storage virtualization

DataCore Introduces Advanced Site Recovery Software

July 13, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

DataCore, provider of storage virtualization solutions, has launched its Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) solution for virtual and physical IT infrastructures.

This new component of DataCore’s comprehensive business continuity portfolio enables businesses to embrace Distributed Disaster Recovery (D-DR) that allows organizations to cost-effectively spread disaster recovery (DR) responsibilities across several smaller sites. ASR builds on DataCore’s universal storage virtualization software to move IT operations from a central site to one or more distributed contingency locations – and back again. Additionally, the solution makes no distinction between physical and virtual servers, unifying their DR operations in a common, automated process. DataCore’s Advanced Site Recovery solution can be seen this week in booth #301 at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans.
Advance Site Recovery software is available today through DataCore ASR-certified implementation partners – starting at $2,000 per site.

Taking machines from one site and replicating them to another site before a calamity unfolds is not new. But buyer beware. Many other disaster recovery products are limiting in that they assume recovery, from one environment to an identical or very similar environment or they support only a subset of the infrastructure. Often physical servers are not supported or require a separate solution from applications and virtual servers. DataCore ASR enables users to execute site recovery operations in a way that is fundamentally different from existing solutions in the marketplace today by bringing the data center together into single solution.

ASR is a key component of DataCore’s comprehensive business continuity portfolio. It automates and radically simplifies how one or more, smaller, remote IT facilities take over workloads from a central site in the event of a disaster or scheduled outage. Rather than attempt to fully recreate the central datacenter at another major site, ASR can distribute responsibilities for keeping the business going among a few remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) based on business and operational capabilities. ASR also takes care of returning control of the workloads to the central IT site when the main IT center is deemed capable of accepting them.

DataCore ASR allows organizations to leverage readily available IT assets between different sites, to minimize or eliminate business disruptions and data loss attributed to planned and unforeseen site outages.

Advance Site Recovery software is available as of July 13, 2009 through DataCore ASR-certified implementation partners. The ASR software for DataCore’s storage virtualization starts at $2,000 per site.

Quest Buys MonoSphere

January 14, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Quest Software has acquired the technology assets of MonoSphere, a privately owned company headquartered in Redwood City, CA. MonoSphere is the creator of Storage Horizon storage capacity management software.

Quest has also hired a substantial number of the former MonoSphere employees.

Quest will continue to maintain, enhance, and support the Storage Horizon solution, enabling customers to dramatically increase utilization of storage infrastructure, resulting in significant reductions in storage capital spending.
Quest will also integrate Storage Horizon with a number of its existing products, expanding Quest’s leadership in providing complete solutions that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases, Windows infrastructure and virtual environments.

DataCore And Promark Set Up A Distribution Partnership

December 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

DataCore Software and Promark Technology today announced a new distribution relationship under which Promark Technology will distribute DataCore’s storage virtualization solutions in the United States.

DataCore storage virtualization software removes physical, geographic and device-specific restrictions of data storage equipment that frequently slow down, interrupt or endanger computer operations – making it practical for organizations large and small to get the fullest utilization, highest availability and fastest performance from their disk storage assets by consolidating and automating essential data protection measures and storage management practices.

Ideally suited for VMware and other virtual server customers, DataCore is unique in providing true high-availability, auto-failover/failback business continuity and DR solutions that are perfect for SMB customers, but perform to meet the needs of enterprise customers – at prices starting under $10,000.

DataCore Software is manufacturer-independent software that runs on any industry standard server or virtual server. It is certified on all the major virtual server platforms, including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, and supports both iSCSI and Fibre Channel connections. As a result, DataCore provides a persistent solution that survives hardware obsolescence and under DataCore’s unique “Carry-forward” Value Protection Program is fully upgradeable without penalty.

DataCore Goes After Eastern European Market, Partners With Prosper Intelligence

October 20, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

DataCore Software and Prosper Intelligence have announced a distribution agreement for Austria and Eastern Europe. Prosper will resell and support SANmelody and SANsymphony™as the SAN and virtual storage component of its virtualization portfolio. Prosper will integrate both SAN software solutions into its showcase “Virtualization Consolidation Academy” (VCA) lab in Vienna.

The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is an innovative knowledge transfer and competence center, which focuses on helping partners and customers evaluate and train and understand virtualization and consolidation technologies. With the agreement, Prosper can provide an end-to-end virtualization portfolio – Total Enterprise Virtualization – to its partner base with the addition of DataCore’s advanced storage virtualization, fault-tolerant SAN and disaster recovery solutions. In addition, DataCore obtains a key distribution partnership with the ability to support and resell into the emerging and growing Eastern European market.

Prosper currently supports a growing base of resellers in Austria and Eastern Europe, who are implementing virtualization and consolidation projects for business-critical applications, servers and data storage. With today’s agreement, DataCore’s storage virtualization technology complements the existing portfolio of desktop, server and application virtualization with a hardware-independent, flexible and cost effective storage solution. The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is seen as an independent review platform that can be used to evaluate, test, train and showcase virtualization solutions and technologies.

DataCore’s virtualization platforms improve the utilization and performance of disk storage, enable a new level of flexibility and hardware independence and reduce the overall cost of storage area networking. With SANmelody, DataCore provides a cost-effective, feature rich SAN solution that includes automated storage management, high availability, disaster recovery and thin provisioning. SANsymphony is the enterprise solution that enables Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and meets the advanced needs of larger organizations in terms of capacity, performance and scalability.

IBM Expands Storage Virtualization for SMBs

October 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IBM today announced its storage virtualization software will be packaged for small and medium sized (SMB) businesses, one of the faster growing parts of the storage marketplace.

The IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software is designed to help improve storage utilization rates, energy efficiency, administrator productivity, availability, and scalability of critical applications. It can help significantly improve the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information.

The new IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) Entry Edition helps SMBs manage that growth and improve the return on their storage investments while also helping simplify operations. SVC Entry Edition is built on more affordable hardware intended specifically to run the new SVC Entry Edition software which delivers the same rich functional capabilities as the regular SVC software. As a result, IBM Business Partners already familiar with SVC will immediately be ready to support clients using SVC Entry Edition. SVC Entry Edition is licensed by the number of disk drives virtualized rather than by terabyte to make it more accessible and affordable. With this new type of licensing, IBM Business Partners can easily package new disk storage and SVC together to deliver complete storage solutions to clients.

Since its introduction in 2003, IBM has shipped over 14,000 SVC engines running in more than 4,600 SVC systems. Complementing the announcement today of SVC Entry Edition, IBM is announcing it has accomplished a new world record SPC disk-based benchmark that demonstrates the extraordinary scalability of SVC and continues IBM’s leadership in storage virtualization with the fastest system tested in the industry. The new benchmark not only beats the previous SVC measurement but does so with IBM’s new Space-Efficient Virtual Disk thin provisioning technology enabled.(2) The new SPC-1 benchmark of SVC running with IBM DS4700 disk supports 274,997.58 SPC-1 IOPS(TM) per second.

IBM is also announcing the interoperability of SVC with the new IBM XIV Storage System, the IBM System Storage DS5000 and the IBM System z/VSE. New interoperability support for SVC also includes Microsoft Hyper-V, HDS Universal Storage Platform and HP XP20000/XP24000.

SVC Entry Edition is planned to be generally available on November 21.

Storage Company Nexsan Releases Assureon 6.0

October 8, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Nexsan on Tuesday debuted a new version of its archiving system, Assureon 6.0, which builds in scalability and security features, such as the ability to separate archiving between users.

The updated Assureon software includes Nexsan’s AutoMaid green technology, which is intended to reduce power consumption in a hosted datacentre. The Assureon system itself consists of disk storage, archiving software and servers in a single rack.

Nexsan uses its own method of storing data, called Maid (Massive Arrays of Idle Disks), which exploits the fact most disk arrays can be almost constantly rotating and therefore using energy. Maid uses smaller disks, but more of them, so that at any one time most of the disks are idle. According to Nexsan, the method reduces energy consumption overall.

Nexsan said Assureon 6.0 also features an innovative content-addressable storage (CAS) capability, which allows customers to virtualise a system into “an essentially unlimited number of physically secure archives”.

The Assureon system competes with iSCSI storage area network packages from companies such as EqualLogic PS 5000 and LeftHand Networks. Nexsan has not yet provided a price for Assureon 6.0.