Is It Time to Upgrade Your DataCore SANsymphony-V?

A few months ago, DataCore released SANsymphony-V 10.0. If you’re running an earlier version of SANsymphony-V, there are several reasons why you might want to start planning your upgrade. There are some great new features in v10, and we’ll get to those in a moment, but you should also bear in mind that DataCore’s support policy is to support the current full release (v10) and the release just previous to the current full release (v9.x). Support for v8.x officially ends on December 31, 2014, and support for v7.x ended last June.

That doesn’t mean DataCore won’t help you if you have a problem with an earlier version. It does mean that their obligation is limited to “best effort” support, and does not extend to bug fixes, software updates, or root-cause analysis of issues you may run into. So, if you’re on anything earlier than v9.x, you really should talk to us about upgrading.

But even if you’re on v9.x, there are some good reasons why you may want to upgrade to 10.0:

• Scalability has doubled from 16 to a maximum of 32 nodes.
• Supports high-speed 40/56 GbE iSCSI, 16 Gb Fibre Channel, and iSCSI target NIC teaming.
• Performance visualization/heat map tools to give you better insight into the behavior of flash and disk storage tiers.
• New auto-tiering settings to optimize expensive resources like flash cards.
• Intelligent disk rebalancing to dynamically redistribute the load across available disks within a storage tier.
• Automated CPU load leveling and flash optimization.
• Disk pool optimization and self-healing storage – disk contents are automatically restored across the remaining storage in the pool.
• New self-tuning caching algorithms and optimizations for flash cards and SSDs.
• Simple configuration wizards to rapidly set up different use cases.

And if that’s not enough, v10 now allows you to provision high-performance virtual SANs that can scale to more than 50 million IOPS and up to 32 Petabytes of capacity across a cluster of 32 servers. Not sure whether a virtual SAN can deliver the performance you need? They’ll give you a free virtual SAN for non-production evaluation use.

Check out this great overview of software-defined storage virtualization: