Raidtec Makes Storage SNAZzy

By
iApplianceWeb
(11/15/01, 09:30:00 AM EDT)

Raidtec Corporation has made a move into storage virtualization technology that allows heterogeneous servers to share a variety of storage devices transparently. The Raidtec products in this area include the SNAZ SAN Virtualization Appliance, SNAZ SVA, and SNAZ InstaView snap shot software for mid-range to enterprise SANs.

SNAZ SVA connects to the SAN and presents all attached storage as one or more global storage pools. It allows any number of volumes to be created, expanded, assigned, and replicated to any number of hosts. The Asymmetric (Out of Data Path) Storage Virtualization architecture of SNAZ SVA provides a central storage management point, while data is directly transferred between the host computer and storage devices, thus facilitating truly heterogeneous SANs.

"The key drawbacks to Symmetric (In the Data Path) Storage Virtualization architectures are the limits on performance and scalability, requiring more costly hardware resources and higher switch port counts to allow comparable levels of performance and redundancy to Asymmetric Storage Virtualization approaches," said Noel May, CTO, Raidtec Corporation. "SNAZ SVA provides scalability, higher performance, lower cost and increased reliability and security."

SNAZ SVA works best for video editing and broadcast, database and data warehouse, call center, online transaction processing, enterprise B2B, XSP, and almost any enterprise computing environment.

Features of SNAZ SVA include:

• SAN Manageability -- SNAZ SVA simplifies storage management through an intuitive Web-accessible GUI.
  
• Interoperability and Sharing -- Volumes can be allocated to multiple servers, enabling shared storage using interoperable cluster management software, SAN file systems, and distributed database managers.
  
• SAN Scalability -- SNAZ SVA enables almost unlimited growth in storage capacity, I/O performance, and bandwidth.
  
• High Performance -- Direct data transfer between servers and storage ensures the highest level of performance scalability, such as striping five storage arrays and getting linear fivefold performance.
  
• Data Replication & Snapshot -- Optional SVA InstaView offers data replication and snapshot functionality.
  
• Definable Classes of Service -- Each volume or storage pool can be configured for performance level, scalability, redundancy, and replication
  
• Backup Functionality -- Command Line Interfaces (CLIs) are included for server free and LAN free backup.

SNAZ InstaView is the optional Snapshot Software available with SNAZ SVA. SNAZ InstaView provides point-in-time volume imaging and presents a virtually unlimited number of views of the data. Each view can be individually allocated on a read only or read/write basis to any server. Data replication and data rollback are also offered as part of SNAZ InstaView functionality.

SNAX SVA begins at a suggested retail price of $15,000.

Link:
Raidtec