Ease Of Use Highlights Storage Pooling Software.

One of the goals of SAN technology is to accomplish storage pooling; that is, the ability to treat all storage as coming from a common device. Probably one of the best implementations you will find for this purpose is SANsymphony, the software package produced by Datacore Software. I have never seen its match for ease of use.

SANsymphony is offered in server-based and network-based configurations. The entry-level Server Edition supports a single storage pool managed by an individual Storage Domain Server. The Network Edition supports larger-scale network storage pools spanning two or more collaborating Storage Domain Servers. A seamless upgrade path is offered between these editions.

Two features of the software impressed me greatly. The first was the ease and speed a user enjoys as storage is expanded. There was no reboot in the SANsymphony-managed pools. The software offers a virtual disk assignment that replaced more complex hardware-intensive reconfigurations. This kind of assignment allows full choice in selecting the kind of configuration you need for a given application.

The drag-and-drop interface has to be the last word in ease of use and configuration convenience. I mixed and matched a variety of configurations from disk concentrations to JBOD. SANsymphony allows entire disks, partitions, or stripes to be flexibly allocated among application servers, even if they are running different operating systems. In these days of heterogeneous computing, the ability to be OS-agnostic is becoming increasingly more important.

To the user, these appear as directly connected disks. As the need arises, authorized administrators allocate storage to individual computers using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Volumes can also be shared between multiple cooperating servers by assigning appropriate read and write privileges to each. By allowing you to create smaller logical volumes, SANsymphony lets you optimize resource allocation to match application demands.

The application hosts connect to the network storage pool using Fibre-Channel point-to-point, hub, or switched links. No software is added to either the application hosts or the storage devices to create the logical connection. SANsymphony software frees disk resources from being confined to individual hosts while leveraging Fibre-Channel's enhanced distance, connectivity, and performance attributes. The result is a versatile and scalable relationship between application servers and networked storage resources.

SANsymphony is a feature-rich package, suitable for server and network-based SAN. It is an essential engine for those who use the TrueSAN architecture. The integrator who needs user-friendliness and ease of storage configuration/allocation would be hard pressed to find SANsymphony's superior.