Welcome to The Virtual Viewpoint: Storage Virtualization Blog

This week DataCore Software’s Third Annual State of Virtualization Survey  findings were published; 477 IT professionals from a broad range of industries participated in the survey conducted at the end of March 2013. 

What was surprising?

Surprisingly, nearly one in three respondents said they are still avoiding virtualization projects altogether because the related storage concerns and costs are too high.

 

Despite the incredible attention the industry is placing on solid state technologies and Cloud storage, there are major issues impacting wider adoption:

 

• Integration difficulties associated with Flash memory and solid state disks (SSDs) rank high among the factors discouraging organizations from applying these fast technologies to their most latency-sensitive virtualized business workloads and desktop virtualization (VDI) programs.
• One in two respondents said they are not planning to use Flash/SSD for their virtualization projects.
• When asked about what classes of storage they are using across their environments, nearly six ...

-George Teixeira, CEO & President, DataCore Software

What does “software-defined” really mean?

Beware of Storage Hardware Vendors’ Claims That They Are “Software-defined”
It has become “it’s about the software, dummy” obvious. But watch what the sales pitches claim. You’ll see storage hardware heavyweights leap for the “we are really software” bandwagon, claiming that they are “software-defined storage,” hoping to slow the wheels of progress through their marketing talk. But, it’s the same old song they sing every year. They want you to ignore the realities driving today’s data centers and diverse IT infrastructures – they want you to not change from your past buying practices – they want you to buy more hardware! They want you to forget that the term “software-defined” is being applied selectively to what runs only on their storage hardware platforms and that when you buy their feature set it will not work across other components ...

DataCore Software is being used by 1000's of companies and organizations around the globe. In this post we will showcase 3 companies that are realizing the benefits of the software-defined data center and simultaneously improving the performance of their Tier-1, mission-critical business applications. DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor boosts the speed, throughput and availability of their virtualized, I/O intensive Tier-1 applications like Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange, as well as SAP, Oracle and others. These and many more customers report two to five times faster application performance and the achievement of better than 99.999 percent uptime after virtualizing their existing storage with SANsymphony-V.

Three Real World Use Cases:

San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital: 500 Percent Improvement in Microsoft SQL Database Performance; Better Response Times Enable More Precise Treatment and Care

Download full customer presentation:  http://www.datacore.com/San-Gorgonio-Memorial-Hospital

San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital in Banning, California ...

By: Manish Sharma, General Manager & Vice President for APAC

DataCore has nearly 10,000 customer deployments ranging across Geographies, Verticals and a wide cross section of customers including the largest Government and Enterprise Organizations to medium sized companies. Therefore, I was very eager to learn more about our technology and use cases and meet one of the Company’s Founders, CTO Roni Putra who was in Malaysia and crossed over the straits to visit customers and partners in Singapore earlier this year. At the time, I had only a couple of months in my new role and I was eager to learn as much as possible from his short visit. Below are a few of the key questions that I addressed to Roni:

Manish (MS): Roni, what is the main value that DataCore provides to our customers?
Roni Putra (RP): We designed DataCore SANsymphony-V to provide powerful storage features that manage, ...

Yesterday at SNW Spring 2013 in Orlando, there was a packed house attending the Storage Hypervisor panel session moderated by Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

The event was lively and many attendee questions were answered in this educational and informative session.

The SNW attendees were pleased to learn how far the technology has come and how it has moved into the mainstream, being proven within tens of thousands of customers who have already deployed storage hypervisors to achieve dramatic economic and productivity benefits.

While the discussion got spirited at times, it was clear that all the panelist were passionate that the time for 'Software-defined Storage' versus 'Hardware-defined' has arrived.

Check out the post: "Beware Storage Hardware Vendors’ Claims for Virtualization and Software-Defined Storage; Hardware-defined = Over Provisioning and Oversizing"

The handpicked panel of experts, industry pioneers included executives from VMware, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and of course DataCore Software.

The SNW session - “Analyst Perspective: The ...

Carla Arend, Program Director Information Management and Storage Software at IDC on IDC latest findings on storage priorities, Cloud and virtualization and discusses the role of storage virtualization in investment protection and how it can avoid the classic ‘Rip and Replace’ approach to storage investments by integrating and getting more utilization from existing storage.

View Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jkdwGoeTWk

IT departments that do not enthusiastically embrace storage virtualization are essentially wasting money.
By Mark Peters, ESG Senior Storage Analyst

At a recent industry conference, a senior manager from a very sizeable IT organization took me to one side to ask -- quietly! -- whether I thought thin provisioning "is okay? It safe to try?" Really? Maybe you're surprised -- but I can tell you that every time we research such tools at ESG we are amazed at how far the adoption (perhaps I should say "active use") is behind what operational and financial logic would seem to dictate.

Read the full article at: URL: http://www.informationweek.com/harvest-the-benefits-of-storage-virtuali/240151123

Highlights:
Harvesting The Benefits of Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization offers benefits to the storage infrastructure that are similar to those that server virtualization delivers on the compute side. In other words, storage virtualization is breaking the mold so that the true value of data ...

Does your business have a need to speed up response times and provide continuous availability for your critical applications? Core business applications like Oracle, SAP, SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint often perform poorly when virtualized. More often than not the root cause is data I/O bottlenecks. If you are looking at solid-state memory technologies as your answer, then register today for a 30-minute webinar hosted by DataCore Software and Fusion-io.

At the beginning of the year, George Teixeira –our president and CEO– shared his thoughts on how 2013 would become the year of software-defined storage and pointed out five major trends in the market. One of the trends is that Tier 1 applications will go virtual and performance is critical. Another trend is that SSD flash technologies will be used everywhere; storage is not just disk drives.

Keeping these trends in mind, there are two top issues reported by customers ...

DataCore Software Corp. has in the past few weeks showcased the latest advances in its SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor and introduced the DataCore VDS (Virtual Desktop Server) software platform to European solution providers in search of simple, affordable VDI solutions to target SMBs.

Showcases SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor Advances
DataCore presented its latest SANsymphony-V performance acceleration and auto-tiering enhancements, more powerful CDP capabilities, greater scalability, support for Windows Server 2012 and optimized integration of flash-based storage to speed up mission-critical tier-1 applications. for more information, please check out the latest: What's New in SANsymphony-V R9 Download PDF

Introduces New Software Product line: The DataCore VDS - The Virtual Desktop Server
DataCore VDS is designed to cost-effectively deploy and serve virtual desktops. Its a VDI application-specific use case that applies DataCore's architectural advantages to make it practical to deploy persistent 'stateful' virtual desktops at lower cost with performance.

 

To review the latest DataCore ...

Original Article from: Database Trends and Applications

DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization software, has made enhancements to its SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor. The new capabilities are intended to support customers who are facing high data growth, as well as the need to enable faster response times and provide continuous availability for Tier 1 business-critical applications.

“This is all about customers who are virtualizing their large database systems – whether it is Oracle RAC, SAP, or SQL Server – that class of applications,” Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing at DataCore, tells 5 Minute Briefing. According to Gonzalez, often when these organizations virtualize their applications they run into some unexpected performance degradation. "Much of what we are doing in this release of the SANsymphony-V goes right at those issues.”

Improving scalability, DataCore gives customers the ability to choose and define cost-effective nodes, and with the enhanced SANsymphony-V, the maximum ...