DataCore Ready Nexsan E-Series storage arrays

Imation has announced that its Nexsan™ E-Series™ storage arrays have been certified as DataCore Ready. When combined with the DataCore SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform, the solution offers data centers rapid ROI through significant improvements in data availability, agility, performance and flexibility.
“Without virtualization, storage and compute capacity are often wasted in application-specific silos. In a virtualized environment, hardware resources can be pooled and optimized from heterogeneous devices, which significantly improves flexibility for the IT administrator,” said Mike Stolz, vice president of marketing and technical services for Imation’s Nexsan solutions. “The combined DataCore SANsymphony-V and Nexsan E-Series solution allows IT administrators to create the optimal virtualized storage architecture on highly reliable, proven Nexsan E-Series hardware.”

The integrated solution offers users a variety of benefits, including:
· Performance – Using Nexsan E-Series arrays as a high-performing storage foundation, SANsymphony-V further increases performance by supporting RAM caches of up to a terabyte to dramatically accelerate reads and writes. SANsymphony-V also automatically rebalances loads due to hotspots to further improve response and throughput.
· Efficient provisioning – The Nexsan E-Series system allows IT professionals to mix-and-match SAS, SATA and solid state drives. SANsymphony-V then provisions virtual disks as required to support different types of workloads. Granular thin provisioning and automated capacity reclamation gives administrators more options for improving efficiency.
· Auto-tiering – SANsymphony-V continuously analyzes what blocks of data need higher I/O throughput and automatically assigns those blocks to the appropriate storage tier. Throughout this automated process, priority workloads like SQL databases can be given preference to fast storage including flash, while cooler data or lower prioritized workload data can be moved to lower-cost drives. E-Series storage arrays deliver virtually unlimited flexibility for configuring storage tiers according to capacity, performance and price characteristics, and the solution enables multiple tiers to be configured in a single Nexsan E-Series system or across other existing storage hardware.
· Business continuity – By keeping data in two physically separate locations at the same time with the help of synchronous mirroring, the combined solution prevents storage from becoming a single point of failure for stretched cluster configurations. Imation and DataCore offer an appealing alternative to very expensive storage arrays. Disaster recovery scenarios also are supported by enabling asynchronous replication across distant sites.
· Migration – Storage investments risk creating more complexity and islands of incompatible devices. DataCore SANsymphony-V and Nexsan E-Series work together to pool existing storage assets, eliminating risk of incompatibility and improving ROI across the entire infrastructure. Also, DataCore SANsymphony-V fully virtualizes data from the underlying hardware, enabling migration of data from legacy systems to Nexsan E-Series with minimal or no interruption to running workloads.

“DataCore and Imation have a long-standing history of collaboration as evidenced by numerous joint customers worldwide who leverage our solutions as a part of their storage architectures,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development at DataCore. “Nexsan E-Series storage arrays combined with SANsymphony-V offer IT departments a highly efficient blueprint for optimizing IT resources and maximizing the effective value of storage investments.”