Synchronous Data Mirroring is critical for protection, business continuity and disaster recovery, and loss prevention. The feature performs block-level data mirroring across any disk system regardless of vendor or disk type using iSCSI connectivity. With StarWind's synchronous data mirroring, your data is synchronized to a second storage device. Once the mirror is online, all future data is written simultaneously to both the primary volume and the mirror.

• Performs Real-time I/O mirroring for Business Continuity and Fail-Safe Protection
• Mirrors two independent storage devices simultaneously via RAID1 configuration
• Ensures High Availability of your data and your storage with SAN redundancy
• Eliminates your storage as a single point of failure
• Reduces downtime while protecting your mission critical data

 

StarWind Active-Active High Availability storage architecture uses Synchronous Data Mirroring with Automatic Failover and Failback technology, allowing the storage to continue operating properly in the event of a failure. 

The automatic failover technology permits you to configure an Active-Active 2 Node storage cluster which ensures a highly reliable and fault tolerant storage. In StarWind's Active-Active Failover system, storage data is load balanced across the storage nodes (or storage appliances) and, in the event of failure, storage traffic that was originally intended for the first (failed) node is routed to other node. These two storage nodes or appliances continuously monitor each other and, in the event that one fails, the second node automatically assumes the workload  without any manual intervention from the IT administrator. 

StarWind Enterprise HA manages synchronous mirroring and active-active automatic failover on a per-volume basis. Because the volume's identity never changes, even in the event when a node or a site fails, your server applications experience continuous data availability without a single point of failure.

 

StarWind's Failback restores the first storage node to its original state before failure.  After the failure, StarWind will automatically failover to the redundant storage node.  But then the system can failback and synchronize to the first storage nide after it is back online. 

StarWind's Failback includes a proprietary "Fast Sync" technology that permits to synchronize to the original storage node quickly instead of performing full synchronization from scratch as most alternative failback technologies do.

The Fast Sync technology permits failback without requiring a complete re-sync of the data between the storage nodes. Only the incremental changed data has to be re-synced once the offline node is back online and ready to resume normal operations.

 

Asynchronous replication is important for disaster recovery because it allows you to copy mission-critical data over the WAN to a secure remote location. This data can be recovered within a short recovery point and with minimal disruption. 

Replicating data to an offsite location allows you to be up and running during a disaster. This allows a robust disaster recovery plan to fail over to a remote site, knowing that your data is intact.

Remote Replication and Backup

• Replicate data off-site over a WAN using standard IP/Internet
• Have data stored remotely for protection
• Allows for Disaster Recovery planning

    

 

StarWind’s Snapshots capture a volume’s state at any point in time. You can perform the Snapshots manually or have them scheduled. These live, point-in-time Snapshots are instant and capture a consistent state of the data you have stored on the SAN.

Point in Time Snapshots

• Instantly recover and roll back an entire disk volume or individual files and folders
• Perform manually or schedule and capture point-in-time block level copies

    

 

StarWind Enterprise Server helps you create and provide shared storage for your server clusters, which is used to increase reliability and availability of your application and data. A cluster is a group of independent servers working together as a single system to ensure that mission-critical applications and resources are as highly-available as possible. The group of computers is managed as a single system, shares a common namespace, and is specifically designed to tolerate component failures. A cluster supports the addition or removal of components in a way that’s transparent to users. The general concept in clustering is that there are nodes, which are computers that are members of the cluster that are either active or passive. Active nodes are running an application or service while passive nodes are in a standby state communicating with the active nodes so they can identify when there is a failure. In the event of a failure, the passive node then becomes active and starts running the service or application.

Clustering, at the most basic, is combining two servers so that a failure will not result in a long outage and lost availability. In the case of a cluster, the redundancy is at the server computer level, however, the redundancy is configured per service or application. The following figure shows two nodes that connect to a shared storage device or a SAN that is provided using StarWind Enterprise Server.

     

 

Thin Provisioning, combined with the ability to scale storage clusters dynamically, allows you to purchase only the storage you need today, and add more storage to the cluster as application data grows. This allows you to raise storage utilization levels, increase return on investment, and make the constantly falling price of storage per gigabyte work to your advantage. You can purchase storage as needed without over-provisioning storage. Thin Provisioning is implemented consistently and it's the mechanism that makes Automatic Snapshots, Remote Replication and Synchronous Data Mirroring all space efficient.

StarWind Thin Provisioning helps you to use storage more efficiently and allocate only the space that you actually use:

• Purchase storage as you need it, not in advance
• Do more with less storage, increasing flexibility
• Raise utilization, efficiency, and ROI
• Take advantage of constantly falling prices per gigabyte
• Reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint