| FibreJet
again delivers what Xsan can’t. FibreJet
enterprise SAN provides virtually unlimited scalability without degrading
performance. The corporate data explosion continues, and the cost
of storage compared to servers makes efficient use of storage assets
a primary goal for IT professionals. CommandSoft’s FibreJet
solution beats others, including Apple’s Xsan, on cost, performance,
and scalability.
Better pooling technology,
saves more time and money
Managing a larger amount of storage with simplified effort is what
FibreJet server and storage consolidation is all about. More than
pooling physical resources together, FibreJet centralizes data in
one place for all to access. More efficient than Apple’s Xsan,
CommandSoft’s FibreJet lets you continue to scale the SAN,
in terms of storage capacity and servers, without loss of performance.
Equally important, FibreJet lets you configure and reconfigure the
storage on demand, without forever committing huge chunks wastefully
to a static configuration as happens with Xsan. Serve content to
Windows, Linux and other UNIX platforms from the FibreJet SAN. FibreJet
delivers on helping keep the IT budget under control.
Centrally control how storage
resources are deployed
IT administrators finally have the freedom to pool storage and server
resources together. Consolidation and central control of allocation
facilitates configuring and reconfiguring applications and servers
quickly and easily, like never before. Now your IT guys will get
additional time to focus on the bigger issues of your organization.
Use the FibreJet SAN for distributed NAS heads to provide scalable,
high-performance file sharing with heterogeneous clients. Use FibreJet
for distributed web serving, where many servers are sharing out
the same web pages from the same storage at the same time.
Always on expansion
Because FibreJet is pure Fibre Channel architecture, and based on
standard native Mac OS X file systems, and therefore uses standard
disk utilities, you can not only add capacity and computing power
to your SAN without interrupting other users, but you also have
the ability to expand an existing file system for increased needs.
What’s more, FibreJet doesn’t bog down as the SAN grows,
unlike Apple’s Xsan.
Data Lifecycle Management
Using CommandSoft’s StorDirector, or your favorite third-party
storage management solution, FibreJet makes it easy to integrate
tape libraries, backup policies, service levels and automated data
placement and protection policies.
More Flexible Volume Management
Far superior to Apple’s Xsan, FibreJet uses standard disk
utilities to control volume management. This allows multiple storage
pools with different characteristics to be constructed on portions
of the same storage LUNs at the same time, and reconfigured later
without affecting other data on the LUNs. In Contrast, with Apple’s
Xsan, you can only use entire whole LUNs at a time to create storage
pools. And what’s worse, with Xsan, once a LUN is committed
for a purpose, it must forevermore be used for the single purpose
unless you destroy all the data on the entire volume that the storage
pool is but a member. That’s why Apple’s so-call volume
expansion is a joke, you can actually only add capacity to a volume
in terms of another storage pool, which must be contstructed again
from entire whole LUNs. This means the expanded volume doesn’t
benefit for example from more LUNs working together for a stripe
set, but only that additional storage pool isolated — it does
nothing for the rest of the volume!
|
| FibreJet
in the Data Center
Here is why the FibreJet managed SAN is the right addition
to your data infrastructure:
- Server and Storage consolidation.
Aggregate storage pools, without committing forever what and
how they are used. Reduce unutilized storage. Redeploy storage
assets with a click.
- Volume-level locking.
Allows multiple servers to safely connect to a shared volume
with read access, while enforcing a single writer at a time.
This avoids issues, such as with Xsan, where multiple people
will overwrite each others work without warning, such as happens
with Final Cut Pro.
- No Metadata Controller.
Perhaps the single best feature of the FibreJet SAN. Because
FibreJet as no metadata controller, it can scale in performance
and capacity without limit. In contrast, with Xsan, the metadata
controller is a single traffic-cop bottleneck to every I/O
in the SAN, and has similar limitations as NAS. Don’t
believe us? Read Apple’s own Xsan discussion board of
real users for the nightmares experienced with Apple’s
Xsan metadata controller, including how well the failover
really works.
- Control User Quotas and Authentication
With FibreJet you can choose to restrict access to storage
to particular users, or grant access only with a password.
Additionally what you grant is controlled by how much you
grant to that user/password so that someone has a hard quota
on much data they can store.
- FibreJet in the Classroom.
FibreJet has been used for years in the classroom setting.
It is great for pooling students’ individual projects.
Each can have their own protected area for their work, while
at the same time safely accessing common material for the
group.
- Xserve
You can use the Xserve for all you data center services.
|
|
Fibre Channel Fabric
Mixed Storage Pool
Servers
Ethernet
Heterogenous Users