New SANsymphony-V Turns Surplus Servers Into Virtual Storage Pools

With SANsymphony-V, DataCore is addressing the problems related to how to best utilize storage as customers consolidate servers and desktops with virtualization technology, said George Teixeira, president and CEO of the Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based company.

"With virtualization, customers consolidate workloads and get a quick drop in costs," Teixeira said. "But this also leads to single points of failure, leading to potential issues. And, as customers start managing multiple workloads on a single storage infrastructure, performance can get bogged down."

SANsymphony-V allows solution providers to take advantage of surplus servers -- which are no longer needed after using server virtualization software -- by turning them into virtual storage appliances, which can use their internal hard drives as part of a virtual storage pool, Teixeira said.

"This allows customers to use existing equipment without the need to rip and replace in order to keep costs down," he said.

Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing for DataCore, called SANsymphony-V an alternative to surprising customers with the need for costly new storage equipment to go with their virtualized server environments.

"Resellers can help customers roll in new high-powered hardware to increase storage performance in virtualized environments," Gonzalez said. "But customers can get blindsided with costs they didn't expect. With SANsymphony-V, just tell customers they can repurpose existing equipment to get started. Then, as their infrastructures expand, they can bring in new hardware as needed."

Customers can also take other surplus servers, move them offsite to a branch office or somewhere else, and turn them into a storage pool for use as a disaster recovery solution, Gonzalez said.

In addition to creating virtualized storage pools, SANsymphony-V offers other advanced capabilities for customers deploying virtual servers, Teixeira said.

For instance, the software allows data to be mirrored across two sites, and provides advanced cache techniques to run workloads in server memory instead of on storage devices to increase application performance, he said.

SANsymphony-V also replicates physical server images so they can be run remotely on virtual servers in case of a disaster, he said.

The software also includes load balancing, thin provisioning, and continuous data protection features.

SANsymphony-V is currently available, and is sold only through indirect sales channels, Teixeira said. Pricing starts at under $10,000, which includes a license for a fully-redundant, two-node environment and annual 24x7 tech support, he said.