To discuss these results obtained by DataCore Software, we interviewed George Teixeira, founder and CEO of the company on the occasion of his recent visit to Paris.

HPC Review: Can you describe your activity?
George Teixeira: DataCore was founded in 1998. Our vision at first was very simple : replicate in software what hardware storage controllers accomplished. Today we have 10,000 clients and 30,000 deployments worldwide. We are the pioneers in storage virtualization and we have innovated recently with our Parallel I/O technology, which provides the best performance and response times for the industry storage. Our software solutions are composed of the hyperconverged platforms SANsymphony and VirtualSAN. Together, these solutions improve the performance and responsiveness of corporate storage infrastructure. They also radically improve server productivity.

How do you achieve this result?
From our perspective, the greatest benefit we can bring to our customers is to provide them a competitive advantage by improving the performance of their storage infrastructure.

We just recently won the world record performance, as measured by the Storage Performance Council benchmark, which constitutes the only independent assessment protocol and validated by industry peers.

What are in your opinion the main benefits for companies?
They are twofold. On the one hand they can with a given infrastructure, run applications critical businesses that need faster time responses and extremely low latency. It helps them, while retaining the same ingfrastructure, to run more virtual machines without losing performance by improving the responsiveness of the attached storage resources. The elimination of the traditional bottlenecks allows them to run resource-intensive environments such as Oracle databases, SQL Server or SAP Hana or VDI.

Our storage virtualization solutions allow the use of all manufacturer storage devices and systems without limitation. And frankly, we contribute to the significant improvement of existing storage infrastructures. Secondly, we improve their performance and productivity. With performance improvement by a factor of 3-20, our solutions enable therefore run 3-20 times more enterprise applications. It also accelerates VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualized environments.

Typically in Microsoft SQL clusters based infrastructure environments, Windows Server or Oracle or SAP composed of 8 to 10 nodes, our software solutions are used to do exactly the same thing with only two nodes !

How do you explain this dramatic performance improvement?
In terms of performance and latency, we are the current holder of the record performance in storage, as measured by the Storage Performance Council, an independent organization specializing in measuring performance storage servers. How we got there is simple: our software is able to harness the power of today’s multi-processor heart. Servers with Intel processors have 8, 12 or even more cores. The problem is that software developers for storage have hardly bothered to exploit this power available to them.

On what aspect did you work to achieve this?
DataCore has addressed this untapped reservoir of power in order to exploit the processor cores available in today’s servers and thus accelerate resolutely effective input-output, resulting in an increase in performance of between 3 and 20 times better than the fastest of the currently available storage systems. With this significant performance improvement, this allows storage infrastructure to respond 3-20 times faster to database queries and enterprise applications requirements. This rise in productivity also means a more efficient consolidation, with a reduction of costs on energy consumption, occupied floor space occupied and manageability.

Do you have any figures to substantiate your claims?
Certainly, the results that we put forward have been established by the Storage Performance Council with the only tool for measuring performance that is documented, validated by peer industry players. We are currently the absolute leader in performance-price ratio, with a record cost of 8 cents per SPC-1 IOPS. Measurements of the Storage Performance Council also result in the lowest latency ever measured, including compared to systems with flash storage resources. Remember, our test server included traditional ans flash storage devices.

Even more surprising, this result was obtained with a Lenovo server costing less than 40,000 dollars, and did better than systems costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. I know it’s hard to believe, but understand that unlike our competitors, the DataCore software fully utilizes all the available cores on server processors, whereas other software companies only use obe or two of the available cores. We are very proud of this result, it truly is a revolution for productivity and the storage industry.