Raidtec Launches SAN Virtualization Appliance

Raidtec Corporation today announced the availability of its SNAZ SAN Virtualization Appliance, SNAZ SVA, and SNAZ InstaView snap shot software for mid-range to enterprise SANs.

According to the company, SNAZ SVA connects to the SAN and presents all attached storage as one or more global storage pools. It allows any number of volumes to be created, expanded, assigned and replicated to any number of hosts. The Asymmetric (Out of Data Path) Storage Virtualization architecture of SNAZ SVA provides a central storage management point, while data is directly transferred between the host computer and storage devices, thus facilitating truly heterogeneous SANs.

“The key drawbacks to Symmetric (In the Data Path) Storage Virtualization architectures are the limits on performance and scalability, requiring more costly hardware resources and higher switch port counts to allow comparable levels of performance and redundancy to Asymmetric Storage Virtualization approaches,” stated Noel May, CTO, Raidtec Corporation. “SNAZ SVA provides scalability, higher performance, lower cost and increased reliability and security.”

“SNAZ SVA and SNAZ InstaView help reduce the total cost of storage ownership while maximizing ROI on Network Storage,” says Johnny Cardosi, president of Raidtec Corporation. “Further, SNAZ InstaView, in combination with SNAZ SVA, provides the SAN virtualization platform to deliver SAN applications such as storage consolidation, online and server-less back-up, data replication and migration, multi-site storage and disaster management, high availability clusters, storage resource management, and simplified storage administration.”

SNAZ InstaView(TM) is optional Snapshot Software available with SNAZ SVA. The company said SNAZ InstaView provides point-in-time volume imaging and presents a virtually unlimited number of views of the data. Each view can be individually allocated, on a read only or read/write basis, to any server. Data replication and data rollback are also offered as part of SNAZ InstaView functionality.

Key benefits of SVA InstaView include:
* Backup and operations can be completed in background while volumes
remain on-line
* Multiple views can be created and accessed simultaneously without
copying data. There is no need to replicate data for each view, saving
significant amount of storage and improving performance
* Ability to maintain several versions of data
* Ability to run several applications in parallel, using the same data
* Ability to create a view of the data at any specific time for later use

A series of Raidtec white papers on Storage Virtualization are available on request or by visiting www.raidtec.com .