|
|
Products | FAQs
3. What makes SANsymphony different?
- SANsymphony is the only solution available, working and in use today that provides the flexibility, manageability and performance that enterprises need.
- SANsymphony supports any commercial disk array or JBOD qualified by its supplier on Windows NT. The disks may be Fibre Channel, SCSI, EIDE or SSA connected devices. Under SANsymphony, these devices become available to Windows, Unix, NetWare and Linux hosts as directly attached Fibre-Channel drives.
- SANsymphony provides virtual storage services using a true network approach. Multiple nodes are used to fulfill availability and scaling requirements with a low incremental investment.
- It is the only portable software product that virtualizes all of your vendors' storage devices into a pool of arbitrarily-sized logical drives accessible over the SAN. Other products are mere LUN (logical unit number) masking filters. They cannot carve out smaller virtual volumes nor aggregate multiple storage devices into larger logical drives.
- No additional overhead or software needs to be added to the application servers. Many other attempts at storage pooling require intrusive modifications to the host operating systems with unique drivers that are only supported on specific releases.
- Unlike other SAN appliance products, SANsymphony software scales by adding collaborating nodes to the storage area network. In addition, the power of the nodes on which SANsymphony runs can be sized to meet differing price/performance requirements -- something unique in high performance storage management solutions.
- SANsymphony includes built-in caching to improve the performance of storage devices in the pool. Other products may in fact slow down I/O.
- Secure access to virtual volumes is handled by the Storage Domain Servers. Rogue hosts cannot see logical or physical drives that have not been explicitly assigned to them. You'll find other products that rely on the honor-system scheme of host-based LUN masking to keep servers from seeing adjacent disks. Unfortunately, those other hosts on the SAN that cannot run the LUN masking product or have been overlooked will assume foreign control of all storage devices in the SAN.
- Highly available network storage pools are configured using N+1 redundancy rather than the considerably more costly 2N clustering model.
|
|
