News

posted on 07 February 2008 15:05

DataCore is going to announce a SANharmony product to provide integrated management of Network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) storage for VMware at VMWorld later this month.

Continuing its music-related naming convention, SANharmony extends DataCore’s Virtualisation II programme by integrating a new class of storage applications with the virtualisation layer - harmonizing storage with virtual servers and enabling DataCore services and IO performance acceleration to be applied to not only the SAN storage but to all storage in the network (i.e. enabling Microsoft NAS to benefit from DataCore’s performance and advanced storage capabilities).

The first new storage applications announced with SANharmony are DataCore’s thin provisioning and high-speed caching functions for NAS volumes.

DataCore will follow this announcement  with others that enable the underlying SAN and NAS storage to seamlessly integrate with Virtual Servers.

One tremendous benefit of VMware is the acceleration of integrated and easily manageable storage offerings. We are already seeing the integration of iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN storage, and a second integration point is to combine file and block storage under one offering.

The third integration point for storage suppliers is to be up in the front rank of VMware, and other virtual server, partners. To that end DataCore will be announcing the enhanced Virtual Infrastructure Foundation PLUS (VIF+) package, which now supports even greater capacity, delivers snapshot technology and offers Fibre Channel support together with advanced thin provisioning and iSCSI support.

Christian Hagen, Datacore’s VP Europe, said: "Virtualisation now represents the major paradigm shift in IT and storage. Storage is becoming increasingly a software topic and with DataCore it has become an application like any other. Our latest enhancements go one step further: they virtualise NAS and SAN storage on virtual servers. Storage server solutions running on virtual machines (VMs) shift the solution away from hardware-based storage solutions towards flexible, hardware-independent, software-based, storage solutions and infrastructures. VMworld Europe is a brilliant platform to inform users about this innovative IT concept."

Further announcements will include a range of new DataCore high availability and disaster recovery packages based on its SANmelody and SANsymphony platforms. Any of these products  can run on any physical or virtual machine of choice: Intel/AMD hardware servers or blades or on virtual machines from Microsoft, Oracle, Citrix, Sun, Virtual Iron and, of course, VMware virtual machines.

DataCore has also announced a starter SAN, running on VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, SUN, and Citrix XenServer virtualisation platforms, hardware servers and blades. This version of SANmelody comes bundled and ready-to-use.

Priced around £2,400 (per SAN server), the VM Starter SAN bundle includes auto-allocating, thin provisioning storage support, SANmotion data migration technology, high performance caching software, snapshots for fast disk backups, auto failover/failback data protection via synchronous network mirroring as well as remote site disaster recovery support through asynchronous IP mirror replication.

DataCore will start shipping SANharmony in Q2 2008.