Posts Tagged ‘N+1’

Posted April 8th, 2012
Gareth Taube

Murphy’s Law and Home-Grown SSD HA

BAKED IN BEATS WRAP AROUND

By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Murphy’s Law and Home-Grown SSD HAIn his recent StorageSearch blog, High Availability Enterprise SSD’s, Zsolt Kerekes discusses why building a do-it-yourself HA solution typical of data center Fibre Channel or IP SAN hard disk array installations is not a viable option for an enterprise SSD array. The reasons, according to Zsolt, boil down to performance, flexibility of use, risk, complexity, and scalability. I would add Murphy’s Law.

Zsolt points out that any home-grown HA solution sitting in front of an SSD storage controller is likely to introduce considerable latency and time to the recovery process. When it comes to the mission critical applications typically running on SSD arrays, such as online transaction processing, time really is money and simply not something you want to sacrifice. “Wrap around” HA, as Zsolt calls it, also introduces architectural complexity and controller configuration issues that can gum up the works.

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Posted February 29th, 2012
Gareth Taube

What You Need to Know About SSD HA and Data Protection

ALL HA SOLUTIONS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL.

By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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What You Need to Know About SSD HA and Data ProtectionFolks from EMC and IBM started Kaminario because they felt passionately that any SSD device worth its name must have an architecture designed from the ground up for fast SSD, not a slow legacy disk architecture tweaked for SSD.

Enterprise mission critical applications need bulletproof reliability as well because any interruption or data loss, even for an hour, can squash not only productivity, but revenue. So Kaminario designed DataProtect’s high availability (HA) and data protection features from the ground up for fast SSD once again.

This is important to remember because many SSD solution vendors claim enterprise-class HA and data protection features, including all kinds of redundant components. But when they start with their HA and data protection checklist you should ask the following questions.

Is HA non-disruptive? Take a look at this Kaminario K2 High Availability Demonstration on the Kaminario Web site. What happens when someone pulls an entire storage node out of the K2? Well, not much and a whole lot. In a matter of seconds, SPEAR’s clustered N+1 architecture detects the outage, starts to fail over to a spare data node, reconfigures the array around the outage, and returns performance to its previous level, all with no data or access loss. Can those other SSD vendors do that? Keep in mind that in a dual-controller configuration typical of other SSD solutions, performance will suffer significantly when one controller drops out and will stay that way until it is replaced. Watch our demonstration video again. Do you want anything less for your revenue critical apps? All of the K2’s storage nodes are also hot swappable, so replacing a node will be non disruptive as well.

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