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The Many Faces of Clustered Storage: Page 2 of 3

Symantec says its new software, an enhanced version of its Veritas Cluster Server, uses a client-server architecture that can handle up to 256 nodes per cluster and provide multi-tier high availability to ensure fast recovery by tying together different components of an application (database, applications, data, a Web front-end). The upgrade is designed to improve the management of virtual environments and is aimed at applications from SAP and Oracle, rather than databases. The company claims its approach to disaster recovery can cut capital expenditures and that a less-expensive IT staffer can use a dashboard to shut down, restart, or move applications, reducing operational costs. It costs $995 per CPU.

Isilon, perhaps best known as a clustered storage vendor, means something very different when it talks about clusters. It means nodes that contain high-speed front- and back-ends, multicore processors, 4 GB of cache, and swappable disks, power supplies, and fans. To Isilon, three or more nodes make a cluster and the storage capacity is treated as a single pool of storage.

The company this week released an operating system upgrade that's designed to boost speed and capacity. "OneFS 5.0 creates a single file system that manages everything, no matter how many nodes. That saves massive amounts of management and operating costs," said Jam Wampold, senior director of marketing and communications.

One big change is the ability to work with multicore processors. Many of the company's IQ cluster nodes have been shipping with dual- and quad-core processors, which have basically been sitting idle. The new symmetric multi-processing support takes advantage of the sleeping cores for an instant performance boost. Another boost comes from a new Accelerator-X node that uses two quad-core processors and 32 GB of memory for faster throughput. "We're taking file services into a performance arena that traditional NAS can't handle," Wampold said. The company offers 210 Mbytes/s of throughput per node and 20 Gbyte/s for a cluster, and it can scale up to 2.3 PB in a single cluster.

Wampold cited photo company Kodak as a customer that has benefited from the new capabilities. Kodak was using 360 individual volumes of 1 TB each to handle the uploading of images to its EasyShare gallery. That required a lot of management to create and maintain," he said. "Now they have more than 8 PB and are still using only two storage administrators." The company also will soon name AppNexus, a cloud computing service provider, and Squarespace, a provider of Website publishing and online content management software, as new customers. Its IQ X-Series also has been certified by VMware to work with its ESX Server 3.5.