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Lefthand networks san/iq 7From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 7, Issue 7 - October 2007 A big advantage of the SAN/iQ software is it doesn't require proprietary hardware and is currently certified for a number of HP ProLiant and IBM System servers. The company also offers its own NSM 160, which is a 1U rack server using industry-standard Intel processors. This approach allows you to choose your preferred storage technology, so you can opt for SCSI, SATA or SAS hard disks. SAN/iQ is based round the concept of clustering, where you bring multiple physical servers, or nodes, together and present all their storage to the network as a single pool. This is then carved up into virtual volumes that are striped across all drives, in all server nodes within the cluster. Unlike many competing products, synchronous volume replication is included in the base product and the Network RAID feature offers two-way and three-way replication. Essentially, this mirrors the selected volume within the same cluster, but offsets the data, allowing a two-way replication to tolerate a single node failure. Opt for a three-way replication and the cluster can handle the failure of two nodes. Three other key technologies are included in the base SAN/iQ product, with thin provisioning designed to eliminate wasted storage, as it shows all the virtual storage to servers, but only uses physical storage as required. Volume creation starts with a 128MB physical volume size that grows dynamically in 128MB increments, as demand dictates. Naturally, snapshots are on the menu and these can be scheduled regularly or taken on demand. When a snapshot occurs, the original volume is frozen and no further write operations are permitted. A new layer is created and all further writes operations are made to this. All snapshots are combined into a virtual volume and data is read back from whichever snapshot contains it. To rollback a volume, you simply select a snapshot, which becomes the latest version and all later snapshots are discarded. Any snapshot can be loaded as a separate virtual volume, allowing for file recovery or to enable backup to occur without impacting on general performance. Asynchronous replication is also included, making SAN/iQ look even better value. The Remote Copy feature replicates volumes to remote sites over slower WAN links and, once a baseline copy has been deployed to the secondary site, snapshot technology takes over to keep the primary and remote volumes synchronised. SAN/iQ provides bandwidth management and throttling to control WAN utilisation of remote copies. IP SAN management is carried out from the Centralised Management Console (CMC), which is an MMC snap-in. We found this easy to use, as it comes packed with wizards to help with cluster and volume creation. There is plenty of status information provided as well and access security is particularly good, as only iSCSI initiators that have been assigned to a volume from within CMC will be allowed to log on to it. Including synchronous, and asynch- ronous replication and snapshots in the base product makes SAN/iQ look extremely good value and it can grow easily with demand, as new nodes can be added to clusters where the data will be automatically re-striped across all new and existing hard disks. LeftHand Networks takes IP SANs to the next level. SAN/iQ offers a superb set
of features, making it a very solid alternative to costly and complex fibre
channel SANs. ST |
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