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DataCore Software is an independent software vendor, founded on February 4, 1998 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, specializing in storage virtualization, storage management, and storage networking.

Its main product, SANsymphony-V (now at the V9.0) forms a transparent, scalable virtualization layer across your storage infrastructure in order to enhance its capabilities and centralize its management. The many nuances that distinguish one model or brand of storage from another and render them mutually incompatible no longer stand in the way of using them together.

Essentially, SANsymphony-V federates dispersed resources to:

  • maximize their combined value
  • to overcome device-specific differences
  • provide higher levels of service than the devices can offer individually

Is a form of scale-out solution (as described in the previous post), with some exceptions (for example on the number of nodes).

The most interesting part of this architecture is that the “DataCore cluster” is a transparent storage system, so can hidden all the real storage, but more important, can hidden failover and failback event! This mean that the storage become resilient to failure and and you can also use different type of storage (and protect your investment).

Interesting applications of this property could be:

  • Datacenter with a high HA level: usually the entire storage failure could not be handled in a transparent way (although for some storage there are specific configurations to handle this case).
  • Data migration: although VMware has his Storage vMotion (and Hyper-V3 will have something similar), in this way you can simple and transparently migrate volumes from one storage to another.
  • Add storage functions and/or use dummy storage: in this architecture, is the DataCore part that talk with the hosts and can provide specific storage functions.

Other interesting features are the multi-tiers support (with a lot of possible tiers considering that you can have different storage arrays, not only different type of disks and/or RAID levels), the integration with vSphere (both on API and vCenter plug-in), the asynchronous replication (for DR scope).

Another interesting aspect is the compatibility: this software runs on a Windows Server, so the HCL is the basically same of a generic Microsoft Windows Server compatibility!

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.