36 Reasons To Adopt DataCore Storage Virtualization Learn the Reasons Why 10,000 Customers Have Chosen DataCore Software Author: George Teixeira When asked for 10 reasons, I just couldn t stop CEO, President & Co-founder, DataCore Software. Mr. Teixeira creates and executes the overall strategic direction and vision for DataCore Software. About DataCore Software DataCore delivers a softwaredefined architecture that empowers existing and new storage investments with greater performance, availability and functionality. DataCore SANsymphony -V storage virtualization software is a comprehensive, hardwareindependent solution that fundamentally changes the economics of provisioning, replicating and protecting storage in large enterprises and small to midsize businesses. www.datacore.com 1. No Hardware Vendor Lock-In Enables Greater Buying Power With DataCore, you gain the freedom to buy from any hardware vendor, and aren t forced to pick and stick with one. This is a major advantage in negotiating your best deal and right sizing your purchase to buy what you need instead of what just one vendor has to offer. It s easy to add, replace or migrate across storage platforms with a minimum of IT pain and best of all you can avoid disrupting users and business applications. Purchasing flexibility is a major advantage of a software-defined infrastructure. 2. Future-Proof Your Storage with Software-defined Flexibility; Be Ready for Whatever is Next A flexible DataCore software defined storage infrastructure also lets you bring in new storage and new storage technologies non-disruptively, so you are ready for whatever comes next. Whether it is incorporating new flash storage or cloud storage into your infrastructure or gaining the competitive advantage that the next new storage innovation brings, your infrastructure is ready to bring it in and put it to work. On the other hand, hardware vendors have no interest in allowing you to bring in new technology to work with the storage you ve have already purchased from them. Their reason for being is to sell you, each year, year after year, on ripping and replacing your last purchase from them with the newer model. 3. Get the Most from What You Already Own Before Buying More: Virtualization = Highly Efficient Utilization. Flexible and smart, DataCore virtualization software lets you optimize the utilization of your storage resources, extending the time to hardware refresh. This is another huge advantage over a hardware-defined infrastructure that forces you to over provision, oversize and buy more hardware to meet unknown demands before you have fully utilized what you already have. When you do buy new storage hardware, the DataCore advantage is that there is no waste you can fully utilize what you buy so you buy only what you need.
4. Faster Performance? Accelerate Your Critical Business Applications Empower your storage to new performance levels. Speed up response times for critical databases, mail servers and other storage intensive workloads. DataCore s self-tuning, adaptive caching software leverages available CPU horsepower and commodity DRAM memory technology to dramatically improve performance. Customers regularly report 200-500% performance gains. In addition, the caching software complements the latest technologies like Flash/ SSD if needed to attain even higher performance. 5. New or More Functionality? No Problem Want auto-failover protection, remote site replication, snapshots, thin provisioning, data mobility or automated tiering of storage devices? DataCore Storage virtualization software makes it simple to add powerful functionality onto existing or dissimilar hardware. 6. Standardized management that works infrastructure-wide The DataCore SANsymphony-V single interface and its universal common set of features and functions minimize training and allow IT to more costeffectively use and manage storage from a large variety of storage devices. 7. Quickly deploy and move virtual machines, applications and data We live in a world that demands fast response and the ability to provision and move data and machines with their applications rapidly is critical. DataCore makes the storage infrastructure the new data mobility Super Highway to reliably and quickly migrate, move and provision what you need to where you need it. 8. Protect more critical data and virtual machines without complexity With DataCore, it is easy to safeguard critical data and VMs at remote sites for reliable and rapid disaster recovery. High-speed, metro-wide mirroring adds a higher level of protection than any single box solution can supply, and DataCore s auto-failover and auto-failback requires no human intervention... You can also reduce or eliminate traditional data protection backup windows with snapshot and CDP technologies that allow efficient, instant, and consistent backups and restores for virtualized environments.. 9. Speed up production deployments of virtualization projects, including virtualizing critical applications Simple Quick Start features, powerful group commands and wizards leverage pre-defined settings and defaults for optimal management, performance and data protection without needing to manually set or tune parameters. 10. Gain true operational efficiency across the entire storage lifecycle to improve IT productivity Benefit from powerful performance and management monitoring tools, Heat maps, trending analysis, capacity monitoring and DataCore s powerful auto-tiering capability that allows you to set up storage profiles and automatically moves workloads and data to the most efficient form of storage (Flash/SSD, high-speed disks, capacity disks or Cloud storage) to meet SLA requirements. 11. Deploy affordable metro-wide or long-distance remote site disaster recovery to keep your business running In addition to built-in high-speed Metrowide mirror protection capabilities, you can efficiently replicate your data and VMs over the WAN to remote sites and secondary systems to accelerate disaster recovery and to make sure it all works you can perform nondisruptive disaster recovery testing. 12. Unique Infrastructure-wide Auto-Tiering Enables Optimal Performance and Cost Efficiency Unlike those who offer limited tiers between a 2 tier levels within a single vendor s box, DataCore provides fully automated, infrastructure-wide Storage Tiering that spans 15 tier levels across many devices and boxes.. It reduces the time and effort administrators need to spend to optimize and meet SLAs, DataCore allows you to create storage profiles and simple set and forget controls as it automatically optimizes workloads and data to be allocated to the most cost and performance efficient tier of storage available that meet the needs. 17. Investment Protection; Stop the Rip and Replace Cycle Storage hardware providers want you to constantly buy new models and Rip and Replace your storage assets. Feature sets are tied to each model. With DataCore software, you can add features as you need them without having to replace your storage hardware. 2
14. Much Higher Storage utilization by Reclaiming Storage You Own Get the full value of your investments. Typically 70% of disk space is wasted or sits idle in organizations. In other words, for every dollar you spend only 30% is useful. Our customers report that with DataCore they are able to boost utilization by 200-300%. That means they are experiencing capacity utilization rates in the plus 90% range versus normal 30% utilization that is more often realized in traditional deployments. 15. Stop Over Provisioning it is too expensive: DataCore s automated thin provisioning software enables administrators to allocate only the storage that is needed for a given virtual machine, rather than relying on machine templates that may over allocate or under allocate storage. This thin provisioning saves disk space and disk purchases, and it reduces energy and rack space requirements. 16. Simplify and streamlines storage management Reduce costs by allowing centralized administration of all storage functions, including provisioning, storage virtualization, migration and replication from a single command console. 17. Data Center wide Virtualization It s simple, DataCore does for storage virtualization what Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware do for server virtualization. Server virtualization, data center consolidation and IT efficiency are the primary drivers for today s software-defined virtualized data centers. Data centerwide virtualization offers the obvious advantages of enabling organizations to consolidate all their critical server and storage devices, to more effectively deploy, manage and rapidly respond to business requirements more easily and cost-effectively. When both servers and storage devices are virtualized, companies can implement business continuity solutions that cover and protect more data and more applications (in both physical and virtualized environments), while optimizing virtual machine and Tier-1 application performance. 18. Breathe new life into your valuable assets and avoid premature obsolescence DataCore software extends the life of your storage investments, making it possible to reconcile differences between old and new, allowing you to decide when is the best time to retire a storage asset instead of having that decision forced upon you. The device-independent, storage virtualization software shelters you from many of the unforeseen forces that cause storage devices to become prematurely obsolete, such as incompatibility with newer host bus interfaces, new firmware releases and different packaging standards. It also allows you to redeploy existing resources in less demanding roles as you gradually modernize elements of your storage infrastructure. 19. Future-proof and stay ahead of the competition by easily absorbing latest innovations: DataCore software-defined storage architecture allows IT departments to avoid costly, short term plug a hole buys in favor of a longer term software architecture strategy for your storage that spans many years. With the flexibility and interoperability you gain with DataCore, you will not only get the most value from your existing storage investments but you can easily add new technologies such as Flash technologies as they become costeffective in the marketplace. This ability to integrate new and latest technologies is a major advantage for your business. 20. Foundation for Private Cloud Computing: Server and storage virtualization are critical enabling components of private cloud computing environments. A private cloud infrastructure is not practical without a solid, proven storage and server virtualization combination. DataCore s software-defined storage architecture has become a foundation for many customers to build their private cloud data center infrastructure. 21. Automation and ease of administration: DataCore empowers your storage systems to provide dynamic, automatic thin provisioning, auto-tiering, selftuning cached performance and load balancing and path resolution, requiring a fraction of the setup and administration needed on most storage systems. This means administrators spend less time configuring and reconfiguring storage as virtual machine workloads, applications or storage capacity demands change. 3
22. Increase uptime, your business depends on it DataCore offers a number of advanced features that work in conjunction with both physical and virtual server environments that help improve business continuity and increases uptime. These capabilities support today s virtual environments and their need to do live migration, storage migration, fault tolerance, high availability, and remote site recovery. They keep virtual machines chugging along and give them the ability to quickly recover from unplanned outages. The ability to quickly and easily move a virtual machine and its storage from one place to another is perhaps the greatest single benefit of virtualization. 23. Prevent hardware vendor lockin and non-completive pricing Why be tied down to one particular storage vendor or even one particular model? It can prove quite frustrating when your needs change or new innovations appear. Because storage virtualization abstracts away the underlying hardware and replaces it with virtual representations of hardware, data center managers and owners gain a lot more flexibility when it comes to buying equipment. This is also an important negotiating tool with the hardware vendors when the time comes to renew or purchase more equipment. 24. Faster provisioning of systems and applications As a data center administrator, you can provide your business units with near instant-on capacity when those urgent requests hit. DataCore s storage virtualization enables elastic capacity to provide system provisioning and deployment at a moment s notice. You can quickly clone and template storage to get those servers and applications your business needs up and running within minutes. You can click Next > Next > Next > instead of filling out purchase orders, waiting for shipping and receiving, and then racking, stacking, and cabling the physical devices only to spend additional hours waiting for the operating system and applications to complete their installations. Click your way to greater productivity. 25. Improve disaster recovery Virtualization offers three important components when it comes to building out a disaster recovery solution. The first is its hardware abstraction capability. By removing the dependency on a particular hardware vendor or storage model, your disaster recovery site doesn t have to have identical hardware on hand to match the production environment. As a result, IT can save money by buying more cost-effective hardware in the DR site appropriate for its less frequent use.. Second, by consolidating servers and storage down to fewer physical production machines i, you can more easily create an affordable replication site. And third, most enterprise virtualization platforms have software that can help automate the failover when a disaster does strike. DataCore provides a complete storage virtualization foundation to support all of the above and it also provides the capability to test mode storage disaster recovery as well. 26. Scale n-dimensionally to meet projected future requirements A storage virtualization solution should be an appropriate match for the scale of your storage environment and be able to handle future growth. N-dimensional scalability means not only adding capacity as needed, but also scaling the number of devices, arrays and storage ports, the number of servers and host ports, and performance. 27. Simplify data management and eliminate error-prone tasks with automation DataCore s single platform delivers a universal and unified storage architecture that you can use to centrally manage storage using familiar and common interfaces across diverse storage types. Built-in wizards, powerful commands and advanced features like Auto-tiering allow you to administer the systems and eliminate many error-prone manual, tasks (like provisioning and data migrations) by creating policies, freeing up administrators to use their time more productively.. 28. Attain the highest levels of data availability and application uptime: DataCore is a software-defined storage architecture that is designed to support redundancy, fast synchronous mirroring, and metro-wide separation to give near-100% availability. Deploy DataCore to get higher data availability and uptime without breaking your budget. 29. Non-disruptive and pass through data migration One of the major benefits of abstracting the host or server from the actual storage is the ability to migrate data while maintaining concurrent I/O access. The actual data can be moved or replicated to another physical location without affecting the operation of client systems. 4
30. Standardizes management of storage, providing decreased operational expenses With storage virtualization, multiple independent storage devices, even if scattered across the network and at different tiers (Flash, Fast disks, Capacity Disks, Cloud Storage), can managed as a single monolithic shared storage pool or multiple pools, all of which can be provisioned as needed and can be managed centrally. Storage virtualization becomes a common disk manager in the virtualized environment. DataCore provides a common way for managing all types of storage in the environment. Virtual disks are much more flexible and efficient than physical storage because they can be resized or expanded and disk space from can also be reclaimed for reuse. 31. DataCore makes Storage the new Super Highway for data and VM transportation: Storage no longer contains just data but machine images (VMs) and the ability to move them, stretch them over multiple locations and continuously protect them is critical. Data and VM mobility require flexible, resilient storage networking. 33. Prioritize your storage environment with auto-tiering to match the cost of storage to the value of data Technology is driven by economic advantages. Different classes of storage have different performance, features and price points. The problem is we often must meet peak levels or above normal service levels and, therefore, we overpay for storage that may only be needed for exceptional cases. DataCore provides the automation and flexibility to match and prioritize storage and performance to what is needed and to applications that bring the most business value. 34. Extend the useful life of existing assets: Existing storage may not be efficient, fast enough or have the features sets you need today DataCore can empower your existing storage, adding years of useful life to the investments you have already made in storage hardware. Also, DataCore runs on standard servers or VMs, as you consolidate servers, you can repurpose them with DataCore to empower your storage. 35. Optimize SSD / flash storage deployments automatically with DataCore Auto-tiering Highly integrated support for flash storage. Designed to deliver ultra-high performance capability for critical application data. Highly integrated support for flash storage. In combination with DataCore s self-tuning caching software, DataCore can utilize Flash to deliver ultra-high performance capability for critical application data. Move and copy data to and from flash storage without disruption. 36. Proven in thousands of customer sites: Nearly 10,000 customers around the world with over 25,000 licenses deployed have realized the value of DataCore software to empower their storage investments. Check out our web site www.datacore.com and the many case studies and learn why so many are choosing a software-defined future. 32. Insulate host applications from changes to the physical storage infrastructure In addition to being a virtualization and storage management layer, DataCore acts as an insulation layer that allows users and applications to deal with storage resources as a service. Meanwhile, under the DataCore virtualization layer, the IT departments can make changes and upgrade systems or move and migrate or do remote site recovery all without impacting the front-end business operations. 0913 For additional information, please visit www.datacore.com or email info@datacore.com 2013 DataCore Software Corporation. All Rights Reserved. DataCore, the DataCore logo and SANsymphony are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.