centralized data management and data availability
IT managers can reduce operating costs through the ability to span volumes across multiple heterogeneous arrays, and centrally managing the resulting storage pool. Within this SAN, managers can flexibly reassign storage as required and automate file migration based on storage policy. Sanbolic enables active-active access to shared files on SAN storage providing improved architectures for availability.

SAN hardware has increasingly become a cost effective option for even small organizations to consolidate their storage centrally. SANs provide high performance and high reliability, and facilitate adding storage as an organization's needs grow.

SANs also present a management challenge to many organizations. While management utilities for storage arrays have been improving, each vendor has their own interface, so typically each arrays needs to be managed separately. Furthermore, each server needs to be provisioned with storage from the array that it uniquely accesses (a LUN), and then create a logical volume structure on that storage. Reassigning or adding storage can be a complex task, requiring the administrator to manage LUNs on each array, zoning on each switch, and volume structure on each server as a separate process. These inflexible storage LUN-server silos always complicate data and application availability since it is often a cumbersome process to reassign access to the LUN if a server fails, and many back up tools require that each server be backed up individually.

Because Sanbolic's software is designed to manage shared SAN storage, the SAN consolidation and management process can be greatly simplified. An administrator can centrally manage storage spanning multiple arrays as a single pool of storage, flexibly reassign storage as required, and automate file migration based on storage policy. Sanbolic's software also supports remote storage management, so that an administrator can log into a SAN at a remote office over a VPN and configure, assign or reassign logical volumes among the servers at that site. Administrators can set security and user access rights globally for the SAN, so that a given user will have the same access rights to volumes and files from any server or workstation on the SAN.

Sanbolic's software allows better utilization of the inherent redundancy in a SAN, and provides an improved set of options for backup as well as server and storage failover. This gives administrators the ability to better match high availability architectures with application requirements, and significantly reduce the cost and complexity typically associated with high availability solutions.

In a Microsoft System Center environment, Sanbolic's software can provide the capability to manage storage assignment centrally, and greatly increase the flexibility of the storage resources by enabling storage volumes to be dynamically expanded and reassigned.

Sanbolic's shared storage software can improve data protection and system availability solutions along several dimensions:

Reassign Volumes on-the-fly
LaScala can quickly reassign a volume (including NTFS volumes) to any sever on the SAN for data access in the event of a server failure, or for a manually administered backup operation.

Copying or Mirroring Data
LaScala can mirror data across heterogeneous data arrays, providing a very cost effective mirroring option.

Application Availability
Melio FS allows all servers to be given access to data on a SAN, taking advantage of the inherent path redundancy of a SAN infrastructure.

This Active-active access to shared files on SAN storage provides additional options for maintaining availability in the event of server failure.

Typical active-passive failover clusters use specialized software to ensure that only one server accesses a volume at a given time, but then a redundant server can be given access to the data in the event that the primary server fails. This adds complexity and leads to low server utilization.

In contrast, Sanbolic's software allow many types of applications (such as file serving) to have concurrent access to shared data. All servers can be actively supporting the application under normal operations, reducing the number of servers required. Should a given server fail, the other servers running the application continue to function, maintaining application availability, although at a reduced capacity. In addition, Melio FS and LaScala support the Windows native DFS Namespaces (distributed File System) and NLB (network load balancing), thus allowing even higher availability without increase in cost and deployment of proprietary solutions.

For applications that do not permit multiple application servers to share concurrent access to the data (for example, most databases, including SQL), Sanbolic's software still provides improved availability options. All data base servers can access any database on the SAN, so the database need not be installed on a particular server. If any server fails, the databases it had been running can be quickly restarted on other machines, ensuring high availability.

Allowing Active-Active and N+1 Clusters Since both Melio FS and LaScala allow shared access to the volume and file system, users can build flexible active-active clusters instead of the traditional active passive approach. In addition, users can deploy application clustering products even in environments with non shared applications such as SQL and Exchange, and utilize the shared storage capability to cluster and migrate the server and application without having to bring the store or database file offline.

Backup Since all servers can share access to the file system, the file system can be backed up from a single server, requiring only a single copy of backup software. Unlike SAN-based block data backup, the file system structure is retained, facilitating data recovery in the event of storage hardware failure. Users can utilize a single back up application license and flexibly back up any set of data of any SAN connected server, at any given time with no disruption or downtime. They can also take full advantage of the high speed FC connectivity and removing the slow process of coping data through the Ethernet network.

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Sanbolic/Microsoft Brochure (pdf) 111 KB

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