| System Area Networks... The Next Step in Storage.
System Area Networks combine the best available technologies for networking and sharing storage. System Area Networking is a term that encompasses all the modern approaches for storage networking including Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Networking (SAN), and SCSI over IP (iSCSI and FC/ip). Each approach offers certain advantages in creating, managing, and accessing shared data resources.
System Area Networks are the next evolutionary step in storage. They allow you to deploy customized storage networks consisting of modular, inexpensive, and centrally managed storage components which may be combined and implemented in new and powerful ways.
Storage networking shouldn't be complicated. If you keep your options open, storage networking is a powerful tool to reduce costs. Managing storage resources is easier, consistent, and global. There is less wasted storage capacity and administrative effort. Storage access and performance grow as easily as capacity grows. Global management tools smoothly integrate with your current storage hardware, increasing the lifespan, capabilities, and utility of iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage resources already deployed. System Area Networking delivers a scalable and more easily managed architecture to accommodate future growth.
All modern disk-based storage systems consist of similar components. The problem has been that each vendor offers different combinations of storage controllers, management software, network components, file system management tools, and remote monitoring utilities. Worse, some management software runs on the servers, some runs on the storage hardware, and some even runs on the network hardware.
Trying to manage all this disparate technology is complex. With the current economic realities of limited or shrinking staff and budgets, complexity translates into higher costs, less staff productivity, and unstable environments. Some vendors push for a proprietary, single vendor solution to solve these problems, and use their dominant technical position or worst-case disruption scenarios to justify inflated prices.
Luckily, storage and network hardware are converging with emerging open standards. System Area Networking is the storage network equivalent of 'open systems' computing standards such as Unix during the 1990's. Third-party software providers now offer vendor-independent storage management software products that deliver flexible, low cost, and inclusive storage network management capabilities. These solutions offer compatibility with your existing storage and server hardware as well as new, state-of-the-art storage arrays.
Major server and storage vendors may try to sell their particular storage approach or toolset as the best technology for all applications, but it's clear that flexibility is best. Providing a choice of storage network protocols delivers technical flexibility. Inclusive, platform-independent storage management software delivers vendor independence. These capabilities combined into a completely integrated, well supported, and affordable solution offered by CorData, delivers maximum client value.
Modern Intel-based servers running the Linux or Windows operating system offer capable and reliable platforms for high-end storage management applications. These servers are inexpensive, modular, and feature redundant components for reliable data center performance. At CorData, we're deploying these thin, redundant, rack mountable servers as modular storage management appliances. They attach to disk or RAID arrays you wish via fibre channel. They attach to your servers via fibre channel or ethernet networks, or a combination of both. They serve up secure converged storage resources to all authorized servers via NAS, SAN, or iSCSI network protocols, using a common, intuitive network accessable GUI console.
CorData storage management appliances are delivered with your choice of storage management functionality determined by the software running on what is essentially the same type of modular, high performance and highly available storage managment server. CorData storage management appliances allow you to build extensible and powerful storage networks with a small number of standardized, modular, mix-and-match hardware components; each storage management server handling substantial block-level storage I/O via fibre channel and Ethernet, or as a NAS file system server via Ethernet NFS or CIFS services. Or as a archive appliance providing integrated compliance and data assurance features insuring your data is always on-line and available, and always in it's original stored state.
CorData iSeries iSCSI SAN Server
CorData's iSeries Server appliance provides a simple but powerful storage network appliance capability with extended storage management features. Able to connect to existing storage via Fibre Channel interfaces, the iSeries includes powerful snapshot, replication, and storage tiering capabilities to provide simplified but powerful block-level storage network services over Ethernet. Mirror and append volumes across your collection of mixed storage systems. Systems scale easily to 4 appliances for redundancy and increased performance, and to a Petabyte of storage under management.
CorData Edge Appliance
For CorData clients preferring a Windows-based appliance rather than Linux, the Edge provides SAN storage services over ethernet utilizing the Windows Storage Server software platform. This system provides NAS (windows CIFS NAS protocol, NFS, and iSCSI storage services as well as full compatibility with windows based infrastructures such as DNS and VSS for application snapshot synchronization. Extremely affordable, this system connects to storage via Fibre Channel and delivers outstanding capability for the dollar invested along with a familiar Windows-based management toolset.
CorData SFA 10000 Storage Appliance
CorData SFA 10000 storage appliances offer a powerful and extensible architecture for high performance computing and high performance storage services. Each appliance supports up to 16 Infiniband or 8Gb fibre channel server connections and a multi-core processing system capable of providing both high performance block storage access and a fully integrated clustered computing infrastructure well suited for storage functionality such as global file systems. Since the multi-core architecure communicates via high-speed internal busses, these cluster resources are much faster than those connected via traditional Ethernet network connections. So now, global file systems, high performance media storage, large-scale image libraries, and fully integrated virtual tape library functionality can all be implemented inexpensively and elegantly right in the computing cluster that manages storage resources. This greatly compresses the distributed architectures of most clustered computing environments, saving money, reducing complexity, and substantially increasing storage performance.
Current global file systems supported include ExaScaler, GridScaler, Lustre, GPFS, as well as high performance block storage and virtual tape services.
CorData E5000 NAS Appliance
CorData E5000 delivers network attached storage resources supporting both CIFS (windows) and NFS (Unix) storage network protocols, with shared file access and content for both. The E5000 supports 10GbE and GbE network hardware and port trunking to maximize network attached storage performance. In addition, by utilizing massive SSD read and write caching right in the appliance, the system maximizes NAS performance and throughput for randomized read/write access such as is typical with virtualized server environments such as VMWare, or in high-throughput application environments such as back-up and media servers.
Also able to handle large-scale environments, the E5000 scales to 760TB of storage capacity, with active/passive redundant NAS appliance controllers. With snapshot and replication services, you can manage your backup and DR plans with no downtime.
CorData Virtual Tape Server
CorData's Virtual Tape Server (VTS) combines powerful tape library emulation software with a standard Linux server platform to provide clients with the speed of disk-to-disk backups, combined with the convenience of using your current tape library management software.
Now, full backups take less time than incremental backups to tape, since you are able to write to simulated tapes on the VTS at SAN speeds, rather than the usual slow speed of data-to-tape over ethernet. Once the data is on disc, you may back it up to tape without affecting performance on your LANs or application servers, so now your backups can run during the day when you can monitor them conveniently.
Tape libraries may be connected to the VTS directly, as may your older SCSI or fibre channel disc arrays, providing your enterprise with an easy way to redeploy and breath new life into older storage technology. SATA RAID may also be deployed as a large, cost effective virtual tape storage pool, delivering outstanding performance and reliability in storage media costing as little as $700 per terabyte.
CorData Assureon Archive Appliance
CorData's Assureon Archive Appliance gives enterprises an easy way to migrate seldom-changing data to a completely secure, online archive system relieving pressure from existing backup and primary storage resources.
The Assureon Archive creates a unique digital fingerprint for every file that's ingested, providing a way to insure the contents of the file are always in their original state. Strong encryption ensures any file may be digitally protected for an imutable lifetime, or digitally shredded in all locations if desired. And Assureon can replicate to other Assureon appliances to provide a completely secure Disaster Recovery solution.
Flexible and Easily Managed Storage Network Resources
You have the flexibility to select the best storage network approach for the job at hand, and change and grow your storage network functionality as required. Choose Ethernet for economy, fibre channel for performance. Manage private file systems, and large pools of shared storage via shared file systems. You may easily allocate these resources to your mixed bag of application servers with simple, drag-and-drop operations on the Storage Gateway Server's management console, and back the data up to remote sites and tape libraries without any down-time.
All storage resources are highly manageable. Storage capacity is globally available and may be reallocated to other storage network connections on demand. For example, file system space may be allocated via NFS or a Windows SHARE, and later re-allocated to the same server as block-level raw storage capacity via iSCSI or fibre channel if more I/O performance is required. A server may have primary storage available via fibre channel, but use Ethernet for a backup path to the same data as low-cost insurance against network disruptions.
System Area Networks deliver maximum storage flexibility. By using a relatively small number of inexpensive, powerful, and interchangeable storage management server and disk array components, CorData clients can 'rack and stack' storage network elements to easily scale or reconfigure performance, redundancy, and capacity 'on the fly'.
CorData clients benefit from consistent, server independent security and management tools. Mirroring, snapshot volume management, storage access security, disk to tape backups, and remote synchronized data sets work the same whether you are running Solaris, NT, Windows 2000, IRIX, Linux, HP/ux, AIX, Tru-64, VMS, or Netware on your server. Uniform storage management utilities run on multiple local and remote storage management servers, all managed from a single virtual console.
Is it possible to sit down at a network console today and allocate private or shared storage resources on demand for Ethernet, iSCSI, and fibre channel attached servers running diverse operating systems all over your data center? Can you use one console tool to manage access and security to insure that users have the data storage performance, uptime, and the capacity they need?
Yes, CorData clients can do that today. And all for as little as $700 per Terabyte for everything you'll need.
Please call us if you would like a whitepaper on System Area Networking, or would be interested in a no-obligation CorData technical briefing.
CorData Technical Briefing Services
703-279-6460
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