Starwind SAN 6.0 – New release of Starwind's popular iSCSI SAN software enhanced with VMware Backup Plugin
This release came just in time for VMworld 2012 San Francisco. There is a new release of popular iSCSI SAN software – Starwind SAN 6.0. This software solution enables to use Windows Servers to create fault tolerance clustered storage which is presented to vSphere as a shared storage. VMs which reside on this shared storage can be further protected by VMware's High Availability.
Starwind iSCSI SAN 6.0 delivers multipath I/O load balancing and provides multipath capabilities for failover. In case of HA node failure, the partner server(s) continue to process client requests without downtime.
What i found interesting in this release, was the thing that you can use Starwind as a DR site over the WAN. In fact, you can build a two/three-node HA cluster in the main datacenter and protect it by replicating data to a remote DR site. WAN replication provides the “last resort” disaster recovery server that you can locate at any distance from the main datacenter.
Starwind iSCSI SAN 6.0 – New features :
– Three-node High Availability (HA) architecture brings 3 way synchronous mirroring (more efficient than 2 way).
– N+1 configuration that allows for building an on-site two/three-node HA cluster with off-site replication.
– Clustered scale-out NAS and data deduplication
– Asynchronous Replication over WAN (with acceleration) – for N+1 configuration
– Clustered NAS (NFS & CIFS/SMB)
A 3-node HA acts as a fully active-active-active storage with real-time synchronization and load balancing between all three cluster node.
Starwind iSCSI SAN 6.0 offers:
– In-line target-site data deduplication allows for saving up to 90% of disk space
– Automatic Failover (in case of HA node failure, the partners continue to serve the data)
– Failback with fast synchro – Fast Synch technology for fast restore the failed node.
Schema with a DR site with Asynchronous replication over WAN.
Also new, the VMware Backup Plugin (RC):
VMware Backup Plugin – The features:
– Agentless architecture (Interesting)
– Archives stored in VMDK
– Full and incremental backup
– Delta data saving
The VMware Backup Plug-in stores VMware virtual machine data in the original VMDK file format. Besides the full VM backup, this technology provides an incremental backup option.
It stores only those blocks that have changed since the last backup operation and ensures a considerable reduction of storage space requirements. VMware Backup Plug-in is integrated with StarWind Centralized Management Console that enables managing backup and storage from a single window.
You can find the full press release with all the details. You can test the solution, by downloading the trial from Starwind's website here.
Enjoy..
