1
Software-defined Storage: The CxO View Agile, cost-effective data infrastructure for today’s business climate
Issue 1
In this issue
Welcome Fellow CxO 2
Top Five Use Cases and Benefits of Software-Defined Storage 3
Maimonides Medical Center A Major American Hospital Tells Its Software-defined Storage Story 12
About DataCore Software 19
2
Welcome Fellow CxO,
Today’s business climate carries a great deal of uncertainty for companies of all sizes and industries. To seize new business models and opportunities, systems must be flexible and easily adjusted in order to respond to growth spurts, seasonality and peak
periods. Likewise, agility helps us mitigate risk. With the sluggish economies across the world, there is a need to be prepared to react quickly to changing fortunes. From cutting back when needed to rapidly growing when opportunities present themselves, companies are less focused on long-term planning in favor of quick decisions and meeting quarterly expectations.
Technology is changing business dynamics as well. Social, mobile and cloud are impacting companies’ operations, meaning they need to be able to meet changing demand 24x7. This has put a premium on companies’ ability to react quickly while being able to absorb and analyze all the data they are gathering.
In survey after survey, CxOs highlight the following challenges when it comes to IT:
■ Dealing with the rapid growth of data
■ High cost of storing this data
■ Delivering high-performance applications
■ Meeting Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery requirements
When looking at IT infrastructure, it’s pretty clear that compute and networking have taken the lead in meeting these demanding requirements. But, storage is a laggard.
Enter Software-defined Storage (SDS). Aside from being the latest buzzword, what is SDS and will it help companies like yours succeed?
Put simply, SDS delivers agility, faster time to respond to change and more purchasing power control in terms of cost decisions. Gartner defines SDS as “storage software
on industry-standard server hardware [to] significantly lower opex of storage upgrades and maintenance costs… Eliminates need for high-priced proprietary storage hardware”.
Our own research based on real-world feedback from thousands of customers shows a growing interest in SDS. By separating the storage software from storage hardware, SDS is able to:
■ Pool data stores allowing all storage assets and their existing and new capacity investments to work together; enabling different storage devices from different vendors to be managed in common
■ Provide a comprehensive set of data services across different platforms and hardware
■ Separate advances in software from advances in hardware
■ Automate and simplify management of all storage
The benefits to your company are potentially enormous. In a recent survey of over 2,000 DataCore customers that have deployed SDS, key findings include:
■ 79% improved performance by 3X or more
■ 83% reduced storage-related downtime by 50% or more
■ 81% reduced storage-related spending by 25% or more
■ 100% saw a positive ROI in the first year
It’s these kind of results and the advances in performance and efficiency due to DataCore’s revolutionary Parallel I/O technology within our SDS solution that have led to over 30k customer deployments globally and 96% of CxOs surveyed stating they recommend DataCore SDS.
Sincerely George Teixeira, President and CEO, Co-founder
3
Research From Gartner
Top Five Use Cases and Benefits of Software-Defined Storage
Software-defined storage offers potential benefits
to I&O leaders looking to increase storage solution
flexibility and reduce costs. We highlight common
SDS use cases and provide an overview of its benefits,
limitations and vendor landscape.
Key Findings
■ I&O leaders are looking for software-defined
storage (SDS) products that offer the potential for
better total cost of ownership (TCO), efficiency
and scalability to address exponential-data-growth
needs, and to benefit from innovations from
hardware and software players independently.
■ The SDS market remains fragmented, with no clear
market leaders.
■ Despite programmability and automation benefits
of SDS, it is viewed as trailing compute and
networking in overall maturity.
Recommendations
■ Identify which SDS use case or cases described
in this research align with your business
objectives and current challenges, and build a
plan to evaluate products that address these use
cases. Investigate each software-defined storage
product for its capabilities, and choose it for the
appropriate use case, while understanding any
current limitations.
■ Implement SDS solutions that enable you to
decouple software from hardware, reduce TCO and
enable greater data mobility.
4
■ Design an SDS architecture to enable storage to be
a part of software-defined data center automation
and orchestration framework, not a siloed
platform.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
By 2019, 50% of existing storage array products will
also be available as “software only” versions, up from
15% today.
By 2019, approximately 30% of the global storage
array capacity installed in enterprise data centers
will be deployed with software-defined storage or
hyperconverged integrated system architectures based
on x86 hardware systems, up from less than 5% today.
By 2020, 70% of storage provisioning and
management functions will be integrated into the
infrastructure platform, up from 10% today.
Analysis
SDS promises to deliver modern storage and data
services as software-based capabilities that can
leverage existing infrastructure or introduce commodity
platforms to improve storage economics, as well as to
provide data mobility, including cloud integration.
Gartner has observed significant SDS interest via client
inquiries, discussions at our events and searches on
gartner.com. According to the results of the December
2015 Gartner Data Center Conference storage survey,
48% of storage leaders are actively investigating or
piloting SDS solutions (see the Appendix).
Gartner views SDS as offering these capabilities:
■ It abstracts storage capabilities dynamically
derived from physical or virtual devices and/or
services — independent of location or class of
storage — to offer greater agility and to deliver
quality of service (QoS), while optimizing costs.
■ It is available for use or licensing in the form of
software, and does not require an appliance or
proprietary hardware to be purchased from the
same vendor. Some vendors may package SDS
as a preintegrated hardware solution for faster
delivery.
■ It has one, or several, of the following key
attributes: abstraction, instrumentation,
programmability, automation, mobility, policy
management and orchestration.
Software-defined storage solutions can be grouped in
two categories (see Figure 1):
■ Infrastructure SDS creates and provides data
center services to replace or augment traditional
storage arrays. Often, the goal is to improve capital
expense (capex) by allowing a storage system
to be deployed on lower-cost, industry-standard
hardware.
For example, infrastructure SDS products may
allow enterprises to deploy a storage-as-software
package on x86 server hardware, converting it to
a storage system that can be accessible by file,
block or object storage protocols.
5
■ Management SDS interacts with existing storage
systems to deliver greater agility of storage
services. Management SDS products enable
abstraction, mobility, virtualization, storage
resource management (SRM) and input/output
(I/O) optimization of storage resources. Often,
the goal is to improve operating expense (opex) by
requiring less administrative effort.
For example, management SDS products may
allow enterprises to deploy software to manage/
virtualize/provision/optimize multiple storage
arrays, and to move data between storage tiers
and cloud.
Figure 1. SDS Categories
Infrastructure SDS Use Cases
Use Case 1: Storage Platform TCO Reductions Through On-Demand Scalability and Exploitation of Commodity Hardware Resources
Applicability
■ Example 1: Large IT business units looking to
lower storage capex.
■ Example 2: Storage solutions for unstructured
data with rapid growth patterns.
■ Example 3: DevOps scenarios where common data
services and data mobility are desired, in addition
to the elimination of proprietary hardware.
■ Example 4: I&O leaders that foster IT as a core
expertise and a business differentiator, as they
are willing to invest in the new skills, training and
potential change in delivery model.
Benefits
■ Cost: Infrastructure SDS eliminates the need
for high-priced proprietary storage hardware. I&O
leaders will deploy storage software on industry-
standard server hardware and will significantly lower
opex of storage upgrades and maintenance costs.
■ Innovation: Industry-standard hardware will
quickly be able to take advantage of the latest
innovations of server hardware, such as new
CPU chips, solid-state and hard-disk drive (HDD)
technology.
Management SDS
Reducing opex
Automation, virtualization, optimization, SRM software
Managing existing storage platforms
Coordinating of delivery of data services
Infrastructure SDS
Reducing capex
Block, object, file storage software
Deploying new storage platform
Delivering its own data services
Categories above apply to the most, but not 100% of all solutions. There is some SDS product overlap between the two categories above. Source: Gartner (April 2016)
6
■ Availability: Some SDS solutions offer a
distributed scale-out approach, where redundancy
is enforced in the software layer.
■ Performance: SDS provides the ability to add on
and scale performance and/or capacity by adding
nodes, or by upgrading existing server hardware
in an on-demand basis, versus the need to
prepurchase in a monolithic design.
■ Flexibility: The hardware platform has less vendor
lock-in, better interoperability, and is easily
scalable and upgradable by the IT team.
■ Agility: Storage provisioning and management can
be more easily integrated into the standard data
center automation and management tools.
Limitations
■ Integration: SDS integration with commodity
servers needs to be embraced as a new discipline,
and addressed with OEM/ODM providers to ensure
interoperability.
■ Performance: SDS performance will be based on
hardware optimization, and rightsizing of software
and hardware resources, and needs to be routinely
monitored, measured and optimized.
■ Cost: SDS cost needs to be carefully examined
to ensure that the overall solution offers not only
lower acquisition costs, but overall lower TCO due
to increased IT responsibilities.
Sample Vendors and Products: Atlantis USX;
DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN; EMC ScaleIO;
Formation Data Systems FormationOne; HPE
StoreVirtual VSA; Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform;
IBM Spectrum Accelerate; Maxta MxSP; Nexenta
NexentaStor Nexenta Edge; Red Hat Ceph; Red Hat
Gluster; Scality Ring; StarWind Virtual SAN Free;
SwiftStack; Veritas InfoScale; VMware Virtual SAN
Use Case 2: Performance Improvement by Optimizing and Aggregating Storage I/O
Applicability
■ Example 1: IT business units and I&O leaders
seeking to improve performance, storage efficiency
and utilization rates of previously deployed assets.
■ Example 2: I&O leaders and application and server
administrators looking to optimize application and
workload performance, and to enable QoS and
load balancing.
Benefits
■ Cost: I/O optimization products can provide a
nondisruptive boost to virtual machine (VM) or
physical host performance without hardware
upgrades.
■ Efficiency: I/O optimization software will increase
density by alleviating the “I/O blender” (see
Note 1) problem that often plagues dense virtual
machine environments.
7
■ Performance: Adding storage capabilities closer to
application and compute resources will result in
faster transaction times and greater sustained I/O.
Limitations
■ Flexibility: This SDS solution might increase
complexities due to the introduction of the
additional layer of software in the data path and
any required host agents.
■ Cost: ROI justification must be carefully examined
against alternatives.
Sample Vendors and Products: Condusiv V-locity;
Infinio Accelerator; ioFABRIC Vicinity; PernixData FVP;
SanDisk ioTurbine; SanDisk FlashSoft
Management SDS Use Cases
Use Case 3: Better Provisioning and Automation of Storage Resources
Applicability
■ Example 1: IT business units looking to streamline
provisioning for a software-defined data center
(SDDC) with predefined classes of storage
services.
■ Example 2: I&O leaders that manage
heterogeneous storage resources today, or that
plan to in the near future.
■ Example 3: I&O leaders looking to extend the
operational life of older arrays through storage
abstraction.
Benefits
■ Cost: Automation of repeatable manual tasks
will reduce TCO for storage by improving IT
productivity.
■ Reliability: Reduction of human errors and
minimizing risk.
■ Agility: Ability to offer storage as a service to
empower end users.
Limitations
■ Innovation: Some of the products have a steep
learning curve to be able to customize them to
meet enterprise needs, and may require DevOps
team interaction.
■ Integration: Products could require integration
with the rest of the SDDC tools.
■ Flexibility: A compatibility support matrix for
new storage solutions and SDS will need to be
established and maintained.
Sample Vendors and Products: EMC ViPR Controller;
IBM Spectrum Control
Use Case 4: Robust Utilization, Management and Life Cycle of Heterogeneous Storage Array
Applicability
■ Example 1: IT business units and I&O leaders
seeking to extend the operational life of previously
deployed multivendor assets.
8
■ Example 2: I&O leaders and application and
server administrators looking to optimize capacity,
performance, and mobility of applications and
workloads.
Benefits
■ Cost: Improved asset management will contain
costs by extending the operational life of legacy
deployments, perhaps by adding new data services
on top of existing storage solutions.
■ Efficiency: Abstracting and pooling storage
capacity can allow for greater utilization by
satisfying broader storage requests with smaller
combinations of available storage resources.
■ Performance: Aggregating disparate storage
resources can improve overall I/O.
Limitations
■ Flexibility: Some SDS virtualization tools might
present an additional vendor lock-in.
■ Efficiency: Some may only use a subset of SDS
tool features, making the effective SDS product
cost important to consider prior to purchase.
Vendors and Products: DataCore SANsymphony;
FalconStor FreeStor; Hitachi Storage Virtualization
Operating System; IBM Spectrum Virtualize; NetApp
FlexArray; Primary Data DataSphere
Use Case 5: Tight Alignment of Storage With Broader Infrastructure Software Management
Applicability
■ Example 1: IT organizations seeking to enable a
full SDDC and/or a more highly automated data
center. Storage infrastructure is being treated as
a component of the data center platform, and
needs to be delivered and controlled through SDS
integration.
■ Example 2: Appropriate for very mature data
centers where business needs are well-understood
and organizational maturity is such that broad
cross-domain skills exist, to construct solutions
that can account for a variety of business needs
while meeting multiple and varied implementation
trade-offs.
Benefits
■ Cost: Reducing the need to overprovision and
providing the ability to more rapidly satisfy storage
capacity and availability requirements can lead
to greater resource utilization that requires less
hard-allocated physical resources and/or less
administrative overhead.
9
■ Agility: Today, storage is often opaque and
detached from the other domains of IT. Storage is
stateful, and, thus, has data gravity, which requires
time in order to move data. Therefore, the ability to
make storage more aligned with the rest of IT (and
thus the business demands) can mean that the
overall IT capability and speed to satisfy business
demands are improved.
Limitations
■ Integration: This SDS is only appropriate for
enterprises with SDDC frameworks. This nascent
approach will require additional DevOps resources
to integrate SDS under the existing IT operations
management platform.
■ Flexibility: Legacy solutions might not be
supported under the new framework.
Vendors and Products: OpenStack Block Storage
Cinder; VMware Virtual Volumes
Potential Concerns
Despite the promise of SDS, there are issues that
must be acknowledged:
■ Value: Some storage point solutions have been
repositioned as SDS to present a higher value
proposition versus built-in storage features, and
need to be carefully examined for ROI benefits.
■ Interoperability: While a few SDS solutions can
be deployed in combination, most assume that a
single SDS product will provide all data services
and/or provisioning capabilities and do not work
well when combined.
■ Support: When deploying an SDS on top of
x86 hardware, the initial onus of integration,
troubleshooting and support may fall to the end
user, versus the integrated storage array provider.
■ Skill and Culture: This is cited as the top reason
for concerns about SDS, as this type of deployment
shifts requirements for storage implementations
and ongoing administrative skill sets.
10
Appendix
Adoption Rate and Interest in SDS Technology
The following figures are based on polling results from the 2014 and 2015 Gartner
Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Summits.
20
14
16
14
9
7
10
14
0 5 10 15 20 25
Currently evaluating SDS in a POC or a nonproduction environment
Broad production deployment
Limited production deployment (specific use cases)
Plan to investigate SDS within 12 to 24 months
Percentage of Respondents
2015 2014
Figure 3. Where Are You With SDS?
Source: Gartner (April 2016)
Actively investigating 36%
Piloting 12% Limited
deployment 7%
Full deployment 7%
Not doing anything currently
38%
n = 105 Source: Gartner (April 2016)
Figure 2. Adoption Stages of SDS
11
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
Software-Defined Storage (SDS)
OpenStack
Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)
Software-Defined Anything (SDx)
Client Inquiry Count
Figure 4. Gartner Client SDS Inquiries Throughout 2015
Source: Gartner (April 2016)
Note 1 I/O Blender
“I/O blender” has been used to describe the issue in
which many VMs running on a single physical server
make I/O traffic appear random. This randomness is
caused by reads and writes that are being intermixed
across several VMs, resulting in slower overall
performance as storage array caching and prefetching
algorithms become incapable of predicting what actions
to take. This hampers performance, because the I/O
must then be satisfied by the solid-state drives (SSDs) or
hard-disk drives (HDDs) in the storage array. This results
in a long I/O path, with a large number of intermediary
devices in between that need to be traversed for an
application or user to obtain or save the needed data.
Source: Gartner Research Note G00301082, Julia Palmer, Dave Russell, 01 April 2016
12
Maimonides Medical CenterA Major American Hospital Tells Its Software-defined Storage Story
Just over twelve years ago, Maimonides Medical Center
deployed DataCore storage virtualization software to
manage and pool its storage as well as to ensure 24x7
data availability. Little did Maimonides know at that
time, but by doing so it was making the most important
stride it could in a journey that led to the organization
embracing the software-defined data center.
Maimonides Medical Center, based in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
is among the largest independent teaching hospitals
in the U.S. The hospital has more than 800 physicians
relying on its information systems to care for patients
around-the-clock. Prior to implementing DataCore’s
SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software, storage
was direct-attached to mission-critical application
servers, and it became increasingly difficult to maintain
the systems while keeping patient records, prescription
data, medical supply ordering and fulfillment, research
data, clinical imaging databases and voice dictation
available at the doctors’ fingertips.
Maimonides Medical Center chose DataCore software
from a number of hardware and software competitors
based on its ability to securely and seamlessly manage
the hospital’s storage resource expansion. DataCore’s
software-centric approach to storage virtualization and its
inherent ability to “thin provision” storage capacity has
proven to be an invaluable service in eliminating the labor-
intensive need for system administrators to micro-manage
the capacity requirements of life-critical applications.
From the start, DataCore enabled Maimonides
to consolidate storage management for mission-
critical patient records. In fact, Maimonides Medical
Center has now consolidated all of its online storage
resources under the control of the SANsymphony-V
virtualized storage platform.
13
ABOUT MAIMONIDES MEDICAL CENTER
Maimonides Medical Center is a non-profit, non-sectarian hospital located in Borough Park, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, in the U.S. state of New York. Maimonides is both a treatment facility and academic medical center with 705 beds, and more than 70 primary care and sub-specialty programs. With a staff of nationally renowned physicians, Maimonides Medical Center strives to conduct quality research, care and education.
www.maimonidesmed.org
Maimonides’ history with DataCore dates back to the
year 2000. Initially DataCore was brought in because
Maimonides used IBM Serial Storage Architecture
(SSA) to support a particular neo-natal unit’s data
storage requirements. Because this particular storage
equipment had reached end-of-life and was no longer
supported by IBM, the storage team at Maimonides
used the DataCore virtualized storage platform to
bridge the SSA devices into Fibre Channel connections
to their application servers.
In a second phase with DataCore, Maimonides
Medical Center migrated to an infrastructure-wide,
DataCore-powered SAN spread across two sites – two
geographically separated DataCore-powered SANs
running as active-active data centers. This was done in
2001. The goal here was to handle the data growth in the
electronic medical record application and meet existing
state and federal requirements to store patient records
for at least seven years and often for even longer.
“When we started putting application servers on the
DataCore virtualized storage platform and started
to really understand what we were doing, the SAN
“The performance and data
availability delivered by
SANsymphony-V enables
our IT staff and medical staff
each to focus on what they
do best. When patients’
lives are on the line, health
care professionals cannot
tolerate having to wait
for information because
a system is offline for
maintenance. The DataCore
storage virtualization
software has dramatically
improved how we manage
our storage resources and
has given us a cost-effective
solution to manage ongoing
expansion.”
– Rogee Fe de Leon Head of the Storage Group
Maimonides Medical Center
14
grew and grew,” states Rogee Fe de Leon, head of the
storage group, Maimonides Medical Center. “It grew so
much that it started breaking down due to sheer size.
We made the decision to scale our virtualized storage
infrastructure to multiple node pairs. As we have
moved along, we have also increased the bandwidth
between the sites and upgraded our Fibre Channel
infrastructure significantly to deal with the expanded
size and scope of the deployment.”
Eight (8) direct Fibre Channel switches support this
infrastructure – infrastructure that stores, moves, and
protects electronic records for ambulatory, obstetrical,
and gynecological services.
A little less than one (1) petabyte of managed storage
(“virtual disks”) is used as “tier 1” storage. This
storage serves the critical applications – including
medical records and imaging. The Picture Archiving
and Communications System (PACS) is the most
storage-intensive application. Meeting HIPAA’s
requirement for audit trails has been a pretty
straightforward process of keeping more log files
for a longer period of time. The disaster recovery
requirements of HIPAA have been met by replicating
the patient data to a second DataCore-powered SAN.
Business Continuity through High Availability
The most pressing requirement the hospital had (and
one that still tops the priority list) is realizing business
continuity – meaning delivering non-stop hospital
operations. To achieve this, the key benefit that
DataCore delivers for Maimonides is high availability.
Storage consolidation, for example, was never a
priority for Maimonides. Moreover, server virtualization
has only been undertaken since 2011. The goal was
always simply to have highly available applications
delivered via highly available storage.
“High availability was the first and foremost reason for
going with DataCore – and for continuing with it,” adds
Fe de Leon. “Now, everything that is mission-critical
to the running of the hospital is supported by the
DataCore virtualized storage platform. Users not only
receive faster access to data, but they benefit from
more server capacity as well.”
Four pairs of SANsymphony-V’s precursor,
SANsymphony, have been running since 2005.
Each pair of storage nodes represents 250 TBs of
mirrored, virtual storage capacity. Physical storage
capacity available behind the pairs is almost twice
that, or 500 TBs per pair. Total storage capacity is
approximately two (2) petabytes. By centralizing the
management of all storage resources as a scalable,
fully redundant virtualized pool the hospital ensures
24x7 access to critical information. This virtualized
storage infrastructure powered by DataCore means
Maimonides has eliminated lapses in data availability
from hardware failure and storage maintenance.
The Virtualized IT Landscape
The drive to deploy virtualized servers at Maimonides
was no doubt similar to the adoption of server
virtualization at most organizations. Sheer demand
for servers and for applications from every group
within the organization meant that deploying virtual
machines (VMs) to meet their IT needs made sense –
Figure 1 Maimonides’s virtualized storage infrastructure, powered by DataCore
Source: Datacore
16
both practically and economically. And Maimonides
has significantly ramped up virtualizing servers over
the past two years. On the virtualized server side, the
medical center now maintains 150 virtual machines
(VMs) across their systems. Out of a total of 12
VMware ESX hosts, six (6) hosts are clustered into a
production environment and the others are clustered
in a development environment.
The medical center also has numerous physical
Microsoft servers, which are clustered between the two
sites for the sake of business continuity. The balance
of the hospital’s hosts run IBM AIX (Unix) and Red Hat
Linux, all obtaining their storage from the DataCore-
powered virtualized storage platform.
The DataCore software currently runs on IBM / Lenovo
x3650 servers. These standard x86 machines have
been deployed with approximately 20 Fibre Channel
ports each using a combination of Emulex and QLogic
host bus adapters (HBAs). All critical systems run
entirely on Fibre Channel topology.
In the most recent deployment of SANsymphony-V, the
configuration virtualizes one pool of fast Fibre Channel
disks on X-IO arrays as well as two vast pools of high-
density, lower-cost, SATA disks on IBM arrays.
Mission-critical Applications Virtualized and Overall Business Objectives Met
A primary, business-critical application that is
supported by the virtualized infrastructure is a GE
imaging system (PACS). Beyond this, numerous
Oracle databases that support the hospital’s human
resources needs and SQL servers supporting the
hospital’s clinical programs are all virtualized. This
includes primary databases such as the hospital’s
neonatal database, its geriatric database, its pediatric
database, and its research database. Microsoft
Exchange is virtualized. Moreover, IBM DB2 databases
are virtualized in support of the hospital’s medical
records management needs.
According to Fe de Leon, “In terms of DataCore
serving as the storage area network ‘backbone’ for the
hospital, you need only know that all of the hospital’s
medical records, all of its clinical records, and all of
its administrative records reside on the DataCore-
virtualized SANs, which serve as the hospital’s
‘de facto’ virtualized storage platform. All of the
applications we rely on to run the hospital – including
billing – are on DataCore.”
Summary
The hospital’s IT department was challenged with
the growth of data storage. The lack of maintenance
windows and the potentially devastating effects of
downtime on the facility’s patients and staff prompted
the urgency to examine SAN alternatives. Maimonides
implemented DataCore’s open and extensible
SANsymphony-V storage networking and management
software to eliminate single points of failure and
ensure continuous, reliable data access.
The ability to have rock-solid business continuity
remains the overriding benefit Maimonides derives
from DataCore storage virtualization software to this
day. DataCore makes it possible for Maimonides to
17
“metro-cluster” applications between two different
sites as if they were co-located. This way, if for
any reason one site happens to be offline – due to
a planned or unplanned outage – the hospital’s IT
systems remain up and running – continuing non-stop
business operations.
“The performance and data availability delivered by
SANsymphony-V enables our IT staff and medical
staff each to focus on what they do best,” explains
Fe de Leon. “When patients’ lives are on the line,
health care professionals cannot tolerate having to
wait for information because a system is offline for
maintenance. The DataCore storage virtualization
software has dramatically improved how we manage
our storage resources and has given us a cost-effective
solution to manage ongoing expansion.”
The Road Ahead: Software that Supports Whatever the Future Holds
SANsymphony-V allows the storage team at
Maimonides to mix and match disks from different
vendors as the price of storage falls and the medical
center’s needs grow. The device-independent approach
of the SANsymphony-V virtualized storage platform
gives the hospital flexibility to incorporate existing
hardware investments and leverage new technologies,
without locking them into any single hardware or
storage technology. With complete data redundancy
and system monitoring tools, the software offers high
levels of data protection in a cost-effective architecture.
As an open-networking, software-defined storage
platform, SANsymphony-V lets customers combine
DEPLOYMENT AT-A-GLANCE
■ DataCore Managed Capacity: 1 Petabyte
■ Number of Users: 5,000
■ Total Number of Physical Servers within the
IT Infrastructure: 400+
■ Number of Virtual Servers:
300
■ Number of Virtual Desktops: 300 (by 2014)
■ Primary Server Vendor: IBM / Lenovo
■ Storage Vendor: IBM and X-IO
■ Server Virtualization Platform: VMware,
Microsoft Hyper-V
■ Desktop Virtualization Platform: Citrix
■ Primary Back-Office Apps: Exchange, Oracle,
SQL, IBM DB2
■ Healthcare Applications:
GE PACS, Allscripts, NextGen EHR, Siemens
■ Storage Management and Virtualization
Platform: DataCore Software
18
heterogeneous components on a SAN and retain
single-console management. DataCore-pioneered “thin
provisioning” technology lets administrators grab
capacity just-in-time, so unused storage space doesn’t
go to waste. Plus, the storage platform empowers
system administrators with metrics for chargebacks,
security policies, and prioritized queries based on
business units.
“DataCore’s storage virtualization software meets
the need of organizations like Maimonides that are
struggling to manage the proliferation of mixed
storage resources while maintaining high availability
and rapid response for users — all on tight IT
budgets,” said George Teixeira, President and CEO of
DataCore Software. “Our SANsymphony-V virtualized
storage platform sets the standard for flexible and
trusted data storage management in the software-
defined data center.”
For additional information, please visit www.datacore.com or email [email protected]
© 2016 DataCore Software Corporation. All Rights Reserved. DataCore, the DataCore logo and SANsymphony are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Source: Datacore
Software-defined Storage: The CxO View is published by DataCore. Editorial content supplied by DataCore is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is used with Gartner’s permission, and was originally published as part of Gartner’s syndicated research service available to all entitled Gartner clients. © 2016 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The use of Gartner research in this publication does not indicate Gartner’s endorsement of DataCore’s products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on its website.
Contact us
About DataCore Software DataCore, the Data Infrastructure Software company, is the
leading provider of Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-
converged Software – harnessing today’s powerful and
cost-efficient server platforms with Parallel I/O technology
to overcome the IT industry’s biggest problem, the I/O
bottleneck, in order to deliver unsurpassed performance,
hyper-consolidation efficiencies and cost savings.
The company’s comprehensive and flexible Software-defined
Storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solutions free
users from the pain of labor-intensive storage management
and provide true independence from solutions that cannot
offer a hardware agnostic architecture. DataCore’s storage
virtualization and Parallel I/O technology revolutionize data
infrastructure and serve as the cornerstone of the next-
generation, software-defined data center – delivering greater
value, industry-best performance, availability and simplicity.
Why DataCore and What We Do
We think differently. We innovate through software and
challenge the IT status quo.
We pioneered software-based storage virtualization. Now,
we are leading the Software-defined and Parallel Processing
revolution. Our Application-adaptive software exploits the full
potential of servers and storage to solve data infrastructure
challenges and elevate IT to focus on the applications and
services that power their business.
DataCore parallel I/O and virtualization technologies
deliver the advantages of next generation enterprise data
centers – today – by harnessing the untapped power of
multicore servers. DataCore software solutions revolutionize
performance, cost-savings, and productivity gains businesses
can achieve from their servers and data storage.
DataCore Software Corporation
Corporate Park
6300 NW 5th Way
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33309
1 (877) 780-5111
www.datacore.com
