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Storage Virtualization | FAQs & Discussions

The Industry's First 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN

A White Paper by Tim Warden; June 24, 2008

OVERVIEW

Tradition insists that innovation in the IT industry is always born of hardware, but eventually that same hardware is emulated and improved into a software solution that eclipses the possibilities and economies of the hardware-only solution. The hardware — ever faster, ever smaller — becomes commodity in support of the "innovation", which has since been transformed into an application in software. The portable software leverages the commoditized hardware as it pursues the limits of Moore's law. Time and again we've seen the tendency played out, most recently with the advent of Server Virtualization, where your servers become nothing more than software in files running on a hypervisor... which is itself software.

The engineers at DataCore Software Corporation understood this back in the 1990's when they were building the first Storage Virtualization platforms, but today as never before we shall see this reality played out again as we use a software storage solution from DataCore to create the world's first commercially available 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN using commodity hardware. That's right, folks: SANsymphony™ was 8Gb-ready the day QLogic shipped those cards.

In this white paper we will build an 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN using a Dell PowerEdge R900 server and the recently released QLogic QLE2562 8Gb Fibre Channel HBA's. We will use DataCore's SANsymphony™ Storage Virtualization software to convert the ordinary server and HBAs into a lightning fast, full featured 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN.

Fasten your seatbelts.

CONFIGURING THE HARDWARE

The basic SAN storage array is all about spindles, RAID controllers, processors, cache, and target ports.

The speed of today's processors, RAM and PCI Express busses far exceeds anything the traditional SAN vendors are building into their hardware boxes. For instance, Dell's own EqualLogic arrays are running on "RISC" processors... "How passé." Even Apple abandoned the PowerPC when it was clear that the x86 Intel/AMD race had left all those RISC processors in the dust. Let's go mainstream and use a standard x86 server to build our SAN.

We select a Dell R900 III with dual quad-core processors and 16GB of RAM. SANsymphony™ will setup its real-time I/O threads on the cords and use the RAM as storage processor cache. We'll use direct attach storage for the spindles and populate the PCI Express slots of the Dell R900 with HBA's and RAID Controllers to implement those basic SAN features.

SANsymphony™ can use any disk device you can connect to a Windows platform. That means FC, iSCSI, SAS, SATA, SATA-2, ATA/EIDE, U320, LUNs from other SANs, FireWire (1394), even USB2 drives! We'll load up the R900's internal drive slots and then prove the scalability of our solution by using Dell's modular MD-1000 Direct Attached Storage shelves to grow out the capacity and spindle count.

The R900 can be configured with 5 LFF or 8 SFF internal disk drives attached to an internal RAID controller. You pick your preference, but for this example, we'll use the SFF drives and bind two 73GB spindles in RAID-1 for the OS and SANsymphony™ software, and populate the remaining six slots with 146GB 10K RPM drives. We can use those six drives for any purpose: SAN storage, snapshot space, or asynch replication buffer space for an eventual DR project.

For capacity and spindle expansion we direct attach Dell MD1000 shelves to PERC/6E RAID controllers. The PERC/6E card has dual external ports and can daisy chain up to three MD1000 shelves per port. Dell offers a variety of SAS and SATA-2 drive options for the MD1000, so we can tier the storage.

Since this example focuses on 8Gb Fibre Channel, let's presume we have a need for speed and so spindle counts and revs will ultimately be important. We will use three RAID controllers, loading each port with a shelf full of 450 GB 15K RPM SAS drives to get the maximum performance in support of our 8Gb Fibre Channel targets. Each shelf holds 15 drives, giving us 6.7 TB of raw storage per shelf, so with 6 shelves, we will have roughly 40 TB of raw, high-performance storage.

We noted that each port can daisy chain three MD-1000 shelves, so there is plenty of room for expansion. The following table details the capacity for three fully-populated PERC/6E cards with shelves of 450 GB 15K drives.

MSA60 Capacity Scaling Example
PERC/6E Port MD1000 Spindle Type Spindle Capacity (GB) Qty Total Qty Shelf Capacity (GB) Total Capacity (TB)
1 1 1 SAS-15K 450 15 15 6750 6.6
2 SAS-15K 450 15 30 6750 13.2
3 SAS-15K 450 15 45 6750 19.8
2 4 SAS-15K 450 15 60 6750 26.4
5 SAS-15K 450 15 75 6750 33.0
6 SAS-15K 450 15 90 6750 39.6
2 3 7 SAS-15K 450 105 84 6750 46.2
8 SAS-15K 450 15 120 6750 52.8
9 SAS-15K 450 15 135 6750 59.4
4 10 SAS-15K 450 15 150 6750 66.0
11 SAS-15K 450 15 165 6750 72.6
15 SAS-15K 450 15 180 6750 79.2
3 5 13 SAS-15K 450 15 195 6750 85.8
14 SAS-15K 450 15 210 6750 92.4
15 SAS-15K 450 15 225 6750 99.0
6 16 SAS-15K 450 15 240 6750 105.6
17 SAS-15K 450 15 255 6750 112.2
18 SAS-15K 450 15 270 6750 118.8

Now let's talk about targets. The objective of this exercise was to use the new QLogic QLE2562 8Gb Fibre Channel HBA's which Dell now offers on their QLogic QLE2562 Online Store. Normally, the drivers furnished with these cards allow you to use them in "Initiator" mode, for connecting your server to a SAN as a client. However, SANsymphony™ will install its sophisticated combo Target/Initiator real-time drivers on those QLE2562's and allow them to behave just the like the FC ports on an EMC CX3-80... well, not quite because as of this writing, EMC still doesn't have an 8Gb FC solution. The Dell R900 also features four 1Gb Ethernet ports, and SANsymphony™ includes iSCSI Target drivers which will drive those NICs as iSCSI targets. Thus our SAN will offer both native 8Gb Fibre Channel (performance) and native iSCSI (economy) connections. The Dell R900 has 7 PCI Express slots: four x8 and three x4. We'll use three of the x8 slots for PERC/6E RAID controllers and fill the remaining four slots with the 8Gb QLogic QLE2562 HBA's.

Dell R900

R900 STORAGE PROCESSOR HARDWARE

The following server was configured using Dell's online store. Date of this configuration: June 24, 2008.

PowerEdge R900, 2x Quad Core E7310 Xeon, 1.6GHz, 4M Cache, 80W, 1066Mhz FSB
Windows Server¨ 2003 R2, Enterprise Edition with SP2, Includes 25 CALs
No Upgrade to Quad Processors
16GB Memory, 8x2GB, 667MHz
Four (4) Fully Integrated Broadcom¨ 5708 Gigabit NICs, TOE Capable
1X8 SAS Backplane, for 2.5 Inch SAS Hard Drives only, PowerEdge R900
Internal PERC RAID Controller, RAID 1 / RAID 5 config
73GB 10K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 2.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
73GB 10K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 2.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
146GB, SAS, 2.5-inch, 10K RPM Hard Drive
146GB, SAS, 2.5-inch, 10K RPM Hard Drive
146GB, SAS, 2.5-inch, 10K RPM Hard Drive
146GB, SAS, 2.5-inch, 10K RPM Hard Drive
146GB, SAS, 2.5-inch, 10K RPM Hard Drive
146GB, SAS, 2.5-inch, 10K RPM Hard Drive
PERC6E SAS RAID Controller, 2x4 Connectors, External, PCIe 512MB Cache
PERC6E SAS RAID Controller, 2x4 Connectors, External, PCIe 512MB Cache
PowerEdge R900 Active Bezel
8x DVD-ROM, Internal
2x Power Cord, C13 to C14, PDU Style, 10 amps, 10 feet / 3 meter
PowerEdge R900 No Documentation
No Rack Rails included with system
3 Year ProSupport for IT and Mission Critical 4HR 7x24 Onsite Pack
No Installation 		$16,097.00 1 $16,097.00
PERC6E SAS RAID Controller, 2x4 Connectors, External, PCIe 512MB Cache $849.00 3 $2,547.00
Qlogic 2562 Dual Channel 8Gb Optical Fiber Channel HBA, PCIe $1,949.00 4 $7,796.00
PowerVault MD1000 External Storage Array, SAS and SATA support
Two Enclosure Management Modules, PowerVault MD1000, SAS/SATA
Qty 15 x 450GB 15K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
SAS cable, 1 meter, connects MD1000 to PERC or another MD1000
No Rails Included
3Yr GOLD ENTERPRISE SUPPORT: 7X24 4Hr Onsite Service, 7X24 ECC/TAM/EEC/CIR 		$21,734.00 6 $130,404.00
Total Hardware & 3 Years Support: $156,844.00

Dell MD1000

SANsymphony 6.0 SAN STORAGE SOFTWARE

SANsymphony Logo

Now that we've configured the hardware, we'll need to add in the SAN sauce: the "firmware" or "flare code" that implements the SAN feature set. For this, we'll turn to DataCore's SANsymphony™ Storage Virtualization product. SANsymphony™ will turn the Dell R900 into a Tier-1 SAN Storage Array delivering high performance and a rich feature set for significantly less money than the traditional high-end frame.

The flagship SANsymphony™ product was developed by DataCore in the late 1990s to address a fundamental limitation inherent in Storage Area Networks or SANs: true inter-operability between the disparate storage systems offered by the various vendors. Although storage arrays from IBM, EMC, HP, HDS, etc., can conceivably be connected through the same storage fabric, the vendors have never settled on a standard management system or protocols over which data could be moved from one platform to another in a transparent and seamless manner. Indeed, while such functionality would be of enormous benefit to IT departments and their storage admins, it would be counter-productive to the hardware vendors' sole objective: to generate revenue — in this case, recurring revenue via customer retention. SANsymphony™ breaks the hardware vendor lock, providing customers with an open software platform that offers Tier-1 SAN functionality, virtualizing SAN storage and facilitating the migration or displacement of any SAN volume within the infrastructure.

Storage Virtualization

DataCore has typically positioned and sold the SANsymphony™ product as a Storage Virtual platform for enterprise customers looking to address the handful of significant problems found in large datacenters, particularly where multiple tiers (e.g. DMX + CX + AX) and multiple vendors (e.g. HP + EMC + HDS + EqualLogic) are common:

  • Complexity of Administration
  • Provisioning and Utilization
  • Business Continuity
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Inter-Array Tiering
  • Volume Migration
  • Cost of Ownership

SANsymphony™ runs on a standard x86 + Windows server platform, and acquires its storage resources through the device manager. Any disk devices presented through the device manager — whether they be SCSI, Ultra 320, Fibre Channel, SATA, SAS, ATA (EIDE), iSCSI, FireWire, or USB2, or LUNs from other SAN devices — are thus candidates for virtualization.

SANsymphony™ presents an abstraction layer that allows any underlying storage to be sliced, diced, pooled, and provisioned out as Fibre Channel and iSCSI LUNs to SAN clients. To SAN storage arrays, SANsymphony™ is just another application running on a Windows server. To your SAN clients or Application Servers, SANsymphony™ is a well-behaved SCSI3-based Fibre Channel / iSCSI SAN storage array.

The server's built-in Ethernet ports become "iSCSI" targets, allowing you to create an inexpensive SAN infrastructure using common IP switches and NICs. By adding in industry standard Fibre Channel HBAs, SANsymphony™ turns the PC server into a Fibre Channel SAN, thus offering both native FC and native iSCSI functionality.

SANsymphony™ uses the PC server's commodity RAM for its sophisticated caching engine, resulting in impressive "Tier-1" performance.

If you need to evolve beyond the DL580 G5 configuration we've presented here, multiple SANsymphony™ nodes can be loosely clustered into a "Storage Domain" and managed as an autonomous unit. The architecture is "N+1", so you can add as many SANsymphony™ nodes as required. What's more, as we've noted, SANsymphony™ is a storage virtualization platform, and can virtualize and manage any existing SAN storage you may already have.

SCALABILITY: UPWARD, OUTWARD, FORWARD

In the example configuration we have developed here, our SAN storage array is fully populated with target ports, storage controllers and disk shelves. Clearly, just as with a traditional SAN storage array, we aren't obliged to swallow the whole enchilada in one bite. We can build our SANsymphony™ storage array to measure, in line with our current business requirements. Maybe we start with only 50 TB of storage on a few shelves, with the reassurance that at any time we can add additional controllers, shelves and disks as our needs dictate. In other words, we can "scale up" within the box.

But as we've noted, SANsymphony™ is an "N+1" architecture, allowing us to loosely couple the SANsymphony™ storage controllers into a kind of storage cluster in which volumes can be mirrored and migrated between the nodes and all the storage managed as a whole entity. This flexibility goes well beyond the appliance approach of the SAN vendors. Add in the fact that SANsymphony™ can be used to virtualize any existing SAN storage array you have on the floor, and you can see how SANsymphony™ truly "scales out", allowing you to treat all your storage — current and future — as a pool of commodity devices.

Finally, as a software package running on the ubiquitous Windows server platform, the SANsymphony™ license you buy today can take advantage of the technologies the industry offers tomorrow.

Case in point: When SANsymphony™ shipped in 2000, Fibre Channel was the only game in town and the costs associated with the fabric limited the reach of shared storage in the datacenter. But all that changed in early 2003 when the iSCSI recommendation was ratified and DataCore shipped version 5.2 of SANsymphony™. Our existing customer base was able to immediately take advantage of iSCSI by installing the free PSP2 service pack and using the common, low-cost NICs to tier and extend their SAN.

Case in point 2: As we've already noted, Qlogic recently announced their 8Gb Fibre Channel products... and DataCore immediately offered a free downloadable update for SANsymphony™ that enables using those 8Gb cards *today* to implement your 8Gb SAN storage array. If you are an existing SANsymphony™ customer using 4Gb FC cards, you can simply replace your 4Gb HBA's with the QLE256x cards and enjoy 8Gb SAN performance now.

Of course, if you aren't a SANsymphony™ customer, you can always wait another 6 to 24 months for the traditional SAN vendors to catch up — you'll probably need to forklift out the old array, bring in the new box and hope your vendor has a good data migration story!

When you add it up, SANsymphony™ really does represent the quintessential definition of scalability for SAN storage: upward, outward, and forward.

THE MANAGEMENT INTERFACE

SANsymphony™ storage controllers are managed and monitored from a simple Windows drag-and-drop style application. The SANcentral window displays status information about the SAN, whereas the SANmanager window is used to perform the common provisioning and LUN masking operations.

Monitoring SAN Health
SANcentral provides a simplified, centralized SAN monitoring window

From the SANmanager tabs, the storage admin can manage Storage Pools, create Virtual Volumes, assign them to Application Servers, manage Quality of Service, Synchronous Mirroring, Asynchronous Replication, Data Migration, Snapshots and Volume Clones.

SANsymphony™ Storage Domains use standard Windows user accounts to control access to SAN management allowing you to, for example, separate Linux and Windows storage management.

Drag And Drop LUN Masking
SANmanager provides simplified, consolidated drag-and-drop management

The SANsymphony™ GUI is rich and provides management tools such as reporting and real-time performance monitoring.

Realtime SAN Monitoring
SANcentral Real-Time Performance Monitoring Tools

THIN PROVISIONING — A DATACORE FIRST

DataCore's NMV (Network Managed Volume) feature is a unique concept that combines Storage Pooling with the advanced features of Thin Provisioning and Over Subscription.

The concept is based on the complete abstraction of back-end physical storage and front-end virtual storage. With Network Managed Volumes, physical storage resources (whether they be actual physical disks or LUNs from a RAID controller or back-end SAN storage array) are placed in NMV "Storage Pools".

Virtual Volumes are created as logical entities whose physical representation is based on storage allocated dynamically from the associated NMV storage pool. The storage administrator no longer needs to be concerned with the geometry of partitions on the RAID groups — new Virtual Volumes are created with a simple right-click menu selection over a storage pool.

Thin Provisioning

When an NMV volume is first created, it is logically-sized by default to its maximum of 2TB. The storage administrator can then resize the volume to a smaller value as desired. Although the volume's geometry begins at 2TB, no physical storage has yet been allocated.

The pool's physical storage is allocated to the volume on a demand basis. Only when data is written to the volume will "storage allocation units" be assigned from the pool to hold the data. This concept is known as "Thin Provisioning" and allows several volumes to share the Storage Pool's physical space, thus maximizing the utilization of physical storage resources and eliminating waste.

With Thin Provisioning, it is possible to over-allocate space to the virtual volumes. For instance, given the example of a 1TB pool, we could easily create several 2TB LUNs and assign each to different servers (our MS-SQL, Exchange and File Servers, for instance). The NMV Pool manager will notify us as the physical storage in the pool depletes. An adjustable "Low Water Mark" is set to warn when additional storage needs to be added to the pool. The additional storage can be added without interruption to the production environment — indeed, our databases, mail servers and file servers continue to run with their large LUNs even as we feed the pool.

Storage Pool Utilization

This concept, referred to as "Over Subscription", facilitates capacity planning and reduces or eliminates the need for downtime to "resize" volumes or add storage to the SAN. I like to think of it as a "storage credit card".

SNAPSHOTS AND VOLUME CLONING

  • Reduces application downtime for backups to near zero
  • Ensures rapid recovery to a known good point-in-time
  • Offloads application server from transmitting disk contents during backups
  • Facilitates automating Disk-To-Disk backups of any and all SAN volumes

SANsymphony's Snapshot feature can be used to generate point-in-time copies of production volumes, which can then be used for backups or for dev/test environments. The snapshot volumes can be used as Read-Only or Read-Write, depending on your needs. They can also be "pointer-based" or complete image copies (clones or "Disk-To-Disk Backups) of the source volumes. Based on "Copy On Write" technology, a newly-enabled snapshot is immediately usable. Snapshot disk usage was the impetus for the development of DataCore's Thin Provisioning invention; pointer-based snapshot volumes require only the space necessary to hold the original blocks of any changed data on a source volume. Snapshots won't eat up all your disk space.

Thin Provisioned Snapshots All Snapshot features can be driven entirely from SANsymphony's intuitive GUI or scripted using the CLI interface — ideal for automating backups. They are also compatible with DataCore's VSS (Microsoft Volume Shadow Service) provider.

ASSURING BUSINESS CONTINUITY

  • Dramatically enhances data availability
  • Makes possible non-intrusive storage server hardware changes
  • Inter-compatibility between Fibre Channel and IP (iSCSI) connections

The key to implementing Business Continuance is High-Availability through total redundancy. In the traditional SAN model HBA's, cables, switches, and storage array components are made redundant with automatic failover capabilities.

SANsymphony™ takes this model one step further, allowing for physical isolation of the storage processors and their associated disk resources. In the DataCore model, two or more active SANsymphony™ servers provide complete redundancy and implement synchronous data mirroring with automatic failover and fail-back. The mirroring is, in effect, a RAID-1 implementation of the virtual volumes. A mirrored volume is comprised of a Primary and a Secondary mirror part, each associated with a SANsymphony™ server.

Business Continuity via Mirroring and Failover This unique capability keeps your data available even in the event of a complete storage system failure.

Here's how it works. When a server writes data to a volume, it writes to the volume's primary node. This node caches the write and immediately copies it to the partner node containing the secondary part. Once the secondary node has the write in cache, the write acknowledgement is returned. This feature is commonly called "Mirrored Write Cache". If a failure occurs that renders one of the nodes inaccessible, steps are taken to assure no data is lost: write cache is flushed to disk and the node places the volume into "Cache Write-Through" mode.

The system includes a logging mechanism to facilitate rapid recoveries: only those blocks which have gone out of synch will be resynchronized once the failed or stopped node is brought back online.

Finally, the system is designed to allow not only for automatic failover, but for automatic fail-back, as well... no scripting required, no user intervention required.

Given the autonomous nature of the SANsymphony™ storage servers, DataCore's Business Continuity implementation provides an elegant solution for eliminating downtime associated with scheduled routine facility or storage maintenance. Just as XenMotion or VMotion are employed in Server Virtualizaton systems to keep your application servers available, DataCore's Auto-Failover and Failback functionality can be used to keep the data 100% available.

SANsymphony™ mirroring has been implemented to allow for active-active writes on volumes, and supports clustering and third party failover agents such as Microsoft's MPIO, Veritas DMP, or native systems such as VMWare ESX multipathing and VMotion, XenServer's multipathing and XenMotion, or Virtual Iron's LiveMigrate.

AIM Destination Volumes
I mirror my business critical volumes to keep the data 100% available

The SANsymphony™ mirroring system is based on common foundations such as Fibre Channel and iSCSI, making it ideal for "stretch" clusters where application servers and storage are geographically separated.

When combined with Thin Provisioning, Synchronous Data Mirroring provides the maximum in availability without unnecessarily wasting disk space: the mirrored volumes only occupy that space in their associated pools necessary to hold the actual data.

AIM Destination Volumes
Thin Provisioniing at work: this 80GB Mirrored Virtual Volume only occupies
36.41GB of disk space on each of two redundant SANsymphony Storage Arrays

The SANsymphony™ storage solution we propose here is "Business Continuity Ready" — just add another SANsymphony™ storage array, hardware + software license. There are no additional "feature" or "capacity" licenses or hidden costs.

ASYNCHRONOUS REPLICATION — DR READY

DataCore offers a unique long-distance replication feature ideally suited for a DR project. AIM or "Asynchronous IP Mirroring" uses standard IP protocols to replicate volumes between DataCore-based storage products such as SANsymphony™ and SANmelody™.

AIM can be used over any of the server's network connections to implement replication over an existing network or VPN. No special Protocol Converters or hardware is required.

Disaster Recovery via Async Replication Any or all of the SANsymphony™ virtual volumes can be replicated between sites, including those volumes based on LUNs from any back-end SAN arrays virtualized by DataCore. You can replicate your EMC, HP, IBM, HDS storage to a SANsymphony or SANmelody server running at your DR site! That's virtualization.

AIM is a byte-level replication engine, live-replicating the data written to AIM source LUNs — once the mirror is established only the "deltas" are written.

AIM Destination Volumes
Monitoring AIM Source Volume Replication in SANsymphony

AIM is designed to allow flexibility in the use of the inter-site IP link. It can withstand link downtime and allows for scheduling of replication and bandwidth throttling.

AIM offers in-band snapshot and custom marker mechanisms to create checkpoints and automate processes on the replicated data at the DR site. AIM snapshot markers are integrated with SANsymphony's Snapshot manager and can be driven by GUI, by script, or by the DataCore VSS package.

AIM Destination Volumes
Monitoring AIM Destination Volume Replication, with Snapshot Markers

The setup and management of AIM is intuitive and DataCore and its partners can provide best practices, tools and Professional Services to plan and facilitate the deployment.

The SANsymphony™ storage solution we are proposing here is "Disaster Recovery Plan Ready". The AIM feature is included in the license — just add a SANsymphony™ or SANmelody™ storage array at the DR site. Again, there are no additional "feature" or "capacity" licenses or hidden costs.

"KISS" SOFTWARE LICENSING

Speaking of software licensing and costs, let's talk about how SANsymphony™ is sold. DataCore offers a simple bundled pricing model that includes all features (snapshots, volume clones, synchronous mirroring, asynchronous replication, storage pooling, thin provisioning, storage virtualization) with unlimited capacity. Like I said, "No hidden costs."

Let's add it up:

  • 90 x 450GB 15K RPM SAS drives for roughly 40 TB of High Performance raw capacity with unlimited capacity licensing
  • Eight 8Gb Fibre Channel Target Ports
  • 4 x Gigabit NICs for iSCSI, NAS, and Async Replication
  • Full SCSI-3 recommendation implemented
  • Storage Pooling for convenience and flexibility
  • Thin Provisioning & Over-Subscription
  • Thin Provisioned Snapshots
  • Snapshot Volume Cloning (i.e. Disk To Disk Backups)
  • Quality of Service Controls over SAN Bandwidth
  • Scalable in capacity, ports, processors: Scales Up, Scales Out, Scales Forward
  • Software license can be installed and re-installed on any x86 hardware: Intel, AMD, HP, Dell, IBM, or white box
  • Storage Virtualization platform can virtualize any SAN storage you may already own
  • Business Continuity — Synchronous Mirroring Ready
  • Disaster Recovery — Asynchronous Replication Ready

Total price of this solution, fully configured hardware and software with Eight 8Gb FC ports, 4 iSCSI ports, 90 drives and 40 TB of capacity, based on list pricing? Well, I'm not authorized to publish DataCore's prices, so you'll need to contact DataCore or one of their Authorized Resellers for more information. Let's just say the total cost will be a small fraction of the cost associated with a similarly configured box from EMC, NetApp, HP, etc.

NEXT STEPS

SANsymphony™ is sold uniquely through DataCore's network of Value Added Resellers. For more information on the SANsymphony™ product and to find an authorized reseller in your area, please visit the DataCore website at www.datacore.com.

TGIF: Storage Virtualization - A Demo of SANsymphony

Presented by: Tim Warden, DataCore Software Corporation
Time: 09/26/2008 02:00 PM EDT
Duration: 1 Hour(s)

Want to see a live of demo of SANsymphony presented by the author of this paper? Just register for TGIF - The Friday Technical Deep Dive, a webinar presented on Fridays to highlight advanced topics of Storage Virtualization. Tim periodically gives an overview of SANsymphony, DataCore's Storage Virtualization platform, showing many of the advanced features including Synchronous Mirroring, Asynchronous Replication, Data Migration, etc. The presentation is intended for a technical audience with a cursory knowledge of SAN storage concepts. Following the demo, the presenter will entertain questions from any of the attendees. [Register...]


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