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SANsymphony-V10

Editorial Type: Review     Date: 07-2014    Views: 4606   





Enterprise storage virtualisation offers many advantages over proprietary hardware solutions including cost effectiveness, no vendor lock-in and excellent scalability

DataCore's SANsymphony-V software is a prime example and its latest version (10) delivers new Virtual SAN capabilities and features that make storage virtualisation really compelling.

The new features focus sharply on the highest possible performance by using Flash and hard disk storage. Normally restricted to high-end enterprise disk arrays you can monitor disk activity, migrate hot data to higher performance storage and work across a range of vendor devices. Storage clustering is massively enhanced supporting up to 32 nodes and scaling to more than 50M IOPS and 32PB of data. Synchronous mirroring supports Metro wide clusters of up to 100kms for N+1 redundant grids.

A smart deployment wizard simplifies the transformation of local disk and Flash-based storage on application servers into a resilient storage pool, using the Virtual SAN. It can also be shared across a cluster of server's avoiding the need for an external physical SAN. SANsymphony-V also integrates and unifies combinations of virtual and physical SANs. It can run on the server-side as a virtual SAN as well as running and managing physical SANs and related services.

At its foundation SANsymphony-V can use any storage device compatible with the Windows Server host hosting the DataCore software. Options include local hard disks, SSDs, DAS, SAN or FCoE. This version also supports high-speed 40/56 Gigabit Ethernet and 16Gbps Fibre Channel adapters.

Windows Server 2012 R2 installation was straightforward. From the management console you can launch a Virtual SAN for local storage, a high-availability SAN spanning local and networked storage systems as well as clustered block and file server configurations. Before allocating storage, port roles are set to determine whether they're serving storage or accessing the node's physical drives and mirroring across multiple nodes. Synchronous mirroring runs real time I/O replication over storage nodes so if one fails, the virtual disks are available to attached hosts and MPIO links provide end-to-end redundancy.

Once hosts are logged in to the storage node they are registered using the console. Disk pools group physical storage devices and each pool can contain a mix of disk types, makes, models and interfaces. During pool creation you select the number of required tiers to a maximum of 15 for each pool. Tier numbers denote disk performance so typically high throughput drives such as SAS or SSD would be first tier. Tier membership is easily changed and SANsymphony-V migrates hot data in or out, on the fly. The console Allocation View provides visibility of tiering in action and storage usage graphs. A data temperature scale indicates how hot it is and a heat map illustrates the distribution.

Storage profiles control tier migration for a virtual disk (VD). When assigning a Critical profile, all data remains in the top tier regardless of access frequency; a Normal profile migrates data blocks through the tiers based on usage.

Thin provisioning is applied by default and SANsymphony-V dynamically allocates disk blocks as required. It supports unlimited snapshots for point-in-time backups and any that can be presented to hosts as new VDs. Mirrored VDs were easy to create: select a pool on one server, assign a pool from a second and leave SANsymphony-V to get on with it. Enabling CDP (Continuous Data Protection) creates a VD history log allowing rollback to any time during the enabled period.

This latest version makes software-defined storage a reality for enterprises looking for an easier way of managing and provisioning their storage using multiple vendors. DataCore has dramatically improved scalability and data availability and the data tiering feature removes the guesswork when fine tuning storage performance.

Product: SANsymphony-V10
Supplier: DataCore Software
Tel: 0118 949 7024
Web site: www.datacore.com

Verdict:SANsymphony-V10 boasts a number of new features that make storage virtualisation compelling: data tiering and clustering, real-time I/O replication and perhaps most crucially the new Virtual SAN capabilities, all add up to an approach that facilitates scalable, manageable software-defined storage

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