In the current and wide storage market, where access to data is faster and faster to satisfy applications demanding more and more data, vendors are mainly divided in Hardware and Software.
Among the second ones, a Company dealing since 1998 with data abstraction from the underlying storage harwdare is DataCore Software.
The Company will explain its solutions on September during Tech Field Day 15, where I’m lucky enough to join the delegates that attend the event. This presentation will be also live at the same link.
Today, its offer is based on 2 products:
- SANsymphony-V
- Hyper-converged Virtual SAN
While the second is actually an Hyper-converged solution, the first one is probably the one that performs the best results in an enterprise environment.
SANsymphony-V can manage all the current standards (DA, SAN, and Cloud), is storage-agnostic, is also hypervisor-agnosticIn the SPC-1 test (Storage Performance Council – an independent organization performing benchmarks on storage devices – you can find the specific and complete report here), classified 1° on response with 100% load: 32 ms.
Let’s have a look at 3 usual scenarios
- traditional: storage separated from computing – usually in large enterprises where storage is already in place
- converged: scale-up storage & consolidation model
- hyperconverged : high level of consolidation
As we can see on the image, there are 3 main components in the storage presentation
- storage residing in a datacore disk pool
- virtual disk created from the disk pool
- host servers virtualizing disks for every application
A centralized GUI manages the whole organization regardless of the number of nodes.
I had a look and I found it quite clear and intuitive.
One of the strenght points of this solution is that 2 is the minimum number of nodes needed.
SANSymphony resides in the middle of the virtual infrastructure, directly on the I/O path (Parallel I/O technology) between applications and the undelying storage, regardless of the vendor.
I have to say that many of the features offered are already present in the market from other competitors, but none of them is applied in a universally format compatibility, allowing aggregation of many vendors of storage, everyone adopting that features in the very same way of the other ones.
Definition of different storages can be set by the system or manually according to performances, assigning one of the 15 “Tiers” – data will move towards the higher tier using availability and performance parameters, automating the transition from hot to cold down to archiving data in a quite granular way.
An additional performance optimization is made by using nodes’ RAM for the high frequently accessed data, much faster than any SSD or Flash disk.
Almost 2 decades of life of the Company and the objective and verified performances of its solutions make Datacore Software one of the best support for accelerating data access. And maybe today the real challenge is nomore data availability (considered as granted), but quick data access. The faster solution will win…
