DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, has responded to market demands, this time by stretching the size of its virtual disks from 2 Terabytes (TBs) to 1 Petabyte (PB).

“Rather than inch up to 4 or 16 TBs as others are considering, DataCore made the strategic design choice to blow the roof off the capacity ceiling with 1 Petabyte LUNs,” commented Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing, DataCore Software. “But we’re still frugal on the back-end, using thin-provisioning to minimize how much real capacity has to be in place day one.”

Performance wise, these immense virtual disks benefit from DataCore’s 1 TB per node, 64-bit “mega-caches.” “You can be big, and very fast too,” added Gonzalez.

Why So Big?
The huge virtual disk requirement arises from two industry trends. As regards the physical storage pool, clients are eager to group multiple disk drives, each exceeding 1 TB, into Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) sets. With this release, DataCore storage virtualization nodes can control pools consisting of numerous RAID sets, each well over the previous 2 TB maximum.

Demand has also been strong from applications seeking to update and analyze very large datasets that in the foreseeable future will grow well past the 2 TB cap.

Extensible Architecture – Key to Rapid Response
The pace of DataCore’s noteworthy innovations is indicative of its uniquely extensible software architecture. Unbridled by hardware, DataCore rapidly adapts its storage virtualization products to harness the power of bigger, faster, and cheaper equipment within weeks of the technology becoming generally available. That puts customers in the best position to take advantage of future hardware advancements.

The new software release is available immediately. DataCore customers under current maintenance contracts are eligible to receive the 1 PB software enhancements at no charge.