With its open, heterogeneous solution for SAN connectivity and management, SANRAD enables companies to benefit from the simplicity and low-cost of iSCSI along with the high performance and availability of Fibre Channel SAN.

The Problem

Due to cost and complexity, only a minority of servers within an enterprise are typically attached to Fibre Channel SANs. Administering a large number of independent servers causes day-to-day challenges for network and system administrators:

• Adding storage capacity within a server to manage ever-increasing data is costly, disruptive, and ineffective. Storage cannot be shared with other servers that need it.
• Storing data within each server can double or triple the cost of power, cooling and rack space needed for storage hardware.
• Investing in server storage and backup accessories such as RAID controllers, disk drives, backup software or tape drives can add up to half the original server cost.
• Individually backing up every server is expensive, tedious, and often unreliable. The process also consumes precious network resources.
• Enterprises with mixed FC and IP SAN environments cannot fully maximize their SAN ROI with traditional solutions.

The Solution

SANRAD V-Switches with integrated StoragePro software and iSCSI to FC protocol conversion can easily attach hundreds of iSCSI servers to FC SAN while smoothly managing all the storage behind them. By using economical iSCSI and edge storage management services, excess FC SAN storage capacity can be used to serve the needs of iSCSI servers across the enterprise.

SANRAD’s StoragePro provides all the needed storage services without burdening or disrupting regular SAN operations. StoragePro features include flexible volume creation, volume expansion, capacity provisioning, storage virtualization, security, local data mirroring, data migration, volume snapshot, multipathing, automatic failover and active/active system clustering. Consolidating data onto a SAN with the V-Switch, iSCSI and StoragePro software provides the following benefits:

• Capitalize on existing untapped FC SAN capacity and investments to greatly improve ROI. Or add lower cost storage to an existing FC SAN to service iSCSI connected servers.
• Use free iSCSI software and low cost IP networks to connect servers to the SAN through the V-Switch at 1/20th the cost of traditional fiber-channel.
• Eliminate all backup and recovery tasks from individual servers, and perform LAN-free and server-free backup with V-Switch tools so servers are never halted for backup operations.
• Reduce operating, management and infrastructure cost by 50% by consolidating data for hundreds of servers onto a single solution.
• Use data mirroring and snapshots to simplify system and data testing, mining and validation with multiple data instances that can be assigned to different servers.
• Use virtualization to improve storage utilization to 90%.
• Provide remote replication, disaster recovery and site replication services.
• Migrate or duplicate data to another server or storage system while remaining online.
• Reduce the cost of deploying new servers by 40% to 50% or move to a complete diskless server environment by using boot from SAN.