Boot

Bin Those Bootdisks

Completely Separate OS From 'Bare Metal'

Imagine if none of your servers had disks in them. No worries about hard disks failing on you. No cheap SATA RAID controller driver issues. Think about all the heat and power that all these disks would draw from your hosting operation. If your boot disk runs out of space, just use the SAN to make it bigger. Why would anyone want put hard disks in their servers!?

Booting your physical servers, and virtual servers right off a Storage Area Network (SAN), means that you don't need to worry about buying servers with expensive disk subsystems. In addition, you would be booting of a clustered SAN, extremely rich in IO - far more IO than even the fastest traditional internal server disk array could ever hope to match.

There are other benefits of removing hard disks from your hardware. If a server suffered power surge in which a motherboard failure occurred, as your server is not physically attached to the hard disks, you disk's don't get fried, because, well there are no disks there to fry. Only the server gets fried. So rather than make a stressful late night trip to the hosting centre, you remotely log in, power up some spare metal, and boot this metal to the same volumes the old 'dead metal' used. Problem sorted.

As more an more companies are using virtualization in order to reduce the number of physical servers in their systems architecture, this also means that running more virtual servers on the same hardware platform - puts more of a risk on that hardware platform. If you lost the hardware running 10 virtual servers, you have lost 10 servers, not one!

Boot from SAN technology, enables you to quickly replace failed hardware remotely because the hardware and the disk are no longer fixed together. The outcome might be to bring a lone server back to life, or perhaps to quickly bring a degraded server/virtual server cluster back to fully clustered state. No one likes working in a cabinet with a degraded cluster - so we say - don't!

ACCYotta partner with DoubleTake - using their Flex Management and Storage server products which can diskless boot both Windows and Linux servers over iSCSI protocol.