VAAI commands or Microsoft ODX APIs. Rather than tie up the host and network when moving disk blocks, the hypervisor asks SANsymphony-V to do it and notify the host when done.
• New Reclamation Services to Reclaim Unused Capacity: Infrastructure-wide use of VAAI and ODX APIs play another important role in recovering disk space. Hosts signal when they have erased (zeroed-out) large number blocks, enabling SANsymphony-V to reclaim that capacity for other uses. Without this coordination, empty blocks would remain allocated and be wasted. Thin provisioning along with smart reclamation techniques get the best use of capacity and often help IT organizations defer or avoid expensive new storage acquisitions.
• Change-control Management and Audit Logs for Error Prevention, Fast Troubleshooting: Larger IT organizations operating 24x7 on multiple shifts often have several individuals provisioning storage and fine-tuning configurations. To avoid any confusion, SANsymphony-V now records each administrative action in a time-stamped audit trail which tracks who did what and when. The audit log also helps troubleshooting by revealing actions that led to a problem.
• Next Gen Remote Replication for Speedy Disaster Recovery: The new SANsymphony-V incorporates optimizations to drastically reduce the time needed to copy volumes to remote sites, while streamlining the transfer of subsequent updates to keep remote copies up to date. These innovations are particularly welcomed by customers with distant disaster recovery sites, as well as those who frequently migrate volumes between branch offices and central data centers.