From Enterprise Storage Forum -The Virtual San Buying Guide: http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/san-nas-storage/virtual-san-buying-guide.html
“The quest for software-defined storage has branched three distinct approaches to storage virtualization; hypervisor-based, device-dependent, and agnostic, software-only,” states Steve Houck, COO DataCore Software. “vSAN is an example of hypervisor-based, EMC ViPR and IBM SVC are device-dependent, and DataCore SANsymphony–V is an example of software-only storage virtualization.”
DataCore has been in the virtual storage space for a long time. Its virtual SAN platform is called SANsymphony-V, which is hardware-agnostic storage virtualization software that abstracts and pools internal and external disks along with flash/SSDs. The company said thousands of data centers around the globe deploy DataCore.
Features include in-memory DRAM caching, auto-tiering, synchronous mirroring, asynchronous replication, thin-provisioning, snapshots, and CDP. Pricing for an HA (high-availability) cluster of 2 SANsymphony-V nodes is under $10,000, including 24×7 annual support.
“The SANsymphony-V platform is designed for mission-critical, latency-sensitive applications in companies large and small, where downtime is not tolerated,” said Steve Houck, COO, DataCore Software.
He believes that VMware vSAN takes advantage of inexpensive internal disk drives, which drives more customers, especially SAN-averse ones, to virtualize their apps. However, he added that it requires the use of more expensive flash memory, a minimum of three hosts, and doesn’t work on physical machine that are also be in the mix, or other hypervisors such as Microsoft Hyper-V.
SANsymphony-V, said Houck, is transparent to applications, so no code changes are necessary. It installs on a virtual machine in two or more nodes to create a tiered storage pool. The software can also run on dedicated x86 machines to offload all storage-intensive tasks from the application hosts
“The quest for software-defined storage has branched three distinct approaches to storage virtualization; hypervisor-based, device-dependent, and agnostic, software-only,” said Houck. “vSAN is an example of hypervisor-based, EMC ViPR and IBM SVC are device-dependent, and DataCore SANsymphony–V is an example of software-only storage virtualization.”
