Create the Ideal, Cost Effective SAN with DataCore SANmelody

DataCore SANmelody overcomes the high cost and complexity of traditional SAN storage. SANmelody converts standard PC hardware into fully capable storage servers and serves virtual disks over existing networks to application servers. SANmelody is simple to operate and lets you cost-effectively optimise, manage and protect data storage and disk space.

Protect Your Data, Infrastructure & Business with Real-time Mirroring

SANmelody fulfils business continuity objectives by preventing storage-related maintenance, upgrades, reconfiguration, expansion and failures from disrupting IT operations.

SANmelody automatically updates identical copies of virtual disks stored on separate drives. Either half of a mirrored disk may fail or be taken out of service without causing server or application downtime. Transparent failover occurs automatically.

Once the equipment is back in service, SANmelody automatically resynchronises the mirrored set before restoring the original I/O paths. Splitting the disk mirror between different rooms, different floors or different buildings provides considerably higher levels of availability than a top-of-the-line, internally redundant array packaged in a single enclosure. The physical segregation shields one half of the mirror from problems with updates, firmware, drivers, power failures, water leaks, etc.

SANmelody protects your business and your data by ensuring it is always available and accessible.

Thin Provisioning - Just Enough Space, Just in Time

SANmelody dynamically allocates storage space effectively and economically through Virtual Volumes. Virtual Volumes do away with labour intensive and disruptive resizing and repartitioning of disks on each host, and the wastefulness of over-provisioning. Instead, Virtual Volumes provide "just enough space, just in time" to fulfil the demands of applications.

Virtual Volumes appear to applications as the largest disks addressable by their operating systems e.g. 2TB up to 1PB (1,000TB or 1,000,000GB). In reality, only a fraction of that space is actually required from the physical storage.

As your server stores data on the Virtual Volume, SANmelody allocates disk blocks from the physical storage. For example, although your server might be assigned a 2TB Virtual Volume, the physical space required will only be 128 MB. As the application starts to fill up the initial 128 MB, SANmelody transparently and automatically allocates additional blocks from the free pool.

These benefits will please IT administrators as they won't have to think about stretching file systems, re-partitioning and moving data around to create free space. In addition, the servers that don’t use much space don’t tie up unused capacity.

This guarantees you get a better return on your storage investment and lower it's total cost of ownership. Typically the utilisation of your storage will increase from 40% to 80%.

Back Up Your Data in an Instant with Snapshots

A snapshot of a disk instantly creates a "point in time" copy regardless of its size. You can use the snapshot disk as the source for backups to disk or tape instead of the original disk and its files. This improves the performance and reliability of your backup as files won’t be locked open or changed and the source server doesn’t slow down whilst running the backup. It also provides a readily accessible source of files and folders as they were when the snapshot was taken making it easier for you to recover individual files.

The snapshot can also be "rolled back" on top of the original source volume. For example, before upgrading an Exchange Server or a virtual machine, you could take a snapshot of it. If the upgrade fails you can use the snapshot to restore the volume and its files and folders to its original state.

Multiple snapshots can be taken of the same volume. For example, you could take four snapshots of a volume throughout the day. This would give you the ability to roll the source volume back to pre-determined points, or simple access deleted or changed files.

Snapshots can also be used to increase your backup window. Many organisations find that there isn’t enough time anymore to run a backup to tape overnight. Using a snapshot the backup can take as long as it needs to without any impact on your servers, infrastructure or clients.

Comprehensive Disaster Recovery with Remote Replication

Remote Replication works in a similar way to Real-time Mirroring but is designed to replicate data to another SAN across the Internet or a private connection. This feature makes it possible to implement business continuity and disaster recovery plans that cover the temporary or total loss of an entire building or campus.

Remote Replication streams your data as it changes to your remote site. When configured correctly, the data at the remote site may only be a few minutes behind the live site. If disaster strikes you can instantly failover to your remote site confident that data loss is minimised and the SAN disks are ready to be assigned to standby servers.

Remote Replication can also be used to remotely protect branch offices. Servers and desktops in remote locations can stream their hard drive across an Internet or VPN connection to a DataCore SAN located at your head office. Remote servers can now be backed up centrally ensuring that it’s performed regularly and correctly.

Boost Performance & Add New Features

SANmelody utilises the power and low cost of commodity x86 or x64 PC hardware. If your existing storage solution is slow, inflexible or lacking in advanced features such as real-time mirroring, remote replication and snapshots you can boost its performance by using SANmelody.

Any disk storage that you can connect to the SANmelody server can be used as physical storage within the SAN. SANmelody can improve storage arrays from HP, IBM, EMC, NetApp, LeftHand, Nexsan – anything that can be connected to a PC. It can be directly connected using a RAID card, e.g. Dell MD1000 / MD1120 or via iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC) or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

SANmelody’s advanced, predictive caching significantly increases disk performance. In fact up to 1TB of RAM per SANmelody server can be used for caching.

As your storage requirements increase, you can upgrade the SANmelody server with more RAM, faster CPUs, faster interface cards (e.g. 10Gb Ethernet / iSCSI, 8Gb FC / FCoE) and more storage.

All of this delivers a SAN that provides flexibility and performance far superior to a traditional hardware based solution. SANmelody is also more cost effective than traditional solutions.

Create Tiered Storage & Get the Best Value from your Storage

SANmelody allows you to create pools of physical storage. These pools are used in conjunction with thin provisioning to create virtual disks.

You decide which physical disks and storage arrays are allocated to which pools. This allows you to create a Tier 1 pool made up of fast SAS or SSD disks. This Tier 1 pool can be used to create disks for applications and servers that will benefit the most e.g. Microsoft Exchange storage groups or SQL databases, logs and indexes.

Slower SATA disks with their low cost per GB can be added to Tier 2 or 3 pools that are focused on archiving or applications that don’t require the faster performance of SAS or SSD.

As the utilisation of a pool increases you can add more physical storage to it. This allows the pool to grow with your requirements and still maintain high rates of utilisation.