VMware vSphere Storage From DataCore: DataCore SANsymphony PSP17 News

Introduction & Key Features

SANsymphony 10.0 PSP17 was released on 17th of January 2024. PSP17 features the following major enhancement highlights:

  • Adaptive Data Placement (ADP): Extending SANsymphony’s intelligent data tiering capabilities with a capacity optimization tier. SANsymphony’s advanced ML algorithms intuitively identify and move rarely-accessed datasets to highly optimized storage tiers at sub-LUN-level while guaranteeing swift low-latency access to hot data all the time. This innovative and unique approach bypasses traditional LUN-level borders

Compressed Snapshots and Rollbacks: SANsymphony’s enhanced point-in-time data copies improves Storage economy. Both full and differential copies reduces footprint and leads to significant cost savings. This also means that with the same raw capacity a higher number of snapshots can be managed which results in extending data retention time and recovery options.

Administration and Configuration

Advanced Admin Settings: Storage administration is streamlined with SANsymphony PSP17.  The introduction of a new snapshot group wizard provides granular control over every snapshot in a group. it also supports the creation of pools tailored to specific use cases. With the new system-wide average latency thresholds, performance issues are detected before they escalate.

This release of SANsymphonyWizard also includes the preview of the new SANsymphony VASA provider v3.1 supporting vVol replication (VMware certification pending)

With the new release of PSP17 there is also a new installation wizard, called DIM-V, for deploying a HCI environment within the vSphere environment. This automates all tasks to deploy and configure the SANsymphony VMs to a vSphere environment and the deployment can be done in minutes.

vSphere Plugin Enhancements

For easy administration of SANsymphony Storage DataCore built a vSphere Plugin. With this plugin administrators can manage the SANsymphony Storage resources from the vCenter UI. vSphere Plugin v3.7 was already released in December with the following enhancements:

  • A new column/option „Version“ has been added to the SANsymphony Servers, View Server Details, and Edit Server pages to display the version and release number of the SANsymphony Server.
  • A new option „Serve Datastore“ has been added to the Datastores table to allow serving a Datastore to one or more hosts.
  • The „Unserve Virtual Disk“ option has been enhanced to allow to unserve a virtual disk from multiple connected hosts.
  • A new option „Get Log Messages“ has been added to the DataCore Plug-in home page to list all the error and warning messages. This log can also be exported to a text file.
  • The Encryption and Capacity Optimization toggle buttons have been reorganized and are available together in the „Create New Datastore“, „Create Virtual Disk Template“, „View/Edit Virtual Disk Template“, and „Create and Serve New Virtual Disk“ workflows. By default, enabling Encryption will disable Capacity Optimization and vice versa.