Texas Memory Systems bundles hypervisor, solid state storage
Enterprise storage company Texas Memory Systems launched this morning a line of products that bundle its solid state hardware with a hypervisor provided by DataCore Software.
DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor adds storage management features to Texas Memory's RamSan disks. The company hopes that bundling the products makes for a simpler, more cost-effective choice for IT administrators.
Readers of ZDNet know the benefit of hypervisors: you can squeeze more performance from the same infrastructure. Texas Memory claims a 200 percent boost with its offering, which plugs into the DataCore host directly or through a fabric.
The combo is best suited for server and desktop virtualization projects and should allow VMWare administrators to lower the amount of memory allocated to each guest OS without sacrificing too much performance. By pooling and mirroring disk blocks across available devices, the software speeds up I/O response and throughput.
More detail on how it all works, in the company's own words:
When provisioning a virtual machine disk format (VMDK) on a LUN presented to the SANsymphony-V cluster, the virtual guest can utilize internal paging mechanisms with sub-millisecond response times. Under this configuration, the virtual guest would have access to an extensive amount of storage while taking advantage of the read and write performance of enterprise-grade SLC and eMLC Flash.
A few more features:
- Caching to automatically optimize disk access across tiers for best utilization
- Synchronous mirroring for high-availability failover
- Asynchronous replication for disaster recovery
- Snapshots and CDP to increase data integrity and ease management
- Thin provisioning uses only the disk space actually written
The attraction: IT administrators might be able to squeeze a bit more life out of their existing storage infrastructure before necessitating an upgrade. Which, in a trying economic time, might not be such a bad idea.