I have never heard of SANsymphony until it was brought up to me twice in 2 days. I thought this was odd because I have been in the SAN space for a few years and never heard of it until now. This made me to do a little digging and the technology is actually pretty cool.
So here is the quick and dirty background of SANsymphony. SANsymphony is a product of DataCore Software Company. SANSymphony is sold as a Software package to maximize IT storage infrastructure and improve performance, availability and Utilization. It is sold worldwide direct or via very small channel partners. They offer a free 30 day trial via a simple download from their site. It competes with IBM SVC and EMC VPLEX . They claim to have over 10,000 customers. The product is currently positioned as one of the first to deliver SDS to the enterprise.
They claim to be able to:
- Virtualize Your External Storage Devices
- Create Virtual SANs from Direct-Attached Storage
- Dynamically Tier your data across PCIe flash cards, different storage arrays, and even the cloud
- Make Your Existing Storage Hardware Run 5 Times Faster
- Link 2 data centers in an Active/Active configuration for a FT environment
SANSymphony software requires a minimum of 2 Windows servers running a minimum of two X86-64 processors with 4GB of memory and 20GB of disk space. The 2 windows servers/nodes run in an active/passive mode with a Sync Mirror configuration.The software can scale to 32 servers and supports 32 PB of storage (wow). Both NAS/SAN are supported so it can present a block storage device as unified storage. The software can also be used as a data migration tool using a single node attached to a certified device. It is also very easy to install/remove and does not require any downtime when used for migrations supposedly.
All-in-all, it sounds like a pretty cool product. I just wonder why I have not hear about anyone using it until now. They have been around since 1998 so they aren’t exactly new. I wonder if they are as good as they make themselves sound… I would love to get my hands on a SANsymphony environment and play around a little. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for them from now on for sure!