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StorMagic's SvSAN is an ideal solution for distributed environments as it pushes storage resiliency to the network edge but without the high costs associated with many of today's hardware products.

SvSAN allows businesses to create high availability IP SANs on virtual storage appliances using nothing more than VMware or Hyper-V hosts. Internal and external direct-attached storage hardware are both supported and it doesn't lock you into a vendor's proprietary hardware as you can use any industry standard servers you want.

The latest SvSAN 5.2 on review delivers a wealth of new features with write back caching using high-performance SSDs as staging areas for increased I/O throughput. Storage pools can be transparently migrated to other locations and expanded on demand into new storage space.

Performance monitoring has been enhanced to provide granular historical statistics on throughput. Per-target reporting now allows users to easily identify bottlenecks and monitor storage usage trends. StorMagic has also released a management pack and system management provider for Microsoft's System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) allowing enterprises to centralize and monitor all SvSAN deployments from a single console. This can scale to thousands of remote installations and provides real-time alerting for swift problem alerting and diagnosis.

The minimum hardware requirement is two servers which StorMagic uses to create synchronously mirrored storage pools. It can scale easily beyond this two server model and uses active-active mirroring across its VSAs (virtual storage appliances).

Using standard Dell PowerEdge servers running the Hyper-V role, we found SvSAN a cinch to deploy. The SvSAN importer wizard led us swiftly through creating new VSAs where we selected the physical storage and network interfaces we wanted it to use.

SvSAN employs load balancing between cluster members and the recommended deployment is to create a dedicated back end network between the servers for this function. It's easy to achieve as we created additional Hyper-V virtual switches which were assigned to mirroring tasks.

Performance can be easily boosted by adding more back-end connections. With one Gigabit link, you'll see around 110MB/sec throughput and adding a second link doubles this. SvSAN also reduces networking costs as it doesn't require additional switching gear.

StorMagic has designed the VSAs to be as lean as possible. Running in a Hyper-V or VMware VM, they take up minimal resources and use only one virtual CPU and 1GB of RAM.

Storage choices are extensive as SvSAN supports all standard SATA and SAS drives along with SSDs. The latter can be added as write-back caches on demand and all I/O is directed to them first where it remains until overwritten.

Many competing products require a minimum of three nodes to provide full data integrity in the event of a mirror failure. StorMagic has a far more cost-effective solution as its Neutral Storage Host (NSH) runs on a separate system and acts as a quorum service which can be shared between thousands of locations.

It creates a logical triangle between itself and the VSAs and ensures that if a host goes down or a WAN link fails, the remaining storage nodes will continue to function. NSH neatly avoids the dreaded mirror 'split-brain' syndrome and is so small it can exist unobtrusively on any Windows or Linux host or in its own VM.

Product: SvSAN 5.2
Supplier: StorMagic
Tel: +44 (0) 117 952 7390 Web site: www.stormagic.com