Shared storage Winner -
There is never enough storage in a busy network, or a slow one for that fact. We needed to place large amounts of storage on line use by our virtualized server platform. This storage needed to be available for use 24 hours by the servers in our virtual infrastructure. We are a virtualization shop using VMware and at the time when VirtualIron and Xen are aggressively entering the market VMware is still a leader. Storage is very important in a centralized shared environment.
We looked at many different software based iSCSI solutions for this shared storage challenge and boy can you find a large swing in costs for the software. iScsi allows you to build a SAN, storage area network, using a normal IP ethernet network. It is recommended that you run your storage on a private segment. This provides for maximum speed for data and does not impact your normal production network segments. If iSCSI is going to be your main storage platform take the time to look at the different recommended implementations. This will save time later in training, support tickets and improve performance over all. These implementations are not hard but should be planned out.
We choose Rocket Division Software's StarWind product. Rocket Division Software is a leading provider of high-performance technologies for the data storage and networking industry. This fully featured product contains all the options we needed in our environment. An iSCSI SAN is far more cost effective than fiber channel SANs, these are extremely expensive and have additional hardware requirements, and depending on your needs, iSCSI most likely will fit the bill. StarWind has many different packages for you to purchase depending on your needs. The “Basic” entry package could be as little as $400. The “Professional” package can be purchased for about $1000. There is even a free version for you check out so try before you buy.
Iscsi can be used to share more than just hard drive storage. There are iscsi initiators, clients, for many platforms both Microsoft and not. iSCSI is fully inter-operable so mixing Windows, Macs, Linux and Solaris is a real possiblilty. Once the iSCSI target software, StarWind, is installed on a Windows machine you can carve this available storage up in pieces. Then allow machines on your network access to the available storage, these are called LUNs. For Windows operating systems using the Microsoft iSCSI client, this LUN would appear as just another drive on the system. In our case, we are using a server platform that allows the file system to be shared. We are accessing these drives hosted on the storage server from multiple servers simultaneously.
StarWind Software will allow you to use almost any media as an iScsi target, USB, Firewire, ATA, SATAI, SATA II, SCSI, Fiber Channel. Soon Rocket Division will be releasing CDP (Continuous Data Protection) and VTL (Virtual Tape Library) modules to this already powerful platform. These items are in early beta and available by request. I am sure there a re few folks that like the early looking as testing.
We put this iSCSI Target product to the test. We challenged StarWind from many hypervisors, hosts for virtual machines, writing data simultaneously to the drives (LUNs) made available by the Starwind target software with no loss in data. The performance of our StarWind driven storage servers is excellent. The ability to move data at wire speed, GbE, as long as the storage can accept it is a real advantage.
There are many different image formats available that host this virtual disk (this is where your data is stored). You even have the ability to use the hard disks directly by talking to the hard drive controller. One can create snapshots of a LUN or virtual disk. This is a period in time that the LUN once was. You now have the ability to revert back to that point in time. Very powerful in the case of rollbacks of undesired changes. You can create a mirror of your virtual disk, just like you can with hard disks, Raid-1. Lots of power here at your fingertips.
As listed on their Website:
“StarWind is a hardware-independent, cost-effective and scalable storage management solution that enables the benefits of Storage Area Networking such as enhanced disaster recovery and increased regulatory compliance and does not consume additional resources on application servers. StarWind does not require any additional hardware, it utilizes the existing Ethernet and IP network infrastructure and leverages existing storage hardware.
StarWind's volume snapshot feature allows simple scheduled or on-demand snapshots of critical data for backup. If necessary all backed up data can be retrieved at once, or individual files can be retrieved as needed. StarWind's unique ability to virtualize and share physical storage hardware also eliminates the need to have an expensive DLT, AIT or LTO tape or high-capacity Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burner.”
As you move your production environment to this reliable storage platform you do from time to time need support. We actually were putting together a rather complicated storage platform. The support we received from Rocket Division was amazing. Email answers were timely the data presented was accurate. The people were incredibly helpful and friendly as well as extremely knowledgeable in this field. I place huge value in support and the support from this company was exceptional. The online tips and knowledgebase articles are professional and well written.
System Requirements:
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows XP (with Service Pack 2 installed)
800 MHz Intel Pentium III class processor
512 MB of RAM
50 MB of disk space for StarWind application data
Shared disk volume for Windows installation, Windows swap file, StarWind executables and StarWind iSCSI image files
Fast Ethernet connection
For more information, check out Rocket Division Software’s website at http://www.rocketdivision.com. There is a wealth of information on this site and as you will see this product is one to watch. We will be updating this review as new modules and add-ons are released to this product.
