DataCore Upgrades PSP2 SDS Solution
DataCore on Tuesday announced new capabilities included for its ‘any hypervisor, any storage’ SANsymphony-V10 storage services platform and its DataCore Virtual SAN release. The new PSP2 update release adds support for OpenStack Cinder, enabling DataCore to deliver its Software-Defined Storage (SDS) services to private, hybrid, and public clouds built with OpenStack. The release also includes new features and services to centrally control and manage end-to-end I/O performance, optimize flash, integrate backups, improve space efficiency, serve virtual desktops, and automate hyper-converged and enterprise-wide SDS deployments.
The developer incorporated several services to enable industry-standard x86 servers to gain the essential enterprise-class storage functionality needed to meet today’s demanding business requirements. DataCore’s ability to deliver hyper-converged, virtual SAN, and SDS platform services fueled a growing list of alliances and server vendor partnerships with companies seeking to leverage their hardware platforms with DataCore’s latest release. The PSP2 release is generally available and shipping.
New services and enhanced features include:
- Brings Software-Defined Storage to Cloud Architectures; adds OpenStack Support: Enterprises and cloud service providers can now use a DataCore SDS platform to centralize the provisioning and management of new or existing storage resources via standard OpenStack Cinder commands. Previously, organizations tasked with creating a cloud infrastructure with OpenStack were challenged to utilize already available storage investments or find new cost-effective storage that was OpenStack-compatible and yet able to deliver enterprise-class capabilities to power their cloud environments.
- Hyper-Converged Virtual Desktop Services: This release introduces new VDI services and deployment tools to automate the creation and management of stateful, highly-available virtual desktops. The resulting high-density VDI implementations are cost-effective and suited for organizations seeking to deploy desktops at a departmental level. The software uses DataCore’s high-performance caching and thin provisioning to diminish the dependency on physical storage. DataCore does not require expensive flash or disk subsystems to achieve needed performance levels; it optimizes industry-standard servers and DRAM, plus uses fewer, lower-priced internal disks in place of higher-priced external storage, to significantly lower the overall cost per virtual desktop.
- Universal Virtual Disk Deduplication and Compression Services: Virtual disks can now be deduplicated, compressed and scheduled in the background to reduce the space they occupy on disk. DataCore’s space-saving services apply universally across the infrastructure; it extends block-level deduplication and compression to any storage and any file system or hypervisor.
- Backup Integration Services, Added Veeam Support and Automation: DataCore works with third-party backup products to simplify end-to-end data protection and ensure rapid data recovery at a granular level. DataCore already supports products such as CommVault Simpana’s IntelliSnap technology and Microsoft Data Protection Manager, which use DataCore online snapshots to centralize backups for a wide range of applications, hypervisors, operating systems, and storage devices. This update provides a similar capability to trigger Veeam backups to use DataCore’s highly efficient snapshots to relieve the burden of using VM snapshots on hosts. Backups can now be scheduled and taken more frequently with minimal impact on applications, improving Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and resulting in greater productivity and speedier recovery.
- Console Services and Centralized Management for Distributed Groups: Organizations with virtual storage pools distributed across multiple locations can now manage the different DataCore server groups from a single user interface. Separate levels of control can be assigned to different administrators across a hierarchy of server groups making it possible to centrally manage, control and delegate responsibilities over widely distributed storage infrastructures with fewer people.
- Hyper-Converged and Popular-Use Case Deployment Services: With this update, DataCore continues to greatly simplify and automate how software can be installed, configured, and updated to meet different use cases and deployment scenarios. This latest release makes it easy to set up hyper-converged environments, scalable file systems over clusters, VDI configurations, mixed file /block storage and multi-node high-availability deployments running the software on either physical or on virtual platforms (VMs).
- Delivers a Centralized and Powerful SDS Platform to Manage Overall I/O Performance End-to-End DataCore: SANsymphony-V10 works infrastructure-wide across all types of storage (flash, disk, and cloud) to automate and optimize performance and resource allocation. The new release offers tools to profile, monitor, instrument, identify ‘hot spots’ and manage performance-impacting application workloads.New performance-enhancing additions included in PSP2 are:
- Performance Optimizations for Flash: Enhancements have been introduced that impact how DataCore cache performs read operations from flash-based and solid-state storage technologies. The net result is faster application response, lower overhead and better utilization of costly flash memory.
- Expanded Instrumentation and Metrics: The PSP2 release provides greater visibility to the I/O behavior of virtual and physical disks so users can accurately understand what is happening with storage resources. Updates include additional performance metrics for virtual disks, improved heat maps and performance trending analysis reports, and added support for S.M.A.R.T. alerts from physical storage to help IT administrators better isolate performance and disk problems. The new capabilities improve productivity and make it easier to manage larger-scale deployments while reducing the time and expense to troubleshoot root causes of application slowdowns.
- Production-Ready Random Write Accelerator (RWA): The previous update introduced this new innovation for experimental use under certain conditions; the experimental designation is now removed in PSP2. This capability converts high-latency random writes into storage-friendly sequential writes, yielding up to 30 times faster performance for the random-write-heavy workloads that frequently updates databases, ERP and OLTP systems. The result is SSD-like speed from lower-cost spinning disks and a reduction in the need for costly flash resources. This capability also helps optimize flash storage performance.
The gap between servers and storage continues to erode as servers become more powerful and more storage capable. In this new era of commoditized hardware, what matters is the software. DataCore's new release combines a rich set of enterprise-class storage services with an enduring software architecture designed to harness the continually improving cost curves and technology advances of the underlying hardware to close the gap. Numerous partnerships signed with leading global server vendors attest to this new trend of server vendors seeking to benefit by providing DataCore Software-Defined Storage with their platforms, including: Huawei, Cisco, Fujitsu, and Dell.
