DataCore virtualises NAS & SAN storage

DataCore Software has celebrated its ten-year anniversary by announcing a number of new storage virtualisation offerings ready to run on VMware virtual machines.

The company highlighted SANharmony, which the company said is the first virtualisation platform integrating management of both NAS and SAN storage. In addition, DataCore announced the enhanced Virtual Infrastructure Foundation PLUS (VIF+) package, which now supports greater capacity, delivers snapshot technology and offers fibre channel support together with thin provisioning and iSCSI support.

Further announcements included a range of high-availability and disaster recovery solutions based on the company's SANmelody and SANsymphony platforms. The new solutions can run on any physical or virtual machine: Intel/AMD hardware servers or blades, or on virtual machines from Microsoft, Oracle, Citrix, Sun, Virtual Iron and VMware VMs.

Virtualisation is still evolving. The technology that lets one computer do the job of multiple computers by sharing the resources of a single computer is used by corporate users in growing numbers for testing and development and simple server consolidation. However, virtual machine software is moving beyond test and development and production consolidation to high availability and disaster recovery. These new use cases will drive future growth and adoption for the technology.

SANharmony extends DataCore's Virtualisation II programme by integrating a new class of storage applications with the virtualisation layer, harmonising storage with virtual servers and enabling DataCore services and I/O performance acceleration to be applied to all storage on the network. The first new storage applications announced with SANharmony are DataCore's thin provisioning and high-speed caching functions for NAS volumes.

The new and improved Virtual Infrastructure Foundation (VIF) package will be marketed and sold as Virtual Infrastructure Foundation PLUS (VIF+). Similar to the original VIF, VIF+ includes thin provisioning, iSCSI support, SANmotion data migration technology and performance caching. However, instead of supporting 3TBs, VIF+ supports 4TBs. The package sells for under £1,500.

At the entry level, VM Starter SAN runs on VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and Citrix XenServer virtualisation platforms, hardware servers and blades. Priced at £2,400 (per SAN server), the VM Starter SAN bundle includes auto-allocating thin provisioning storage support, SANmotion data migration technology, 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 said VM Starter SAN provides the simplest and most affordable way to realise the cost savings and productivity benefits of a virtual SAN.

"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," commented Christian Hagen, European VP. "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."

DataCore will start shipping SANharmony in Q2 2008.