Virtualizing business-critical applications without hesitation using the DataCore™ SANsymphony™-V storage hypervisor

By James E. Bagley Senior Analyst Deni Connor Founding Analyst Storage Strategies NOW October 2012

he virtualization and consolidation of business-critical applications is a high priority for IT operations in organizations of all sizes. But the owners of these applications often balk at virtualization because of a set of unknowns that surround the loss of dedicated server hardware. The truth is that applications perform

differently in a virtualized environment as opposed to dedicated server hardware. Virtualization causes contention for shared storage resources and the performance of formerly well-behaved applications can become unpredictable. When performance becomes erratic and response times suffer, users grumble and application owners want their physical machines back. Storage equipment outages for routine maintenance, upgrades and expansion compound the problem because many virtual machines rely on those same resources.

The workarounds Storage ‘plumbing’ is often blamed for the lack of performance, only to undergo costly overhauls with no

guarantees. Some companies resort to short-stroking hard disk drives (HDDs) and end up squandering precious capacity in search of access speed. Others try striping more disk spindles in parallel to increase throughput at the expense of floor space and energy consumption. Expensive flash memories are getting tossed into servers as caches to make up for high latency mechanical disks. And more solid state drives (SSDs) are substituted for HDDs on arrays to speed up reads, with the undesirable consequences of delaying writes, compromising reliability and significantly raising the price of storage. The applications themselves can be modified as a last resort, although the effects are short lived when the underlying hardware configuration changes. All of these attempts increase the chance of outages because more gear is involved in supporting the programs. Finally, despite the extensive plumbing rework, the risk of a pricey and disappointing outcome remains.

The solution is software – the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor Just like a virtualization system’s hypervisor controls multiple and disparate virtual machines, the

DataCore storage hypervisor delivers robust shared storage services from multiple and disparate storage systems by managing system-wide resources. SANsymphony-V customers report up to five times throughput improvement of their critical production workloads including Oracle, SAP, SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint. At the same time, they cite impressive 99.999% availability.

T

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Infrastructure-wide adaptive caching & auto-tiering – Performance accelerators The DataCore storage hypervisor applies separate server resources in conjunction with system-wide

storage, rather than depend on a given server’s operating system to manage local storage devices in isolation. The result is improved and deterministic performance for all applications. The storage hypervisor caches disk requests infrastructure-wide with proven algorithms. These include write coalescing and read ahead, speeding up read and write requests across the wider scope of resources. SANsymphony-V can manage very large working sets for virtualized production applications in its large distributed caches without incurring costly delays for accessing slower storage media. Tiered storage pools are created from diverse disk assets and automatically assigned to workloads based on priorities. The policies dynamically migrate disk blocks across PCIe-based flash memories, solid state drives, high RPM hard drives, and lower speed, high capacity drives from potentially different vendors. The pools may also encompass off-premises private cloud storage for low-cost archive and disaster recovery. Automatic tiering of the storage pools using heat maps in conjunction with auto-tuning within tiers provides load balancing among the available resources, circumventing bottlenecks. With this overall infrastructure knowledge, the storage hypervisor synchronously mirrors data between fault domains, allowing separate storage facilities split over a metropolitan area to appear logically as one location. These hot-hot sites eliminate single points of failure while avoiding disruption due to periodic maintenance.

Storage virtualization complements server virtualization

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Return on investment behind storage virtualization Unlike the expensive, complex and risky modifications to the infrastructure’s plumbing, the

implementation of the DataCore storage hypervisor has immediate benefits without buying a single piece of hardware. Application owners will quickly benefit from the SANsymphony-V implementation in improved response times and remarkably higher throughput. Critical production applications whether virtualized or not will perform predictably, and complete processing operations quicker. Because existing infrastructure is efficiently utilized, even repurposed, costly additions to hardware infrastructure can be reduced and deferred. Future needs can be anticipated using the rich set of SANsymphony-V instrumentation and reporting tools. Stretch mirroring of data (and virtual machines) prevents downtime even when storage systems go out of service for any reason. Since storage resources can be managed across the entire infrastructure, the coordination of expansions, migrations, new applications and upgrades is greatly simplified. Additional benefits accrue to organizations whose disk farms span multiple locations. Data integrity is maintained via the metro-wide mirroring, while the caching algorithms span the infrastructure to minimize the latency between multiple sites. Safeguards against regional outages and disasters are provided by asynchronous remote replication to distant sites, without slowing down applications. The sophisticated, yet easy to use management tools provide mission-critical applications owners with the assurance that the systems will operate reliably and economically in distributed situations, and their data is well protected.

Our Take DataCore practically invented the concept of storage virtualization and has the years of experience in the

field across thousands of customers and multiple generations of its product to claim a leadership position in the space now known as software-defined storage infrastructure. With SANsymphony-V R9, this experience is embodied in the comprehensive functionality and scalability of the product. The benefits it yields with regards to performance and availability are even more pronounced in scenarios where business-critical (Tier 1) applications must be virtualized and consolidated. Regardless of server virtualization hypervisor (VMware, Hyper-V, etc.), operating system (Windows, Linux or Unix), storage system manufacturer or switching fabric, application owners will be well-served by the deployment of SANsymphony-V. The management of heterogeneous and disparate devices now critical to achieve balanced, cost-effective transactional (e.g., OLTP) and analytical processing (OLAP) is no longer a problem regardless of who supplied the hardware or which new technology must be leveraged. By creating a single management capability for the entire infrastructure, applications run more reliably, and disruption from upgrades and migrations can be minimized or eliminated altogether. We expect DataCore to maintain its industry-leading position in the storage hypervisor space. Information on SANsymphony-V can be found here: http://www.datacore.com/Solutions/Applications.aspx Note: The information and recommendations made by Storage Strategies NOW are based upon public information and sources and may also include personal opinions both of Storage Strategies NOW and others, all of which we believe to be accurate and reliable. As market conditions change however, and not within our control, the information and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. Storage Strategies NOW, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any damages whatsoever (including incidental, consequential or otherwise), caused by your use of, or reliance upon, the information and recommendations presented herein, nor for any inadvertent errors which may appear in this document.