LEFTHAND NETWORKS
Powerful and yet cost-effective, LeftHand iSCSI SANs are changing the rules of storage networking. Our customers are not constrained by high cost, high maintenance, vendor-specific systems. LeftHand SANs are easy to grow, easy to manage, and architected to meet their most urgent business needs:
- SCALABILITY Our storage networks scale performance along with capacity, from entry-level 6 TB SATA SANs to enterprise-class 100 TB SAS SANs
- High Availability Integrated synchronous and asynchronous replication provide our customers with anytime, anywhere data access
- Reliability SAN/iQ Network RAID spreads multiple copies of data across the network, allowing uninterrupted access to volumes even through the loss of an entire datacenter
- Performance We deliver our iSCSI SANs on industry standard platforms, and focus our expertise on creating best-in-class features that keep your SAN at peak performance
An open approach gives customers the freedom to build enterprise-class storage solutions on their choice of hardware. The SAN/iQ platform turns enterprise-class x86 servers like the HP ProLiant or IBM System xSeries into scalable network storage ideal for server consolidation and virtualization projects, Microsoft application environments and disaster recovery solutions.
SAN BASICS
No other SAN – fibre channel or iSCSI – can offer the seamless scalability, high availability and ease-of-management that you receive from the LeftHand SAN. LeftHand’s patented SAN/iQ software allows you to start your SAN with as little as 3 TBs. When you need to scale your storage, you simply add a storage module to the network. The software automatically adds the module into your existing cluster, and re-stripes and mirrors the data across the all the modules in the SAN. The intelligence built in the software allows this to all be done seamlessly, without downtime. The modular hardware coupled with SAN/iQ Network RAID feature gives you full data protection. Each block of data exists on more that one module, which means an entire module can go offline without affecting data availability.
Legacy SAN Architecture
Other SAN solutions have data protection across the disks in a box, but not across the boxes themselves, leaving you vulnerable to any form of data corruption, human error, accident, or outage that renders a box inoperable.
LeftHand’s Distributed Storage Matrix Architecture
The LeftHand SAN is ideal for mid-tier enterprises due to its intuitive centralized management console which presents all of your modules and data volumes through one GUI. Get all the functionality you’d expect from a SAN without needing to assign a team to manage data storage.
What are the deficiencies of other shared storage solutions?
With other shared storage solutions, you’re forced to add capacity by adding more disk drives behind the existing controllers. Many controllers aren’t equipped to handle the additional load, so to maintain performance you end up supporting multiple partially populated enclosures. Many administrators using a legacy SAN only populate their enclosures with a small percentage of the supported capacity in order to maintain the performance they need. Plus, whether it’s because of a performance issue or simply to add more capacity when you’ve filled the existing enclosure, adding another enclosure is an expensive investment and a separate entity for you to manage. Applying the new storage to your existing LUNs is problematic and frequently requires re-provisioning. You need a solution that scales in small chunks at a pace that matches your growth, without complicating management or compromising performance.
Ensuring data availability is another challenge for mid-tier enterprises. You may run RAID within your server or on your existing SAN and have redundant components within an enclosure, but few companies outside the enterprise have any contingency plans to deal with the loss of a storage enclosure. A power outage can cripple operations, human error can result in a failure, the sprinkler system accidentally can ruin a piece of hardware or a natural disaster can make a whole facility inoperable. Equally, this is true if you’re using an iSCSI SAN that does not stripe and mirror your data across all of the modules in the cluster. Even if an iSCSI SAN allows you to cluster your boxes in a RAID 50 configuration, if one box goes down, your data is inaccessible.
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