|
Next to its people, data is a company's most valuable asset. Businesses of every size rely heavily on data that is at once increasingly complex and increasingly regulated. Government regulations in countries around the world dictate how financial, customer, personnel, and health-related information is stored, maintained, and retained.
Central data storage and management help organizations achieve compliance with this mountain of requirements, and help to ensure that business-critical data will be available when users need it. Storage area networks, or SANs, are common solutions for businesses seeking to simplify storage. Unlike direct attach storage (DAS), which creates disparate, random islands of information, SANs centralize data storage. Disaster recovery solutions-a necessity in today's world-are easier to implement on SANs, and the stored data is easier to manage than in a DAS environment.
A company that leverages server virtualization for high availability and disaster recovery has even more reason to deploy a SAN-and not just any SAN. Virtualized environments need shared storage to take full advantage of the shared infrastructure. When both server and storage are protected, the solution is complete.
Although Fibre Channel SANs are an option for large enterprises, these storage solutions tend to be expensive and limited in their flexibility. Compact and cost-effective, iSCSI SANs are a better fit for many businesses. HP LeftHand iSCSI SAN solutions are built in a way that's fundamentally different. Built from the ground up to be flexible, scalable, and highly available, HP LeftHand P4000 SANs deliver all of the features of enterprise storage and are an excellent fit for disaster recovery, business continuity, and virtualized storage solutions.
Executive summary
Your business's increasing reliance on data calls for a well-designed and well-built data storage system. Agile, easy to deploy, and intuitive to manage, HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions provide all of the functions that organizations expect to see in a Fibre Channel SAN-at an affordable price point that makes centralized storage an economical option even for small- and medium-sized businesses. Because HP LeftHand SANs are built with a superior architecture, they are more scalable and offer higher availability, more reliability, and higher performance than other iSCSI SAN products.
HP LeftHand SANs are based on iSCSI technology-SCSI over standard Internet protocols (IP). This allows companies to use the standard iSCSI drivers that accompany server operating systems to access storage over standard IP networks.
HP LeftHand SANs use a process called true clustering. True clustering means that every storage system in a cluster participates equally in sharing both the cluster's workload and storage capacity. The cluster manages itself. With true clustering, organizations can administer a single entity while configuring virtual volumes and per-volume network RAID levels. They can also take snapshots, make remote copies, scale the cluster, and even take storage systems down for upgrades or maintenance-all without affecting data availability.
HP LeftHand SANs deliver the enterprise storage management features that companies expect of Fibre Channel SANs. However, the similarity ends there. The purpose of this white paper is to describe the benefits of a clustered architecture in comparison with traditional controller-based architectures, and to discuss the technology that makes HP LeftHand SANs better by design.
|
