Report Spotlights
“Top 10 Biggest Storage Challenges” and Details Test Results on DataCore’s Application-Adaptive Data Infrastructure, Self Provisioning VVols,
Hyper-converged Simplicity, Parallel I/O Performance, Automated Storage Tiering, Continuous Data Protection and More
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.,
February 10, 2016
– DataCore, the leader in Parallel Powered Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solutions, today announced the results of a new hands-on evaluation and testing recently
performed by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lab on its DataCore SANsymphony™ and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN software. The report also highlights ESG’s
survey results on the “Top 10 Biggest Storage Challenges.” The lab testing, performed independently, was done to assess the value of DataCore’s
infrastructure-wide storage virtualization and hyper-converged solutions for the data center, and the tests were designed to validate the flexibility and
ease of management in a heterogeneous, highly virtualized environment. ESG also examined DataCore Software’s performance, efficiency, and availability in
fully virtualized and hyper-converged configurations.
“DataCore’s SANsymphony and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solutions proved to be robust, flexible, and responsive. The company now finds itself with
incredibly relevant capabilities that truly matter to users. We found the software easy to implement and manage, virtualizing any storage infrastructure
with enterprise-class features and functionality while enhancing performance,” said Tony Palmer, senior lab analyst, ESG Lab. “ESG Lab was especially
impressed with DataCore’s parallel I/O technology and its ability to deliver enterprise-class performance running on low-cost commodity hardware.”
After completing the testing, Palmer added, “It would benefit any organization considering or implementing an IT virtualization project to take a long look
at DataCore Software.”
ESG Lab Validation Highlights:
-
Enables Enterprise-class Hyper-converged Data Infrastructure
ESG Lab found that virtualizing infrastructure with DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN was intuitive and straightforward. During the evaluation, a pair
of servers running a hypervisor and DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN provided a highly available platform to run multiple simulated applications and
enterprise workloads. When a server failure was simulated with a hard power off, virtual machines and storage failed over to the surviving node immediately
and automatically. A new server was installed and added to the Failover Cluster–seamlessly and painlessly–while applications remained online and
continuouslyavailable.
ESG also tested, reviewed and reported on DataCore’s ability to go beyond traditional hyper-converged performance limits and run demanding enterprise-class
application and storage workloads. DataCore’s hyper-converged solutions provide a range of performance and application adaptive acceleration capabilities,
the most significant being its parallel I/O software.
“DataCore has been hyper-converged since before there was such a term in the industry, so it’s no surprise that its hyper-converged offering is robust,
highly available, and offers very impressive price-performance with the full complement of enterprise-class functionality that DataCore has been honing for
nearly two decades,” added Palmer.
-
Drives Fastest Response Times and Industry-best Price Performance
DataCore’s parallel I/O software technology is designed to adaptively harness available multi-core processors to optimize and schedule I/O processing
across many different cores simultaneously. It actively senses I/O load being generated by multiple VMs concurrently and dynamically assigns CPU cores as
needed to process the I/O load. This enables DataCore to take full advantage of modern multi-core server technologies to eliminate I/O bottlenecks, speed
up application performance, and drive greater workload and virtual machine density per server.
ESG Lab reviewed DataCore’s recently-published Storage Performance Council SPC-1 benchmark results. “DataCore has published an excellent result of 459,290
SPC-1 IOPS™ at 100% load with an average response time of only 0.32 milliseconds in a hyper-converged configuration [1],”
continued Palmer. “The 0.32 millisecond result at 100% load is the fastest response time ever reported by SPC-1, and showcases the power of parallel I/O
software to significantly reduce the time it takes for applications to access, store, and update their data.”
DataCore set a new SPC-1
price-performance record
. At full load, SANsymphony was responding at nearly two orders of magnitude below the 30 milliseconds response time threshold set by the Storage
Performance Council and at 0.32 milliseconds, it is three times faster than the one milliseconds threshold considered to be the standard for all-flash
systems.
ESG stated that the DataCore SPC-1 result proves its suitability for response time sensitive applications (e.g., Virtualization and Database workloads,
OLTP, ERP, etc.) and demonstrates the headroom available to scale up and scale out to much larger configurations and capacities.
-
Simplifies VMware vSphere Storage Management: Self-Provisioning with VVols
Administrators crave the simplicity, power and fine-grain control promised by vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVols); however, most current storage arrays and
systems do not support VVols. With DataCore enabled, virtually any storage becomes VVol capable allowing VMware vSphere administrators to self-provision
virtual volumes from virtual storage pools — and instantly specify the capacity and class of service needed for their applications without having to know
anything about the storage or underlying hardware.
ESG Lab tested DataCore self-provisioning VVols. In the testing scenario, ESG set up Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze policies to define different levels
of service. DataCore made provisioning storage a seamless, integrated part of VM creation, empowering administrators to provision storage for virtual
machines using predefined storage policies that were able to define performance, availability, and locality of data without ever having to touch the
back-end storage.
DataCore automatically took care of the entire behind-the-scenes configuration, which is the responsibility of specialized storage administrators in
traditional storage environments. ESG Lab reported that it was impressed with the speed, simplicity, and completeness of the DataCore integration. Virtual
machines based on these predefined profiles were created in minutes using native VMware tools. ESG noted that this capability is particularly of value as
much of the existing storage in data centers can never be retrofitted to support VVols, so the fact that SANsymphony extends VVols self-provisioning to
existing storage investments and any new devices not yet able to support VVols is a powerful capability.
-
Automates Infrastructure-wide Storage Tiering to Maximize Cost-Effective Performance
ESG Lab also validated the business value of DataCore’s automated storage tiering. All performance testing was completed using test tools to simulate a
typical OLTP workload. ESG first measured the performance on a non-tiered storage pool using a SAS disk. Next, an SSD was added to the storage pool.
The software immediately started the rebalancing process of tiering, moving hot, or frequently accessed, data blocks from the SAS disk to the higher
performance flash disk.After completing the rebalancing process, the DataCore solution dedicated all resources to performing storage operations for the application. The
effect of storage tiering was immediately visible, the DataCore software reported a total of 1,392 IOPS—a 700% improvement over the non-tiered storage
pool.
-
Supports Continuous Availability, Metro-wide Clustering, Remote Disaster Recovery, Advanced Data Protection and Automated Failover and Self-healing
Functionality
ESG Lab further validated that DataCore SANsymphony and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN provide an array of advanced data protection capabilities that can
cost-effectively satisfy the most stringent business continuity and disaster recovery requirements. Synchronous mirroring across metropolitan areas,
automated failover and self-healing, full and incremental snapshots, roll-back in time Continuous Data Protection (CDP), and asynchronous remote
replication to distant disaster recovery sites can all be used without being dependent on any specific model or brand of storage device. For example,
customers can take advantage of a hyper-converged system at a remote site and establish it as a contingency site for larger data centers.ESG also noted that DataCore’s CDP capability was easy to configure and use, enabling rollback to a specific point in time without having to create
multiple snapshots. An ideal solution for recovering the state of applications and configurations prior to bad events when snapshots were not invoked
or to recreate ‘any-point in time’ restores.
View the ESG Lab Report and the Top 10 Biggest Storage Challenges
In addition to the lab report on DataCore, ESG recently conducted a survey of 373 IT professionals and respondents who were asked to identify what they
would consider to be their biggest challenges with respect to their storage environment. As one might expect from a captive audience of server
virtualization users, there was significant focus on both data growth and data protection (each cited by 26% of respondents), as well as staff costs and
data migration (coming in at 23% each). Perhaps of greatest interest and significance, however, is that hardware costs (27%) was the most-cited storage
challenge.
Bottom-line, in addition to the added flexibility to deal with growth and change, overcoming total cost of ownership including the rising people and
hardware costs are now the primary business motivators driving the increased momentum to deploy software-defined storage solutions such as those from
DataCore.
View the complete ESG Lab Report and Survey Information here.
About DataCore
DataCore is the leading provider of Software-Defined Storage and
Adaptive Parallel I/O Software
– harnessing today’s powerful and cost-efficient server platforms to solve the IT industry’s biggest storage problem, the I/O bottleneck. The company’s
comprehensive and flexible storage virtualization and hyper-converged virtual SAN solutions free users from the pain of
labor-intensive storage management and provide customers true independence from storage solution vendors that cannot offer a hardware agnostic
architecture. DataCore’s Software-Defined Storage platforms revolutionize storage infrastructure and serve as the cornerstone of the next-generation,
software-defined data center – delivering greater value, performance, availability, and simplicity. Visit https://www.datacore.com or call (877) 780-5111 for more information.
###
DataCore, the DataCore logo and SANsymphony are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service
names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may
be trademarks of their respective owners.
CONTACT
For media & PR inquiries:
SVM on behalf of DataCore
Jill Colna or Sarah Anderson
401.490.9700
DataCore@svmpr.com
SPC Benchmark 1 Full Disclosure Report DataCore Software Corporation DataCore SANsymphony-V 10.0
(Current as of 11/30/2015)