Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vadim Nekhai.
Today I’d like to dwell on the best solutions offered on the market and choose the one that would be crowned as a winner. How will we choose the winner? We’ll set a list of needed options (‘must-haves’ of any SAN solution) that will surely include an affordable price, and such features as Synchronous Data Mirroring, Remote/Asynchronous Replication, CDP and Snapshots, Shared Volumes Support, and Thin Provisioning. Why are these features so important?
Synchronous Data Mirroring - a feature due to which all data is written simultaneously to a second storage device that can guarantee protection, business continuity, disaster recovery and loss prevention.
Remote/Asynchronous Replication is an important feature that provides disaster recovery. It allows the user to copy mission-critical data over the WAN to a remote location. This data can be recovered within a short recovery point and with minimal disruption.
CDP and Snapshots. This feature captures a volume’s state at any point in time. These live, point-in-time Snapshots provide the user with an unlimited number of rollback points.
Shared Volumes Support provides shared storage for server clusters, which is used to increase reliability and availability of data.
Thin Provisioning allows you to purchase only the storage you need, as application data grows. This raises storage utilization level, and increases ROI significantly.
So, we need a SAN solution that would imply all these features and combine them with an affordable price, right? After careful analysis of many SAN solutions we have chosen the winner: StarWind Enterprise Server.
StarWind Enterprise Server is a software product that turns any 32-bit or 64-bit Windows Server into iSCSI target device that is capable of sharing access with multiple hosts. StarWind Enterprise Server includes all the ‘must-haves’ we’ve specified above: Thin Storage Provisioning, Synchronous Mirroring, Data Replication, Automated Snapshots, Continuous Data Protection. Moreover, StarWind Enterprise Server includes additional features such as RAID that enhances the security in case the mirrors are located on different servers and MPIO (Multi-Path I/O) which increases the productivity in case of network congestions. Most importantly, StarWind Enterprise Server includes two nodes with its license to support mirroring and replication. All these (and many other) features, available for less than $3,000 make the StarWind Enterprise Server a real bargain if compared to other competitive solutions offered nowadays.
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