Virtualization news for the channel community and you !

When looking at storage virtualization, it is important that the goal of storage virtualization is not undone by the additional services you implement in your data center in order to achieve the desired virtualization result.

openBench Labs has been testing SANmelody, one of the prime storage virtualization solutions around at present.  Some of their findings …

We fully expected to see some loss in throughput at the virtual disk server due to the inherent overhead of our topology; however, what we encountered was a measurably significant drop in I/O workload at the storage array as a sizable number of read requests were satisfied out of SANmelody’s cache. Using 8KB random read requests, we were able to handle 50,000 I/Os per second (IOPS). That load flooded the path between the application and storage server with 400MB of data per second, which is the limit for reads on a 4Gbps link. Nonetheless, read throughput on the link from the storage array to the server running SANmelody was only 250MBps. SANmelody was satisfying approximately 37.5% of the I/O requests from the application server using its cache.

At most SMB sites today, IT is likely to have multiple vendors’ storage arrays that have similar functions that must be managed in different ways. From an operations perspective, multiple arrays with multiple management systems forces IT administrators to develop overlapping sets of skills.

Worse yet, substantial capital costs are incurred when the same critical management functions are repeatedly licensed for every storage array. For example, licenses for snapshot, mirror, and replication functionality on an 8TB Fibre Channel SAN array with SATA disks can more than double the cost of the array. With SANmelody in place, IT buyers can plan for new storage devices not with an eye to the bottom line, but with laser-like precision.

KEY FINDINGS
-Full virtualization of direct-attached and SAN-connected storage
-Simplified SAN infrastructure management through automation of storage administration tasks using the Windows MMC
-SANmelody caching boosted I/O throughput by 33% running IOmeter
-Round-robin LUN distribution of server I/O traffic benchmarked at 50,000 IOPS using 8KB reads with no I/O bottlenecks
-No single point of failure with support for snapshots, synchronous mirroring, and synchronous replication

Full report

One little remark however, Jack Fegreus indicates that SANmelody is available as of 2TB, this week DataCore has released licenses for 0,5TB and 1TB, clearly to satisfy the SMB market.