SANRAD delivers cost-effective storage consolidation by enabling any storage to be centrally managed as part of a virtual storage pool. SANRAD’s open network architecture is storage agnostic, thereby giving IT managers the flexibility to utilize existing and new storage options to meet the varying cost, performance and reliability requirements of the enterprise.

The Problem

• The vast majority of server storage today is Direct Attached Storage. In spite of the advantages of storage networking, most servers still maintain, manage and protect their own data storage. This creates budget constraints, resource issues, and ineffective asset management.
• 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 50% to the server cost.
• Individually backing up every server is expensive, tedious, and often unreliable. This process also consumes precious network resources.

The Solution

SANRAD V-Switches with integrated StoragePro software allow companies to easily consolidate their storage into a single cost-effective virtual storage pool whether connected to a low-cost IP SAN or an existing fully redundant FC SAN. Customers can choose any preferred storage, protect previous storage investments, and avoid future lock-in by other vendors.

StoragePro provides all the needed storage services, whether on Fibre Channel SANs or low-cost iSCSI SANS. Consolidating data onto an IP SAN using iSCSI, with SANRAD V-Switch and StoragePro software has many advantages:

• Reduce the cost of deploying new servers by 40% to 50%.
• Use free iSCSI software and low cost IP networks to connect servers at 1/10th the cost of traditional fibre channel.
• Eliminate all backup and recovery tasks from individual servers, so servers are never halted for backup operations.
• Reduce operating, management and infrastructure cost by 50% by consolidating data from a large number of servers onto a single solution.
• Provide support for DFS, GFS and Clusters such as VMware, MSCS, Red Hat GFS.
• Use SANRAD virtualization to create thousands of custom storage volumes across one or all the connected storage systems to improve storage utilization and reduce storage costs.
• Combine and virtualize storage systems with diverse properties into the same storage pool to provide various service levels and performance grades for different applications.
• Deploy local inter-campus / inter-data center synchronous data mirroring over FC or dedicated fiber optic cables (dark fiber), snapshot, virtual shadow copy service (VSS) and cloning to help eliminate data loss and ensure business continuity.
• Utilize Active/Active V-Switch clustering with automatic failover, failback and multi-pathing to provide uninterrupted access to data. 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.