1. Virtualizing business-critical applications
without hesitation using the DataCore™
SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor
By James E. Bagley
Senior Analyst
Deni Connor
Founding Analyst
Storage Strategies NOW
October 2012
he virtualization and consolidation of business-critical applications is a high priority for IT operations in
organizations of all sizes. But the owners of these applications often balk at virtualization because of a set
of unknowns that surround the loss of dedicated server hardware. The truth is that applications perform
differently in a virtualized environment as opposed to dedicated server hardware. Virtualization causes
contention for shared storage resources and the performance of formerly well-behaved applications can
become unpredictable. When performance becomes erratic and response times suffer, users grumble and
application owners want their physical machines back. Storage equipment outages for routine maintenance,
upgrades and expansion compound the problem because many virtual machines rely on those same resources.
The workarounds
Storage ‘plumbing’ is often blamed for the lack of performance, only to undergo costly overhauls with no
guarantees. Some companies resort to short-stroking hard disk drives (HDDs) and end up squandering
precious capacity in search of access speed. Others try striping more disk spindles in parallel to increase
throughput at the expense of floor space and energy consumption. Expensive flash memories are getting tossed
into servers as caches to make up for high latency mechanical disks. And more solid state drives (SSDs) are
substituted for HDDs on arrays to speed up reads, with the undesirable consequences of delaying writes,
compromising reliability and significantly raising the price of storage. The applications themselves can be
modified as a last resort, although the effects are short lived when the underlying hardware configuration
changes. All of these attempts increase the chance of outages because more gear is involved in supporting the
programs. Finally, despite the extensive plumbing rework, the risk of a pricey and disappointing outcome
remains.
The solution is software – the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor
Just like a virtualization system’s hypervisor controls multiple and disparate virtual machines, the
DataCore storage hypervisor delivers robust shared storage services from multiple and disparate storage
systems by managing system-wide resources. SANsymphony-V customers report up to five times throughput
improvement of their critical production workloads including Oracle, SAP, SQL Server, Exchange and
SharePoint. At the same time, they cite impressive 99.999% availability.
T

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2
Infrastructure-wide adaptive caching & auto-tiering – Performance accelerators
The DataCore storage hypervisor applies separate server resources in conjunction with system-wide
storage, rather than depend on a given server’s operating system to manage local storage devices in isolation.
The result is improved and deterministic performance for all applications. The storage hypervisor caches disk
requests infrastructure-wide with proven algorithms. These include write coalescing and read ahead, speeding
up read and write requests across the wider scope of resources. SANsymphony-V can manage very large
working sets for virtualized production applications in its large distributed caches without incurring costly
delays for accessing slower storage media.
Tiered storage pools are created from diverse disk assets and automatically assigned to workloads based
on priorities. The policies dynamically migrate disk blocks across PCIe-based flash memories, solid state
drives, high RPM hard drives, and lower speed, high capacity drives from potentially different vendors. The
pools may also encompass off-premises private cloud storage for low-cost archive and disaster recovery.
Automatic tiering of the storage pools using heat maps in conjunction with auto-tuning within tiers provides
load balancing among the available resources, circumventing bottlenecks.
With this overall infrastructure knowledge, the storage hypervisor synchronously mirrors data between
fault domains, allowing separate storage facilities split over a metropolitan area to appear logically as one
location. These hot-hot sites eliminate single points of failure while avoiding disruption due to periodic
maintenance.
Storage virtualization complements server virtualization

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3
Return on investment behind storage virtualization
Unlike the expensive, complex and risky modifications to the infrastructure’s plumbing, the
implementation of the DataCore storage hypervisor has immediate benefits without buying a single piece of
hardware. Application owners will quickly benefit from the SANsymphony-V implementation in improved
response times and remarkably higher throughput. Critical production applications whether virtualized or not
will perform predictably, and complete processing operations quicker. Because existing infrastructure is
efficiently utilized, even repurposed, costly additions to hardware infrastructure can be reduced and deferred.
Future needs can be anticipated using the rich set of SANsymphony-V instrumentation and reporting tools.
Stretch mirroring of data (and virtual machines) prevents downtime even when storage systems go out of
service for any reason. Since storage resources can be managed across the entire infrastructure, the
coordination of expansions, migrations, new applications and upgrades is greatly simplified. Additional
benefits accrue to organizations whose disk farms span multiple locations. Data integrity is maintained via the
metro-wide mirroring, while the caching algorithms span the infrastructure to minimize the latency between
multiple sites. Safeguards against regional outages and disasters are provided by asynchronous remote
replication to distant sites, without slowing down applications. The sophisticated, yet easy to use management
tools provide mission-critical applications owners with the assurance that the systems will operate reliably and
economically in distributed situations, and their data is well protected.
Our Take
DataCore practically invented the concept of storage virtualization and has the years of experience in the
field across thousands of customers and multiple generations of its product to claim a leadership position in
the space now known as software-defined storage infrastructure. With SANsymphony-V R9, this experience is
embodied in the comprehensive functionality and scalability of the product. The benefits it yields with regards
to performance and availability are even more pronounced in scenarios where business-critical (Tier 1)
applications must be virtualized and consolidated.
Regardless of server virtualization hypervisor (VMware, Hyper-V, etc.), operating system (Windows, Linux
or Unix), storage system manufacturer or switching fabric, application owners will be well-served by the
deployment of SANsymphony-V. The management of heterogeneous and disparate devices now critical to
achieve balanced, cost-effective transactional (e.g., OLTP) and analytical processing (OLAP) is no longer a
problem regardless of who supplied the hardware or which new technology must be leveraged. By creating a
single management capability for the entire infrastructure, applications run more reliably, and disruption from
upgrades and migrations can be minimized or eliminated altogether. We expect DataCore to maintain its
industry-leading position in the storage hypervisor space.
Information on SANsymphony-V can be found here: http://www.datacore.com/Solutions/Applications.aspx
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