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Storage virtualization, management and disaster recovery provider Sanrad announced it is adding storage Service Level Assurance (SLA) functionality to its V-STOR and V-Switch SAN solutions. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company says the features will help small to medium-size businesses ensure quality of service and reduce their -virtual’ footprint.
“Until now, SLA was only available in costly high-end SAN products,” says Sanrad CEO Oded Ilan. “With our SLA as the new standard for SMBs, SANRAD directly lets smaller organizations enjoy the cost-savings and reduction of the ecological footprint of SAN virtualization.”
Sanrad says the SLA features mean high-priority applications, such as databases, CRM systems or even Exchange servers can ensure access priority, ensuring a minimal guaranteed bandwidth access to the storage system. The SLA mechanism ensures that such applications will not experience performance degradation by lower-priority applications, and is especially important for virtual server environments, where multiple applications reside on the same physical servers and use the same underlying physical storage system.
Allon Cohen, Sanrad’s vice president of marketing and product management, says their technology allows smaller organizations to easily guarantee performance of critical applications by using the SLA feature. “In the SMB market IT directors have the tools to measure CPU performance and address computational bottlenecks, but have less exposure to the key barrier to full virtualization: storage throughput performance,” Cohen says.
Sanrad says its SLA technology further strengthens the company’s ability to bring affordable SAN functionality to the SMB market. Sanrad has set the bar high with its V-Switch and V-STOR offerings, which provide an impressive level of service with their zero downtime and zero data loss. In addition, the technology supports utilization of legacy storage arrays for data replication, which the company says helps maximize the storage investment.
Storage virtualization is often touted as a way for midmarket companies to save money by reducing infrastructure costs. Ilan argues it provides companies with tools to address the underutilization of resources and the poor economics of silo-based storage, as well as the flexibility to respond to changing business requirements.
“In a storage virtualized environment, organizations achieve the full benefits of consolidation, improved resource usage and comprehensive disaster recovery,” he explains. “Storage virtualization also dramatically reduces power and cooling costs.”
Open storage virtualization enables IT managers to improve overall storage utilization by allowing capacity from any storage array to be combined in centrally managed, virtual storage pools, Ilan says, and intelligent network switches enable organizations to link storage hardware and software solutions from multiple storage vendors, removing the burden of proprietary vendor lock-in and simplifying tasks such as data replication, mirroring and data migration.