DataCore has added NAS acceleration and high-availability to its SANsymphony-V product.

The basic configuration is two mirrored servers. SANsymphony-V software runs in each server with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and its built-in NAS services, Hyper-V, and Microsoft's Clustered File Share functions, and provides a thinly-provisioned virtual block storage pool underneath them.

The storage media can be the server's own, direct-attached storage (DAS) or an external array. Hyper-V apps access files through the Cluster File Share subsystem and SANsymphony provides the block storage underpinnings of this.

Because the two servers are mirrored, one can act as the the failover target for the other. In normal operations both servers handle file requests through the clustered file system. SANsymphony-V's adaptive caching, with a virtual disk copy, provides a degree of NAS acceleration. This is not filer acceleration in the Avere or Alacritech senses though, as we understand it.

In larger systems the SANSymphony-V software can run in separate servers connected by iSCSI or Fibre Channel. DataCore says its NAS acceleration and high-availability features are cost-effective and scalable, and don't require "enterprise NAS hardware". Nor is expensive hardware required to provide the level of high availability offered by SANsymphony-V.

Existing DataCore SANsymphony-V customers, running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Hyper-V, do not need to buy any extra software to support the clustered NAS file-sharing features. Snaphots and Continuous Data Protection are optionally available. ®