DataCore Creates Virtual SAN Out of Server Storage

Ten Things You Need to Know About Software-Defined Storage

One of the benefits of using a storage management application is that the location of the actual storage device doesn’t matter all that much.

Taking advantage of that benefit, DataCore’s release of SANsymphony-V10 has added a Virtual-SAN capability that turns all the Flash memory and magnetic storage attached to a server into a shared resource for the applications that access that server.

As of late, there has been a lot of interest in Flash storage on a server, and DataCore CEO George Teixeira notes that most of the Flash storage deployed today on a server is allocated to a single application. Teixeira says that this is a comparatively expensive way to solve an application performance issue because most of the time the Flash storage device is just sitting idle.

SANsymphony-V10 turns Flash and magnetic storage on the server into a resource that can be shared by a cluster of 32 servers, accessing up to 32PB of storage at speeds of up to 50 Million IOPS, says Teixeira.

DataCore is not the only vendor to have turned Flash memory into a shared resource. But Teixeira says the rise of Flash validates a software-defined approach to storage that allows IT organizations to mix and match third-party storage devices as they see fit.

Of course, DataCore would be the first to admit that most IT organizations have only a fraction of their data running in Flash memory. But the percentage of the data that does run in Flash tends to be really hot in terms of how often it needs to be accessed across what is usually a broad application portfolio.