News
Xiotech Brings Data Mirroring to its SAN-in-a-box
- By Scott Bekker
- December 16, 1998
Xiotech Corp. (
www.xiotech.com) has expanded the software controls in its Magnitude SAN-in-a-box to include the capability for data backup within the product. The Eden Prairie, Minn.-based company calls the solution REDICopy.
The Magnitude centralized storage subsystem holds up to 32 disk drives and sports Fibre Channel ports for up to eight Windows NT and/or Novell Netware servers in a cluster. Xiotech software assigns server storage by striping data across all available disks, creating virtual hard drives for each server.
What REDICopy provides is a "zero backup window," company officials say. The software tells the Magnitude hardware to replicate one virtual drive onto another. While the two virtual drives are linked, the source drive can continue in full production, without performance degradation, according to Xiotech. Meanwhile, changes to the source data during the mirroring process are reflected in the target, and an administrator can choose to maintain the link after the 1 GB/minute replication is complete to continue updating the target.
Xiotech proposes several applications for the technology, including hot backup, versioning and Y2K and other non-production testing. In the case of hot backup, a dedicated backup server would move the mirrored data to tape after the replication was complete, again separating the load from the production server.
Another application is on-the-fly changes to the RAID level of a source drive. For example, an administrator could copy data with a RAID 10 setting to a virtual disk set for RAID 5 and then redirect the associated server to the target data at the end of the mirroring operation. --Scott Bekker, Staff Reporter
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.