| | Details |
| Vendor | DataCore Software Corporation |
| Product Type | Storage Virtualization Software |
| Market Space | Small, medium and large IT environments |
| Product | SANsymphony™-V Storage Virtualization Software |
| Description | SANsymphony-V software solves difficult storage-related challenges introduced by server and desktop virtualization, cloud computing and more general expansion, business continuity, and disaster recovery initiatives. It forms an active, transparent virtualization layer across disk storage devices to maximize the availability, performance and utilization of datacenters large and small. |
| Announced | January 31, 2011 |
| Current version / Release date | Release 8.1, August, 2011 |
| Updates | Available for download for customers under annual maintenance contract |
| Packaging | Supplied as a downloadable CD image with context sensitive Help files |
| Licensed By | Disk capacity under management, per node, some seperately-priced optional features |
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| SUPPORTED ENVIRONMENTS | |
| Main Features | Device-independent virtual disk pooling, synchronous mirroring (HA), high-speed caching, asynchronous remote replication, thin provisioning, auto-tiering, online snapshots, non-disruptive disk migration, continuous data protection (CDP)
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| Host Connectivity | Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) via FCoE switches
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| Access Type | Block disk I/O over a physical or virtual SAN. File system access is provided via NFS/CIFS protocols from the underlying Windows Server operating system. The two access methods may be combined to meet high availability, unified storage (SAN/NAS) requirements.
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| Host Environments Supported | Computer systems running standard Windows operating systems including (Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008, Hyper-V, Windows XP, Windows 7), UNIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, RedHat Linus, Suse Linux, Apple MacOs, VMware ESX / vSphere, Citrix XenServer, |
| Disks Supported (back-end) | Any internal drives, external drives, external disk arrays, JBODs, Solid State Disks (SSD), and intelligent storage system supported on Windows Server 2008 may be attached to the DataCore node(s). They may be direct-attached or SAN-connected. |
| Disk Interfaces Supported (back-end) | Any disk interfaces supported by Windows Server 2008 including SAS, SATA, USB, FireWire, iSCSI, Fibre Channel. |
| SAN Switches Supported | All standard iSCSI and Fibre Channel switches are supported |
| Network Interfaces | Standard IP network interfaces for internode communications, console access, and asynchronous remote replication between nodes. |
| PLATFORM | |
| Operating Platform | SANsymphony-V is installed on standard Windows Server 2008 R2 platforms, which then become high-performance Storage Virtualization nodes. These may be physical or virtual servers.
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| Operating System Requirements | Win 2008 R2 SP1 with .Net 4.0 |
| Processor | Standard Intel/AMD x86-64 CPUs |
| Memory Required (min) | 4 GB RAM. |
| Disk Cache | Up to 1 TB of processor memory (RAM) per node may be used as disk cache |
| Disk Capacity | Model dependent; greater than 128 TBs per node max |
| Max Nodes in a group (region) | 2 |
| PERFORMANCE | |
| IOPS/ node | Dependent on configuration of underlying hardware platform. |
| Bandwidth/node | Dependent on configuration of underlying hardware platform. |
| Max # of Virtual Volumes | There could be limitation on number of Virtual Volumes created on each SANsymphony-V node, but the limitation will be defined by size of each Virtual Disk and performance requirements per SANsymphony-V Node.
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| Min size (GB) of virtual volume | 0.001 GB |
| Max size (GB) of virtual volume | 1 Petabyte = 1024 TBs |
| Max # of Physical Volumes | The max number of Physical Volumes is dependent on the Storage Sub-System Hardware |
| Physical Volumes (max size) | 1 Petabyte |
Host Initiators
(max #) | A single SANsymphony-V node could contain multiple (depending on number of slots on the motherboard) multi-port FC HBAs or iSCSI NICs that would be assigned to a number of hosts. That would be the only limitation within a single node. |
Snapshots
Incremental & Full clones | SANsymphony-V supports Instant Point-in-Time Snapshots along with Full Copy clones. You may periodically update snapshots to a later point in time with just the changed blocks that transpired after the last snapshot. You may also use snapshots to restore the source volume via the Source Update option. Snapshots are readable and writeable. SANsymphony-V uses copy-on-first-write technology as well as thin provisioning to significantly reduce the space taken up by incremental snapshots. The snapshot is available immediately upon request and may be triggered by VSS-compatible applications.
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| RAID Levels | SANsymphony-V supports software mirroring and striping across physical disks behind each DataCore node. It can also offload RAID protection to back-end RAID subsystems. |
Synchronous replication
(Inter-node Mirroring) | SANsymphony-V synchronously mirrors virtual disks in lock step across two DataCore nodes. Separations up to 100 kilometers are typically achieved using dedicated high-bandwidth optical routes across Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs). Longer distances may be achieved for more latency-tolerant use cases. Diversely routed redundant mirror connections between nodes ensure no single point of failure.
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| Asynchronous Remote Replication | SANsymphony-V supports Asynchronous Remote Replication over conventional LANs and WANs using standard TCP/IP protocols. It automatically compresses transmissions to reduce bandwidth requirements. Secure, encrypted connections such as VPNs and trunked or aggregated multi-link circuits can be used to enhance the privacy and speed of inter-site transmissions. Disaster recovery sites may be initialized via network connections or by cloning virtual disks to transportable media at the primary site and shipping them to the remote destination.
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| Multi-pathing Support (Linux) | SANsymphony-V supports Multi path drivers for different Linux versions and different OS types. |
| Multi-pathing Support (Windows) | Supported. DataCore MPIO supports Auto failover and Auto Failback between primary and alternate path. It also support failover and failback between FC and iSCSI inside a single server. |
| Multi-pathing Support (VMware) | Supported. SANsymphony-V supports different versions of VMware ESX. |
| Max # of SAN Ports Consumed | That depends on number of SANsymphony-V Nodes within the SAN island. |
| Fabric Zoning considerations | SANsymphony-V requires two fabric zones, Storage Zone and Client Zone. If there are different switches used for storage and client, then there are no zoning required on any of the switches. |
| Zones Per Host | Since DataCore does not use LUN Masking technique, all hosts could co-exist in a single zone. But as a best practice policy, DataCore recommends creating a zone for every type of OS to separate Windows servers from Linux and other OS |
| High Availability Configuration |
| Load Balancing | Explicit load balancing is achieved by spreading virtual disks across multiple ports. Multiple back-end channels to LUNs within a device are supported. If one back-end channel fails then all LUN I/O activity will continue on the remaining healthy back-end channel/channels. |
| Non-disruptive upgrades | Yes. Non-stop data accessibility is configurable with paired redundant SANsymphony-V nodes that circumvent any single point of failure. Such innovative and cost-sensitive architecture ensures that service level obligations continue to be met in spite of component failures. Essentially, the I/O responsibilities associated with an outage, scheduled or unexpected, are distributed in real-time among the remaining storage resources being managed by SANsymphony-V. Hosts automatically exploit alternate paths to the other running SANsymphony-V node to maintain end-to-end high availability |
| Online Disk Expansion | Yes. Additional disks can be added to a SANsymphony-V node to expand the configuration on line without any down time. Also, when using thin provisioned disks, if more storage is needed, you can increase the pool size, without affecting any host or any Virtual disks presented to those hosts. |
| LUN Security / Masking | SANsymphony-V does not use LUN Masking technology. All FC or iSCSI ports connected to a node are discovered automatically. Once an FC port WWN or iSCSI IQN are discovered, the SANsymphony-V node will serve up a Virtual disk to that port. Hosts may only access virtual disks specifically assigned to them over specific ports |
| Virtual / Physical Correlation (Troubleshooting) | Within SANsymphony-V, each Virtual disk could be created from multiple physical resources (storage). SANsymphony-V provides detailed information about which physical pool the Virtual disk is created from and which ports are used to present the Virtual disks to the hosts. |
Automated Storage Tiering
| Sub-LUN migration: Dynamically promotes groups of most frequently accessed disk blocks (chunks) to fastest class of storage and demotes infrequently accessed chunks to lowest cost, slower tiers. Administrator can set tier preferences and override migration for special circumstances. Up to 15 tiers can be defined to distinguish between devices having different price/performance/capacity characteristics.
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| Thin Provisioning | Thin Provisioning– It’s a proven technology that almost every customer utilizes and enjoys. It takes the guess work out of how much disk space to allocate to an application. Configure up to 1 PB virtual disks and SANsymphony-V takes care of allocating actual disk space as the demand for physical space increases from the running application. |
High-speed Caching | I/O Performance: SANsymphony-V converts the memory inside each server that it has been installed on (SANsymphony-V node) into a storage Cache. Advanced caching techniques inherent in SANsymphony-V’s design accelerate the response time of concurrent reads and writes from multiple application servers to virtual disks on the storage area network. The performance enhancements come inexpensively, exploiting the low-cost memory of the commercial processor platforms on which SANsymphony-V runs. SANsymphony-V’s cache is closely analogous to that found in modern hi-end storage subsystems. However, it operates across multiple storage devices.
It resides between the operating system on the application server and the physical storage. Like cache found on storage subsystems it provides a variety of caching services noted below:
• Read-ahead: When a request for a block is satisfied, SANsymphony-V will automatically pre-fetch adjacent blocks into its cache on the principal that if “block X” is required, “blocks X+1 and X+2” will probably be requested shortly afterwards.
• Write-behind: Unless specifically told not to cache writes, SANsymphony-V will respond with “I/O complete” when a request is cached. It will then flush the cached request to disk when convenient.
• Write-coalescing: One of the reasons that writes are not normally flushed immediately to the disk is to allow SANsymphony-V to better organize the sequence of writes and to concatenate writes from adjacent blocks into a single operation.
SANsymphony-V’s caching acceleration applies to all multi-vendor storage devices configured throughout a Storage Area Network. The caching strategies implemented by SANsymphony-V have been thoroughly tested and proven effective on generation after generation of hardware based storage controllers
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