SAN at a DAS Price?
In a recent series I did for Information Week entitled SAN vs. DAS I discussed the reemergence of the DAS market. The cost of DAS storage is cheap, capacities are high and the performance can be tuned anywhere from value with SATA to performance with 15K RPM SAS or even high performance with PCI-E Solid State Disk (SSD).
At some point however, most data centers will need to share storage with other servers. This can be because of a need to better utilize storage resources like capacity or more likely to enable such server technologies as clustering, or to leverage server virtualization for live migration type of features.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The first step into shared storage can be a bit of sticker shock for many organizations. Additionally when an organization first needs shared storage they often need just the very basics and not all the capabilities of the mid-range or high end arrays. Lastly they have often invested in DAS storage and the thought of throwing that investment out in favor of a SAN is distasteful.
This is where StarWind Software's product comes in. As we learned in a recent briefing, StarWind develops a software based SAN. With it they can convert those existing Windows servers that you have filled up with DAS storage into an iSCSI SAN and do so in less than 30 minutes, making it a viable candidate for a first time SAN. Basically you end up with a storage virtualization / virtual SAN solution that works on any industry standard server running 64-bit or 32-bit Windows.
The StarWind Server software offering priced at $995 provides just what a first time SAN customer needs, the basics so you can either create Microsoft Clusters or leverage server virtualization for live migrations plus of course get better utilization of your available storage capacity by amortizing that capacity across more servers in the environment.
At some point most shared storage customers will want to expand the offering beyond the basics, looking for advanced data protection capabilities. The StarWind Enterprise Server software priced at $2,995 gives you features such as mirroring and replication, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and Snapshots, Thin Provisioning, Storage Virtualization and Mirrored Fail-Safe volumes.
To get you started though, StarWind's big announcement that will cause quite a bit of commotion in the storage industry, is that for a limited time StarWind is offering a free 2TB version of the StarWind Server Software. While support is not included in this free version, it is ideal for most home labs, consultants, seminar trainees and anyone else out there who is not using it in production or for serious work. When the time comes to deploy into production the free version can be upgraded for greater capacity and the ability to access technical support.
As an organization grows and the need for shared storage becomes a requirement, there is a potential hole in solutions available and those that are available are often very limited in capabilities. StarWind Server allows for an inexpensive first step to shared storage and the StarWind Enterprise Server provides advanced capabilities that prolongs the savings.
Briefing Report
