SAN

Storage Area Networking

Experience The Ultimate In Storage Versatility & Performance 

Storage Area Networking technology, when based on Fiber Channel subsystems has, and is, prohibitively expensive to deploy for most businesses today. Enter iSCSI. Here is a storage protocol that uses existing TCP/IP based network adaptors and switches, and therefore is much more economical to deploy. Based on TCPIP, it's also something your existing IT personnel will understand and be happy to manage.

ACC Yotta specialize in the deployment of iSCSI based SANs, one brand in particular SANIQ, from a company called LeftHand Networks, which in our own independent lab tests, performed better in regard to price / performance and shear scalability. We wanted to work with extremely scalable SANS, and it's clear to us that Lefthand Networks unique clustering architecture is the leader in this area.

SANs can be deployed in various types of storage module, with capacities starting from 1TB, going up to 9TB per single module. Modules are then simply added to the storage cluster, to expand all capacity which connects to it.

In addition to buying hardware SAN modules, the other unique feature of Lefthand Networks product is the VSA - the Virtual Storage Appliance. Using a VSA, it is possible to turn a server running VMWare ESX Server into part a virtual SAN module, which all other virtual servers on the ESX server can connect to. In a dual ESX server configuration, you cluster the VSAs together, just like you would with the hardware modules. The result is an extremely capable and resilient virtual 'mini SAN'.

The performance of the VSA is well below that of the full hardware based SAN module product, and our recent lab testing shows this. However, if used for low IO based duties such as a highly available development or staging environment - or even a live website cluster which sits behind a network acceleration appliance, you can get on the road to SAN based server environments far simpler and cheaper than you ever thought possible.