Virtualization Best Practices - Did you overlook Storage?

"With the spotlight on server, desktop and application virtualization, it is easy to forget that your approach to data storage must also change." Our comprehensive software makes it practical for organizations large or small to fully leverage their existing storage assets in the following ways:

• Centrally pool all disk resources over scalable physical or virtual SANs.

• Transparently migrate data between different storage devices.

• Automatically provision just enough disk space, just in time.

• Non-disruptively expand and upgrade.

• Carry out online disk-to-disk backups.

• Speed up storage performance through external caching.

• Maintain up-to-date disaster recovery images at a remote site.

• Configure fault-tolerant shared disks across physically separate arrays.

Success Hinges On It

Just think how isolated disk bottlenecks and minor drive outages that once affected only a few applications or a handful of users will now impact many more. Or maybe it wasn't apparent that before virtual machines, desktops and applications can be dynamically provisioned, migrated and trusted to automatically fail over, a robust shared storage infrastructure must be in place.

Such alarming news may lead you to shop around for a good, dual-redundant SAN-in-a-box. But first stop to consider the two lessons that virtualization has taught you:

1. Regardless of who makes the equipment, hardware introduces numerous physical, geographical and device-specific restrictions that get in the way of doing business.
2. Software can emulate hardware and improve on it to eliminate many of its limitations.

With that in mind, take a good hard look at the makeup of your existing storage and any likely purchases. Can you spot the mechanical and packaging characteristics that will inevitably slow down, interrupt and endanger your computer operations?

Storage Virtualization is Required

That's where DataCore storage virtualization software comes into play. With continuous enhancements over the past 10 years, it is the underpinning for thousands of virtual and physical IT environments around the globe.

Were you surprised to see performance speed up from software? You'll find DataCore unique in several other aspects as well. We implement storage virtualization functions outside of the disk subsystems, rather than embedded and confined within them as seen below.

DataCore effectively caches I/O on separate servers sized to your requirements. In smaller environments with surplus processing resources, it runs as a separate virtual machine, creating a virtual SAN from internal disk drives. The product operates across like equipment or dissimilar devices with equal ease.

For example, you can remotely replicate from your local premium storage devices to a less capable and lower cost unit at your disaster recovery site. And you can take snapshots of active production volumes onto your less capable test drives.

Moreover, our external approach presents well behaved virtual disks to Windows, Unix, Linux, NetWare, MacOS and all the popular hypervisors including VMware, Citrix and Microsoft variants, without application or file system dependencies.

Get the Most from Your Assets

By consolidating and automating these essential data protection measures and storage management practices, DataCore software gets the fullest utilization, highest availability and fastest performance from your storage assets. As importantly, the software accommodates your future hardware changes and dynamic virtual environments without incurring repeated major capital expenditures or retraining.