DataCore SANsymphony-V10 Software Update Announced

DataCore has revealed new virtual SAN functionality and significant enhancements to its SANsymphony-V10 software, the 10th generation release of its comprehensive storage services platform. This new update substantially improves virtual SAN capabilities designed to achieve the fastest performance, highest availability, and optimal use from flash and disk storage directly attached to application hosts and clustered servers in virtual (server-side) SAN use cases.

DataCore has revealed new virtual SAN functionality and significant enhancements to its SANsymphony-V10 software, the 10th generation release of its comprehensive storage services platform. This new update substantially improves virtual SAN capabilities designed to achieve the fastest performance, highest availability, and optimal use from flash and disk storage directly attached to application hosts and clustered servers in virtual (server-side) SAN use cases.

DataCore’s Virtual SAN is a software-only solution that automates and simplifies storage management and provisioning all the while delivering enterprise-class functionality, automated recovery, and significantly faster performance. Easy to set up, it runs on new or existing x86 servers, creating a shared storage pool out of the internal flash and disk storage resources available to that server. This allows the DataCore Virtual SAN to be cost-effectively deployed as an overlay and without the need to make major hardware or complex SAN gear purchases.

DataCore states that–unlike SANsymphony-V10–competing products are incapable of sustaining serious workloads and providing a growth path to physical SAN assets. Additionally, they are inextricably tied to a specific server hypervisor, making them unusable in all but the smallest branch office environments or non-critical test and development scenarios.

The new SANsymphony-V10 virtual SAN software scales performance to more than 50 Million IOPS and to 32 Petabytes of capacity across a cluster of 32 servers; this makes it one of the most powerful and scalable systems in the marketplace.

Enterprise-class availability comes standard with a DataCore virtual SAN; the software includes automated failover and failback recovery, and is able to span a N+1 grid (up to 32 nodes) stretching over metro-wide distances. With a DataCore virtual SAN, business continuity, remote site replication and data protection are simple and quick to implement. It's also automatic thereafter.

Additionally, DataCore SANsymphony-V10 resolves mixed combinations of virtual and physical SANs, keeping in mind that a virtual SAN may extend out into an external SAN; the need for centralized storage services and hardware consolidation efficiencies are required initially or considered in later stages of the project. Unlike its competition, DataCore can run on the server-side as a virtual SAN, run and manage physical SANs, and can operate and federate across both.

DataCore virtual SANs are ideal solutions for clustered servers, VDI desktop deployments, remote disaster recovery and multi-site virtual server projects, in addition to demanding database and business application workloads running on server platforms. The software also gives companies the ability to create large scale and modular ‘Google-like’ infrastructures that take advantage of heterogeneous and commodity storage, servers and low-cost networking to transform them into enterprise-grade production architectures.

Additional Features

Though the focus of SANsymphony-V10 is on the new virtual SAN capabilities, as well as the new licensing and pricing choices, there are also a number of other major performance and scalability enhancements in this version, including:

• Scalability has doubled from 16 to 32 nodes; Enables Metro-wide N+1 grid data protection
• Supports high-speed 40/56 GigE iSCSI; 16Gbps Fibre Channel; iSCSI Target NIC teaming
• Performance visualization/Heat Map tools add insight into the behavior of Flash and disks
• New auto-tiering settings optimize expensive resources (e.g., flash cards) in a pool
• Intelligent disk rebalancing, dynamically redistributes load across available devices within a tier
• Automated CPU load leveling and Flash optimizations to increase performance
• Disk pool optimization and self-healing storage; Disk contents are automatically restored across the remaining storage in the pool; Enhancements to easily select and prioritize order of recovery
• New self-tuning caching algorithms and optimizations for flash cards and SSDs
• ‘Click-simple’ configuration wizards to rapidly set up different use cases (Virtual SAN; High-Availability SANs; NAS File Shares; etc.)

Pricing and Availability

Typical multi-node SANsymphony-V10 software licenses range from $10,000 to $25,000 range while the new Virtual SAN starts at $4,000 per server. 

The virtual SAN price includes auto-tiering, adaptive read/write caching from DRAM, storage pooling, metro-wide synchronous mirroring, thin provisioning and snapshots. The software also supports all of the popular operating systems hosted on VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Simple ‘Plug-ins’ for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft System Center are included allowing for simplified hypervisor-based administration. SANsymphony-V10 and its virtual SAN variations may be deployed in a virtual machine or running natively on Windows Server 2012, using standard physical x86-64 servers.

General availability for SANsymphony-V10 slated for May 30th, 2014.

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