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TechNote:
Storage Virtualization
Automated Storage Provisioning
Automated provisioning and storage management, powered by DataCore Software's SANsymphony™ and SANmelody™ products, offers the ability to consolidate and manage any heterogeneous collection of storage resources in a hardware and application-independent fashion.
larger imagePooled Storage Capacity
Storage capacity is viewed as one or more pools that can be allocated to any storage client using almost any operating system on a Storage Area Network. Because allocation is from a pool, capacity utilization efficiencies can be improved by up to 50%. Even high-end proprietary storage elements (EMC, IBM, Hitachi etc) can be combined in a single pool, as a tiered storage hierarchy. With lower cost storage elements making use of arrays based on Serial ATA drives different classes of storage to be allocated according to the needs of the application,
Drag-and-Drop Storage Allocations
Drag-and-drop storage capacity allocations to multiple application servers connected over a mix of Fibre-Channel (FC) or IP networks makes it simple to address storage growth, changes, and failures without disturbing the host hardware. The capability of using iSCSI along with FC also means that different classes of applications can be addressed with an appropriate host connection, that is independent of the actual storage hardware connection.
Server deployment is independent of storage purchases. This "Open Systems" approach protects legacy investments but frees the user from vendor lock-in. Proprietary storage needs to be configured only once and then used as a general pool for storage provisioning. The cost savings in proprietary storage hardware maintenance calls alone can be a substantial contributor to the ROI for implementing an automated provisioning capability.
Just-in-Time Storage Provisioning
The use of the DataCore’s Network Managed Volumes (NMV’s) option allows dynamic, just-in-time provisioning of storage capacity to host devices. Physical storage capacity is automatically and proportionately allocated exactly according to real-time usage needs. A “perfect distribution” of capacity is maintained with no inaccessible islands of unused capacity. Additional physical capacity can be installed as it becomes necessary without any interruption of operations.
High-Availability Mirroring, Locally or Remotely
SANsymphony and SANmelody provide the ability to replicate or mirror storage to another site either synchronously over Fibre-Channel, or asynchronously over a TCP/IP link, as part of a high-availability architecture or disaster recovery plan. Unlike proprietary mirroring schemes that are tied to hardware peers, the DataCore’s mirroring can be between dissimilar storage hardware, and the modest and sensible licensing costs are per-site, rather than per-device. See the InfraStor Tech Note on Asynchronous Mirroring for more information.
Snapshot Automation
Real-time snapshot automation enables LAN-free backup from a centralized backup server, eliminating the impact of backup traffic on host devices, and reducing the costs of backup software licenses. Repetitive snapshots as a part of a business continuance architecture can be configured to reduce the impact of failures that occur between formal backup periods.
Auto-Discovery on the SAN
SANsymphony and SANmelody discover prospective storage clients, storage devices, and interconnecting switches, automatically giving the IT staff a complete live picture of their storage network. The software assigns descriptive names to these assets. The active displays help isolate cabling and other hardware issues reported to the centralized alarm console and event manager.
Unsurpassed Performance on Commodity Hardware
SANsymphony and SANmelody use a sophisticated caching algorithm coupled with a N+1 scalable architecture to provide unsurpassed storage performance on commodity storage hardware.
- In a recent benchmark of storage performance audited by the Evaluator Group, transaction rates as high as 400,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations per second) and data throughputs of as much as 2.1 GB/s were sustained. This represents 2 to 10 times the performance of any comparably configured high-end storage subsystem.
- In another independently conducted, SPC-1 performance benchmark, DataCore’s architecture demonstrated a standardized Cost per SPC-1 IOPS that is 1/2 the cost of the lowest priced mid-range storage subsystem, and 1/3rd to 1/5th the cost of high-end proprietary arrays.
Learn More:
InfraStor Storage Solutions: Virtualized Storage
Key Point Summary
Automated Storage Provisioning:
- Provides enterprise-wide “just-in-time” block-level storage provisioning from a single console.
- Allows complete freedom from vendor lock-in. Capacity from any mix of storage arrays from any vendor can be provisioned to any application on almost any OS platform.
- Enables storage and server resources to be independently scaled with zero downtime.
- Improves overall storage utilization efficiencies by up to 50%. Uses Network Managed Volumes to dynamically maintain a “perfect distribution” of capacity according to current data requirements.
- Provides High-Availability redundant access to pooled storage resources with “N+1” scalability.
- Enables mirroring between dissimilar storage hardware.
- Enables Asynchronous Mirroring and Replication of storage resources to remote sites over IP.
- Provides Snapshot functions for testing, real-time LAN-free backup, and hot system replication.
- Accommodates mixed Fibre-Channel and TCP/IP (iSCSI) infrastructures.
- Enables the re-purposing of legacy storage investments.
- Eliminates the need for reconfiguring basic storage arrays for additional storage clients.
- Achieves unsurpassed performance using commodity hardware
