Storage virtualization specialist DataCore Software today announced SANsymphony-V sofware, which is designed specifically for virtual server and/or virtual desktop environments (although SANsymphony can also be used in physical environments, as well as a mix of virtual and physical).
DataCore officials note that many virtualization projects get stalled due to the perceived need for rip-and-replace upgrades of users’ existing storage infrastructure. SANsymphony-V allows users to virtualize their existing storage resources, thus minimizing the storage costs required for migrations from physical to virtual environments.
DataCore officials also note that users making the transition from physical to virtual servers or desktops require a simplified storage infrastructure
“It’s not always storage specialists that are in charge of virtualized environments, so a lot of the key enhancements in SANsymphony-V are in ease of use and reduced complexity,” says George Teixeira, DataCore’s president and CEO.
SANsymphony allows users to create shared virtual disks in VMware, Microsoft and Citrix virtual environments.
Some of the new features in SANsymphony-V include integrated continuous data protection (CDP) functionality, two-click reverse replication that eliminates the need for scripting, automated port selection (to reduce human error), and a built-in task scheduler to coordinate functions such as replication and snapshots.
A pass-through drives feature enables applications to see the disks in the same way they saw them in physical environments.
“When you make the transition from physical to virtual, now you don’t have to go through a copy of the data to fold it into the virtual environment, which expedites the transition process,” says Augie Gonzalez, DataCore’s director of product marketing.
Gonzalez also claims that the asynchronous replication in SANsymphony-V is 5X faster than in previous versions, which reduces bandwidth requirements.
In addition to the new features in SANsymphony-V, the software includes standard SANsymphony features such as virtual tiered disk pooling, high availability via mirroring, I/O caching to boost performance, online snapshots, thin provisioning and back-end load balancing.
