Parallels and Storage Virtualization: DataCore SAN Solutions for Parallels

DataCore is the perfect complement to Parallels.

Download: Parallels and DataCore Solutions Overview.
Virtualize Top to Bottom - DataCore CEO Opinion Paper
Taneja Group: Top 5 Storage Challenges Confronting Virtual Servers

"Together, Parallels and DataCore can provide customers with an immediate return on their virtualization investment, and tremendous flexibility to meet or exceed tomorrows needs."
Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. Read More

Customers Embrace Value of DataCore and Parallels Solutions

MB Trading, Ulster Greene ARC, Bryant & Stratton College, and many others are enjoying unsurpassed uptime, on-demand workload distribution and tremendous cost savings since consolidating their IT environments with Parallels and DataCore.

"We run DataCore and Parallels in tandem and are extremely impressed by the combination," said Brenton M. Brown, Chief Information Officer, MB Trading. "They give our enterprise all the benefits that come by embracing total virtualization: fast and reliable performance, highly efficient storage and server utilization and the flexibility to provision both server and storage resources easily, when and where needed." Read more

Common Use Case Scenarios - Challenges & Solutions

1. Large (greater than 100 Terabyte) configuration of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers and Virtual Desktops split across two sites.
2. Midsize (Less than 10 Terabyte) shared storage requirement for Parallels virtual environment.

Learn more: DataCore and Parallels Use Scenarios & Solutions

Solution Highlights

Makes business continuity and disaster recovery practical for virtual servers, virtual desktops and generalIT
consolidation

Eliminates storage-related disruptions due to inevitable maintenance, reconfiguration, upgrades, expansion and failures

Speeds up application performance by removing disk I/O bottlenecks

Maximizes use of available disk capacity

Centralizes and automates storage administration despite variations in equipment

Business Challenges

Finding it unaffordable to put in place the highly-available, shared storage required to support a virtual server and/or virtual desktop project.

Experiencing frequent disruptions attributed to storage. For example, outages are required to expand capacity, take backups, resize volumes, swap out disk drives, upgrade equipment and migrate data to different
equipment.

Applications and virtual machines run slowly. Problems can be traced to disk I/O bottlenecks and programs
running out of disk space because 5 to 15 times more workloads are competing for the same storage
resources.

High risk of losing critical information due to major and mini disasters that damage or impair storage
hardware. Such a loss might jeopardize the organizations ability to continue IT operations and lead to
business collapse.

Budget cuts impeding rollout of adequate SAN to support server consolidation.

Essential to your Parallels Environment

Virtually everything hinges on storage. Server and desktop consolidation, in particular, place extraordinary demands on it. Too often, disks slow down, interrupt or endanger these centralized IT operations. Not because they are poorly built, but because they are physically constrained. Although Parallels OS virtualization helps you to overcome similar limitations in processors, when it comes to advanced functions such as workload migration, load balancing, fail-over and disaster recovery, it is completely dependent on highly available (HA), shared storage. Youll be shocked at the high hardware costs and major overhaul generally proposed to put such a storage infrastructure in place.

DataCores storage virtualization solutions deliver a more practical HA solution to Parallels shared storage requirements. They abstract your storage into idealized, virtual disks akin to Virtuozzo Containers. The software pools and mirrors disk blocks across available devices, despite differences in make and model. In the process, it speeds up I/O response and throughput using extensive SAN-wide caching. This lets you take optimum advantage of Parallels full suite of capabilities without hesitation. From a central management console, you can non-disruptively provision, share, clone, replicate and expand virtual disks among physical servers and containers. DataCore yields the highest availability, fastest performance and fullest utilization from your storage assets, making it an essential element of your Parallels configurations.