How SvSAN Works
SvSAN turns the underlying storage of any x86 server into highly available shared storage within clusters of two servers (nodes) or more. SvSAN sits on top of the hypervisor as a guest virtual machine, and is fully compatible with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Linux KVM. Its shared storage enables organizations to use advanced hypervisor features.
High Availability
SvSAN’s shared storage works through active-active synchronous mirroring between two servers. This ensures there is always an exact copy of data on each server. If one server suffers a failure or is taken offline for maintenance, the remaining server continues to operate, providing no disruption in service to the organization, and no downtime. This is high availability.
Lightweight Witness
The capability to provide highly available shared storage on a minimum of just two nodes is a defining feature of SvSAN. This is made possible by the use of a very lightweight witness service which can be sited locally or remote to the cluster, can provide quorum for hundreds of clusters at a time, and will run on as little as a Raspberry Pi.
What Makes SvSAN Different
Built for the Edge
The processing of data for many organizations is moving away from traditional large datacenters and into edge sites where the data is collected. This concept manifests itself in many ways, such as retail stores around a country each needing highly available storage to keep POS systems online. Unlike competitive solutions that have been designed “from the datacenter down”, StorMagic SvSAN has always been targeted at edge locations and SMEs.
A simple, cost-effective solution, SvSAN allows an organization to remove the complexity in their storage infrastructure, providing instead a lightweight, efficient alternative. SvSAN has been designed for the realities of edge computing such as long latencies and limited throughput which are often found in remote areas. When space, cost or network reliability are at a premium, it is the perfect solution to eliminate downtime.
Simple, Lightweight Deployment
SvSAN eliminates complexity by directly reducing the amount of hardware required to enable highly available virtualized storage. With just two nodes at each location, organizations can benefit from a virtual SAN solution that is easy to obtain, install and operate. Furthermore, SvSAN delivers genuine 2 node high availability without significant system requirements and huge flexibility. Use any x86 server hardware, any CPU, any storage type, and either vSphere, Hyper-V or KVM hypervisors. SvSAN needs just 1GB of RAM, storage of 512MB for the boot device and a 20GB journal drive, and can operate over a 1GbE network. Together, these requirements put SvSAN at a significant cost advantage to other solutions on the market – even other virtual SANs.
Tailored and Scalable
With options to deploy on two nodes for a light footprint or on three nodes for added redundancy, as well as hyperconverged and storage-only deployment models, SvSAN's flexibility ensures organizations can create an architecture that fits their precise needs. Whatever the architecture, SvSAN's centralized management enables simple, straightforward operation from a single location, no matter how many clusters are deployed. Deploy, manage and upgrade clusters without onsite visits and save money by keeping specialist IT staff at HQ, not at every remote site.
Game-changing features that meet your specific needs
StorMagic SvSAN has been designed to be as simple and lightweight as possible, while delivering everything you need to eliminate downtime and provide high performance and high availability at one to thousands of locations.
All of the features necessary for highly available shared storage are included in the base SvSAN license. It enables the configuration of low-cost, software-defined storage infrastructure.
There are also two performance- and security-enhancing add-ons available, which are SvSAN's caching and data encryption features.
SvSAN's performance-enhancing caching features are collectively known as Predictive Storage Caching, which utilizes patent-pending algorithms to unleash the full power of memory and hybrid disk configurations.
SvSAN's data encryption feature enables organizations with one to thousands of locations to affordably and efficiently introduce data encryption at each individual site.
SvSAN features:
Synchronous mirroring/high availability
- Data is written to two SvSAN VSA nodes to ensure service uptime
- Write operations only complete once acknowledged on both SvSAN VSAs
- In the event of a failure, applications are failed over to other available resources
Stretch/metro clusters
Volume migration
VSA restore (VMware only)
VMware vSphere Storage API (VAAI) support
Centralized management and monitoring
Multiple VSA GUI deployment and upgrade
- Deploy and upgrade VSAs through a single wizard either immediately or in a staged approach for out-of-hours activity
- SvSAN handles dependencies and performs a health check ensuring there is no impact to environments
I/O performance statistics
Witness
PowerShell script generation
Cluster-aware upgrades
Predictive Storage Caching add-on:
Predictive read ahead caching (SSD and memory)
- Beneficial to sequential read workloads – populates memory with data prior to being requested
- Boosts performance by reducing I/O requests going to disk, instead serving data from low latency memory
- Read more about SvSAN's caching features in the dedicated white paper.
Write back caching (SSD)
Data pinning
Data Encryption add-on:
Data encryption
- Encrypts data before it is written to disk with a FIPS 140-2 compliant algorithm
- Use any KMIP compliant Key Management Server, any x86 server and storage type and encrypt all data or just selected volumes
- No need for specialist hardware, eliminates the need for OS or hypervisor-level encryption
- Read more about SvSAN's data encryption feature in the dedicated white paper.
We can ship to virtually any address in the world. Note that there are restrictions on some products, and some products cannot be ship to international destinations.
Please also note that the shipping rates for many items we sell are weight-based. The weight of any such item can be found on its detail page. To reflect the policies of the shipping companies we use, all weights will be rounded up to the next full pound.
