ACADEMIA

Texas Memory Systems announced the launch of a line of bundled solutions featuring its RamSan® solid state disk appliances with DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor software that deliver high-performance and feature-rich storage to VMware environments at a reasonable cost. By adding advanced storage management features of the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor to RamSan storage, organizations can leverage their existing storage infrastructures with greater than a 200 percent performance increase and more than a 200 percent gain in administrative productivity for superior ROI.

This new RamSan-SANsymphony-V solution easily integrates into existing IT infrastructures. Customers simply select the appropriate capacity for their application, attach the RamSan either directly or through a fabric to the DataCore host, and set up access policies for the virtual storage pools.

Ideal for server and desktop virtualization projects, the utilization of RamSan and DataCore technologies allows VMware administrators to lower the amount of memory allocated to each guest OS and still maintain a high level of performance. When provisioning a virtual machine disk format (VMDK) on a LUN presented to the SANsymphony-V cluster, the virtual guest can utilize internal paging mechanisms with sub-millisecond response times. Under this configuration, the virtual guest would have access to an extensive amount of storage while taking advantage of the read and write performance of enterprise-grade SLC and eMLC Flash.

“The TMS RamSan-SANsymphony-V bundled offerings can easily be configured to turn new or existing servers and local storage into high-performance storage arrays optimized for virtual infrastructures,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development, DataCore Software. “By organizing disks with different performance levels into separate tiers and using RamSan appliances as the fastest tier with SAS or SATA drives on the lower tiers, customers benefit from the optimized throughput delivered by SANsymphony-V’s automatic storage tiering technology while simultaneously prolonging the useful life of their storage systems. The bundled offerings dynamically adapt to the most demanding application workloads to deliver unparalleled performance for physical and virtual environments.”

DataCore storage virtualization software delivers a radically simple, high-availability solution to meet vSphere shared storage requirements. The software abstracts storage into idealized, virtual disks akin to virtual machines. It pools and mirrors disk blocks across available devices, despite differences in make and model. In the process, it speeds up I/O response and throughput using extensive SAN-wide caching. This helps take optimum advantage of VMware's full suite of capabilities. A plug-in for VMware vCenter allows non-disruptive provisioning, sharing, cloning, replications and expanding virtual disks among physical servers and virtual machines. SANsymphony-V yields high availability, fast performance and full utilization of storage assets, making it an essential element of VMware Virtual Infrastructure deployments.

Advanced features of the bundled solutions include caching to automatically optimize disk access across tiers for best utilization; synchronous mirroring for high-availability failover; asynchronous replication for disaster recovery; and snapshots and CDP to increase data integrity and ease management, especially in virtualized environments. Thin provisioning uses only the RamSan space actually written for more efficient Tier-0 utilization.

“Companies are looking for solutions that make SSD benefits available across the entire IT infrastructure; by adding the extensive storage management capabilities of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor to the World's Fastest Storage from TMS, we are able to better leverage the explosion in virtualized solutions to the benefit of our customers and channel partners,” said Dan Scheel, President of Texas Memory Systems. “Rather than go with a rip-and-replace upgrade to get these benefits, the TMS-DataCore bundle will provide better utilization of existing storage infrastructures while dramatically improving the efficiency, performance, provisioning, data protection, availability and management of that infrastructure. This truly is a winning opportunity for all involved.”

Hardware support is available from TMS with software support being supplied by DataCore.