News

DataCore Upgrades Software-Defined Storage, Hyper-Converged Solutions

• By David Ramel
• 05/27/2016

DataCore this week upgraded two of its enterprise offerings: the SANsymphony Software-Defined Storage (SDS) platform and the Hyper-converged Virtual SAN.

The upgrades leverage the company's Parallel I/O technology that speeds up virtual servers. That technology has been enhanced in the latest DataCore software release, Version 10 PSP5.

The upgrades feature: deeper hypervisor integration; certified VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) support; richer performance monitoring, charting and capacity planning tools; more granular Quality of Service (QoS) and access controls; and lower cost bulk storage options, the company said.

"DataCore Parallel I/O technology and application-adaptive software solutions exploit the full potential of servers and storage to solve data infrastructure challenges and elevate IT to focus on the applications and services that power business," the company said in a statement this week. "DataCore's solutions revolutionize the performance, cost-savings, and productivity gains that businesses can achieve from their servers and data storage -- delivering greater value, industry-best performance, availability and simplicity."

The SANsymphony offering, which virtualizes storage hardware, is used on standard x86 servers, providing one point of control of common storage services across all connected storage devices. It manages shared pools of storage from the different devices.

The Hyper-converged Virtual SAN, said to provide up to 10x performance gains with Parallel I/O and RAM caching, supports all major hypervisors, the company said, and can provide high availability with as few as two nodes, but can expand up to 64 nodes.

"While growing in popularity, it is well-known that in the real world, many hyper-converged systems are underpowered and can't meet high-end workload demands; plus they lack essential high-speed fibre channel connectivity, the backbone of database and tier-1 business applications," DataCore said. "In contrast, DataCore Parallel I/O takes hyper-converged performance to another level -- and its proven ability to support fibre channel at thousands of customer sites and lead the industry in fabric connectivity make DataCore an ideal enterprise solution."

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) analyst Jim Miller commented on the new upgrades coming with the latest software release. "EMA has previously awarded DataCore with top honors as Best Enterprise Solution for Software-Defined Storage and our research has shown that their most recent Parallel I/O optimizations significantly lower server and storage costs," Miller said. "They are raising the bar once again with this latest software release."