DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization software, has made enhancements to its SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor. The new capabilities are intended to support customers who are facing high data growth, as well as the need to enable faster response times and provide continuous availability for business-critical applications.
“This is all about customers who are virtualizing their large database systems – whether it is Oracle RAC, SAP, or SQL Server – that class of applications,” Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing at DataCore, tells 5 Minute Briefing. According to Gonzalez, often when these organizations virtualize their applications they run into some unexpected performance degradation. “Much of what we are doing in this release of the SANsymphony-V goes right at those issues.”
Improving scalability, DataCore gives customers the ability to choose and define cost-effective nodes, and with the enhanced SANsymphony-V, the maximum number of storage virtualization nodes in a centrally managed group doubles from four to eight. This enables both very large scale data centers and cloud service providers to expand into the additional nodes, extending capacity, throughput and connectivity. “The improved scalability is sometimes not used strictly because they need the capacity but also in order to assure resiliency and to avoid the performance hit when a component is lost in the architecture,” observes Gonzalez.
In addition, SANsymphony-V maximizes existing resources, while incorporating the latest technologies like Flash and solid state disks (SSDs) cost effectively. “We have found that the way Flash and SSDs behave as storage devices is a little bit different and little more nuanced from the way that hard disk drives operate and so we have done some special optimizations to account for the way that they absorb data in a ‘bursty’ manner.” With this release, SANsymphony-V accounts for that characteristic so the end user at the application level does not see the downstream behavior and sees continuous smooth operations.
SANsymphony-V also enables trend analysis over time with a recording feature that compiles and displays a running chart of metrics gathered from the environment. “For a long time we have had real-time visibility into the systems and that is good if you are keeping an eye on them. What we are doing in this case is enhancing that with trend analysis so that you can look over days, several weeks or a year and see where you are experiencing spikes in terms of users coming on or additional loads that are being submitted into the system. This enables you to look at the downstream consequences of those spikes and see if they require any additional resource to be put in place or better balancing of the resources that you have.” The historical collection may be exported as a CSV file for further analysis, planning and reporting with Microsoft Excel and other tools.
Additional capabilities include customized control for better resource utilization and storage tiering; and a greater degree of continuous data protection (CDP) as well as near-instant restoration for business-critical applications. SANsymphony-V also now runs on the Windows Server 2012 operating system in addition to Windows Server 2008 R2.
Complete information is available about SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor.
