GT: I am the CEO and one of the original founders of DataCore Software. DataCore Software pioneered storage virtualization back in the late 1990s, and is now the leading provider of hardware independent, storage virtualization software. We believe we have the largest base of customers in the industry using virtual storage area networks (SANs). DataCore has customers around the world, and they include many well known companies such as IKEA, Overstock.com, Hertz, Lufthansa, Samsung, LG Electronics, Sony, Canon, DamilerChrysler, France Telecom, DFW airport, UK’s Telegraph Group, Newmont Mining, as well as thousands of smaller and mid-size firms.

DataCore storage virtualization solutions add intelligence and the flexibility of virtualization to SANs. They give a “storage server personality” to standard servers, in much the same way as adding Oracle or VMware turns standard servers into “database servers” or “virtual machine servers.” DataCore software transforms standard servers into “virtual storage servers” that consolidate, pool and serve virtual disks from physical storage of all types, and perform enterprise-class storage management and control, thin provisioning (virtual capacity), data protection, disaster recovery, business continuity and other services, across iSCSI, FC and mixed networks, while facilitating administration and dramatically improving utilization of storage.

GT: Because VMware has helped to make customers and partners more familiar with the benefits of virtualization in the context of servers, we would often start off by explaining that: “We do for storage what VMware does for servers,” and the analogy provided a good foundation for explaining storage virtualization. But, in the last year there’s been a big change. Partners and customers are actively seeking complementary solutions to extend virtual infrastructure across the entire enterprise, from storage to server to desktop. I would say that this move to “Total Enterprise Virtualization” is the biggest change we’ve seen in the past two years. There has been an “It’s the virtualization, stupid!” realization. Before, if people thought at all about virtualization, it was in the context of a given point solution. Today, virtualization is understood as a comprehensive infrastructure solution that is absolutely strategic to a competitive business.

GT: Yes, the architectures of both our flagship products, SANsymphony™ and SANmelody™, are "future proof." It’s an important differentiator in the discussion of virtualization solutions. When you buy a storage array or hardware appliance to provide virtualization, your investment in virtualization moves rapidly toward obsolescence the moment you buy it. The hardware platform upon which the appliance is constructed is, at best, what was current when the appliance was designed, and your virtualization investment goes in the garbage when you have to (or, for performance or compatibility reasons, want to) replace that appliance. On the other hand, DataCore solutions are hardware-independent, upgradeable, software products. They are not tied to any hardware platform; they run on a standard server. You can pick the best, current model server your budget will allow, and when it comes time to replace it, do the same. Your DataCore storage virtualization solution can transition from one to the other and, because it is running on a new, fast server, will outperform alternative solutions that are hardware "dependent."

GT: Sure. "Virtual Capacity," or "Thin Provisioning" as it is more often called today, solves two major pain points – it eliminates the 'out of disk space' stoppages that require business downtime to add disks and restart applications, and reduces the amount of time you have to spend formatting, allocating and provisioning disks, a tedious, labor intensive, ongoing process that begs for automation. Thin Provisioning lets you 'point and click' and automatically serve virtual disks to storage starved application servers, where needed, when needed, in sizes ranging from gigabytes to terabytes. To application servers, the virtual disk appears, performs and works just like a locally attached disk. The difference is that the actual physical disk capacity is drawn from the storage pool automatically over the SAN on an as-needed basis, therefore ensuring optimal disk space utilization. Applications never have to run out of space. Once it is set up, Thin Provisioning is a completely automated process, providing "as needed" capacity without human intervention.

Of course, it is virtualization that makes this possible – the ability to affect and allocate resources independently from the physical devices that create them. Thin Provisioning is one way that we are able to deliver very High Utilization and Ease of Administration, two of the key benefits that are leading businesses to virtual infrastructures. It is estimated that in the average business, storage utilization is less than 30%, and this is now hitting home at the highest levels. Recently, I met with an executive of a major financial institution who told me that his CEO had declared that if they were only using a third of their storage at any point in time, then the cost of that storage is actually 3x more than its original price, which was unacceptable. Thin Provisioning and storage pooling are proven ways that DataCore storage virtualization can help customers increase utilization to upwards of 90%. The ability to have many different systems use and share pooled storage, and the ease with which additional physical storage can be added without disruption to support applications, makes this practical. This is yet another benefit of storage virtualization.

I should also mention that we were the first vendor to offer Thin Provisioning in the marketplace and this year we decided to bring this advanced enterprise capability down market (download 30 day free trail). We recently introduced an entry-level SANmelody solution that includes Thin Provisioning priced at under $1,000. This breakthrough price has already resulted in hundreds of shipments and more importantly we are seeing a groundswell of interest from new SMB and iSCSI users who thought these types of innovative capabilities and benefits were beyond their reach.

GT: Well, I’d say what sets our company (as opposed to our products) apart is that we are committed to a software-based, hardware independent approach to the virtualization, management and control of storage, and to making our solutions available and affordable for enterprises large and small. Those are big differences between us and the two companies you mention, Hitachi and IBM. We don’t wrap expensive hardware around the sale of our solutions; we solve the problem with our software and leave it to the customer to choose the hardware of their choice. Both IBM and Hitachi are former partners of DataCore, and before coming to market with their own hardware "dependent" solutions, they licensed our solutions for resale. This, of course, was made possible by the fact that our solutions were hardware independent. I’m not sure that this literally qualifies as "ironic," but it sure makes the point.

Another thing that sets us apart in this industry is our experience in creating and supporting enterprise storage software. Creating software that virtualizes, controls and manages storage at a sophisticated level requires experience and skills that are not readily transferable from other areas of expertise. Even someone with experience in virtualization can’t do what we do. The core of our engineering team has been building storage software together for almost 20 years, and DataCore storage virtualization has been proven in enterprise customers throughout the world for over 9 years. That experience, in the lab and in the real world, sets us apart.

Our ability to support all our storage services over iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC) and mixed networks is certainly a product advantage. Customers do not have to commit to one or the other, and have the flexibility to choose as their needs and budgets dictate, and we are committed to making enterprise-class storage virtualization available to enterprises of all sizes. But, in terms of what differentiates us as a company in this industry, the point to be made is that, because our solution is hardware-independent software, we are readily able to bring to that solution – and the market – support for new, important industry advances, such as iSCSI, as well as our own innovations, such as Traveller™, a revolutionary marriage of continuous data protection (CDP) and virtualization that not only allows for any-point-in time data recovery, but allows the user to “timeshift” workloads so that they can be performed in parallel without disruption to production.

It’s why we lead the industry in terms of innovation, especially for large scale enterprise deployments. We were first to fully integrate a unified iSCSI and FC architecture, add domain and region wide management, enable user defined prioritization levels for recovery, incorporate “hot swap’ thin provisioning pools, and the list continues. We released SANsymphony Enterprise Edition 6.0 early this year and it incorporates all the above mentioned capabilities, and it is only the first half of our Virtualization II strategy.

GT: Yes, in fact during the last 12 months, over 60% of our sales have been associated with virtual server deployments. There’s a natural connection in the data center and in the field between what we do and what the server virtualization vendors do. When you consolidate servers, you are putting “all your eggs in one basket” to the extent that a single failure can take out a lot of virtual machines. That’s why server virtualization best practices call for a shared storage solution with true failover. However, true auto failover and recovery usually comes at a hefty price and is still the weakest link in making a SAN practical to support virtual server environments. We deliver high-availability, SAN solutions at a price that is a fraction of traditional SAN hardware solutions. But, more important than satisfying the storage requirement cost effectively, DataCore and server virtualization solutions, such as VMware, together extend virtual infrastructure from storage to servers, and, by adding a desktop virtualization solution such as Citrix, to the desktop as well. This is meaningful, because virtual infrastructure benefits stop where physical infrastructures take over. The dependence of desktops and servers on fixed and dedicated storage means that the benefits of virtualizing these infrastructures (such as flexibility, utilization, control, the ability to make changes non-disruptively) are attenuated by the limitations of physical storage. DataCore maps storage virtually, allowing customers get the most out of their investments in VMware and Citrix by extending virtual infrastructure all the way through to the storage.

In addition to our work with VMware, we have a good relationship with Virtual Iron, and we also have customers using Virtuozzo and XenSource. We also have many customers running on Microsoft Virtual Server, and we’d welcome the opportunity to collaborate with Microsoft, but it has been difficult to connect with them, which is unfortunate. We run on Windows, so there are some unique synergies, commercially and technically, in the areas of virtualization and storage that should be explored.

GT: Chargeback was a topic of interest at our quarterly customer council meetings, and our major customers told us that there is a need for this capability. SANmaestro™ was our response. Obtaining and working with the information necessary to manage assets and resources within a large storage or Windows network can be a formidable task. The network's scale presents challenges to gathering the data needed for current and future utilization and performance, profiling, analyzing the data gathered, and communicating that analysis to those who control IT purchases and budgets. For example, we have seen many companies as well as managed service providers begin to "bill" or "charge-back" their IT costs to companies or to profit centers or affiliates based on usage or quality of service, but in a large IT environment allocating and auditing usage and service can be a monumental task.

We designed SANmaestro software as a powerful and "spreadsheet simple" approach to monitor, analyze and report as well as trend storage and Windows metrics and information across large or complex environments. It is quick to set up, easy to use, and it generates useful reports and charts. It can be readily integrated with existing management systems and it can be customized to meet specialized reporting and analysis needs using a simple spreadsheet tool instead of complex programming environments.

GT: What’s next for DataCore? Virtualization II will take data protection and data integrity to another level. Utilizing CDP and time addressability technologies, it will blur the lines between backups, snapshots and disk-based technologies, advance the unification between the worlds of file shares and block storage, add a greater degree of transparency and integration of tools, self optimize and regulate domain services, provide additional quality of service capabilities and new group operations, and automate and raise disk management from the device level to the SAN level.

For additional details please see: The Storage Challenged Virtual Enterprise: The 5 Top Storage Challenges Confronting Virtual Server Deployments Download PDF
I think that we stand at the forefront of a new user-driven era for storage that places data storage in the greater context of a Total Enterprise Virtualization architecture. Our plan is simple. We are transforming the traditional, static approach to storage, in which the user is mired in low level disk administration, into a dynamic and flexible, service-level management system that self regulates, simplifies and automates the provisioning of storage resources to meet user and business application demands, and we are optimizing that system for use with VMware and other virtual, as well as physical, infrastructures.