With the SANsymphony-V virtualisation layer, Kaspersky Lab has unified the management of its diverse storage systems from IBM, HP and NetApp, added a new level of business continuity safeguards and delivered faster response times by accelerating the performance and flexibility of shared storage in support of its many Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines.
“It was clearly a strategic decision for us to integrate a storage virtualisation platform in order for us to benefit from greater flexibility, higher levels of business continuity and unified management,” notes Alexey Ternovsky, Senior Infrastructure Technology Researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “We evaluated a number of different virtualisation approaches and found that DataCore was the perfect fit to meet our demands and help us lower the rising costs for managing and extending storage in the long run. The DataCore storage hypervisor gives us the power to manage huge amounts of data and lets us build our own storage infrastructure with our choice of features and performance characteristics.”
Kaspersky Lab’s decision was primarily driven by SANsymphony-V’s ability to leverage existing storage environments and enhance their enterprise functionality by providing a higher level of availability for business continuity; by adding centralised and simplified management over all their storage assets; by increasing performance; by enabling fast remote site disaster recovery capabilities and by maximizing the utilization of their current investments. Strategically, the flexibility to expand the storage infrastructure vendor and hardware independently on an as-needed base were
critical requirements.
Over the next year, the two Kaspersky locations plan to virtualise nearly ten petabytes of their data (i.e., ten thousand terabytes, or 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) spread over a mix of storage devices. This will enable the company to offer both centralised IT services for internal requests as well as new services for external customers who rely on Kaspersky Lab’s data center services and solutions. The DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor software will be installed at the two data centres and will synchronously mirror all the production data currently located on diverse storage systems each with different characteristics tied to each vendor’s hardware-based platforms.
High Performance Shared Storage for Microsoft Hyper-V
In the Kaspersky Lab environment, very high performance is critical and the performance demands will continue to grow alongside the ever-expanding
environment of Microsoft Hyper-V virtual servers and desktops. Ternovsky and his team identified SANsymphony-V to be the most efficient way to provide shared storage for the overall virtualised infrastructure. As the performance needs continue to grow, more memory can be added to boost cache performance and new server technology can be easily inserted without interruption to further scale performance.
SANsymphony-V helps Kaspersky Lab to expand and optimise capacity on an as-needed basis without hardware vendor lock-in or having to acquire huge amounts of unused disk resources. With lots of automated storage capabilities, such as transparent auto-failover, systems can stay up when underlying devices fail. Moreover, powerful “Quick Serve” commands automate the management of storage provisioning. In addition, auto-tiering automates the progression and demotion of data across different storage devices – based on performance and cost criteria. Bottom-line: SANsymphony-V greatly automates and simplifies the administration and storage tasks found in the huge SAN environment of Kaspersky Lab.
“The flexibility, performance and management scalability of the DataCore solution make it an effective shared storage solution for our large number of
virtual machines running under Microsoft Hyper-V,” adds Ternovsky. “We now benefit from a better cost infrastructure which allows hardware
interchangeability adding a new level of savings and agility to managing our systems and their cost. Our IT administrators have a lot of know-how with
Microsoft Windows and virtual machines under Hyper-V, so it was important that SANsymphony-V is not only Microsoft-certified but is intuitive and familiar – with a similar look and feel and many automated features that make storage administration in such a big environment much more practical and easy.”
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