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Reldata IP Storage Gateway 92ooFrom STORAGE Magazine
Vol 6, Issue 8 - October 2006 At the appliance's foundation lies a good quality Supermicro motherboard, equipped with a pair of 3GHz Xeon processors. Storage connectivity is handled by dual-port QLogic FC cards, while the motherboard's dual Ultra320 SCSI channels are routed through to the backplates at the rear. There are plenty of network options, as both the motherboard's Gigabit Ethernet ports are available and the appliance also has a pair of PCI-e dual-port Gigabit cards as well. You can use all ports to present iSCSI targets to the network, while the four ports on the PCI-e cards can also be joined together in a virtual connection as load balanced and failover teams. The tidy Java-based remote management console is designed to manage multiple appliances. After selecting one, it presents an Explorer-style tree menu, which provides access to storage resources, and each one is accompanied by a window to one side with a list of options for the selected resource. Once a new volume has been created, it is accompanied by an impressive range of data protection options. Snapshots provide simple point-time copies and are easy to create, as you select a destination that could be the same physical disk, a different volume or even a different storage array and set up a schedule. After creation, the snapshot can also be presented to the network as a new iSCSI target or file system, if required. Remote mirroring can be applied to volumes designated as iSCSI targets where a second appliance presents a target to the primary appliance, which uses it to create a copy of the selected volume. Mirroring writes to both source and destination simultaneously and it is possible to mirror a volume to multiple destinations. Snapshots are a simple solution, but are really not a lot of use if the original volume is lost, as they only store the changes made to the volume and not the data itself. Replication is more sophisticated, as it operates very much at the block level and takes a full copy of the source volume to another location, but thereafter only copies the 'deltas' to reduce network traffic. Another slick feature of Reldata's replication is that a snapshot is also taken on the remote copy to maintain consistency with the source volume. Replication tasks are run at regular intervals, determined by a schedule, and another key feature is that multiple destinations, possibly on remote appliances, can be used for replicating a single source volume. Replication can also be carried out at the file and folder level, using Linux' Rsync, and Reldata has integrated the command line into the management interface to make it far more accessible. Your choices don't end there either, as you can locally attach FC and SCSI tape drives and libraries, and present them as iSCSI targets to your backup servers. Alternatively, they can be declared as physical devices where the appliance will employ NDMP for direct disk to tape backup. IP SANs are proving to be a popular and cost-effective alternative to FC SANs,
and RELDATA is offering a very interesting solution that doesn't lock you in to
one storage vendor. Support for SCSI and FC devices, and the ability to present
virtualised storage as iSCSI and NAS, makes the 9200 highly versatile and it
provides a particularly impressive range of data protection features. ST |
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