Coraid EtherDrive VSX: Storage Virtualization for Ethernet SAN
The Coraid EtherDrive VSX series centralizes and streamlines Logical Volume Management (LVM), snapshots, clones, and remote replication across the enterprise – quickly, and easily.
Storage services for Ethernet SAN
The Coraid EtherDrive VSX series is the first storage virtualization solution to combine the price-performance and simplicity of Ethernet SAN with features such as logical volume management (LVM), snapshots, cloning, mirroring and remote replication.
EtherDrive VSX is a core component of the Coraid EtherDrive scale-out block storage solution and is deployed in conjunction with a cluster of EtherDrive SRX arrays. Both SRX and VSX appliances can be configured and managed using Coraid EtherCloud, the industry's first software-defined storage platform.
Data efficiency and protection
The growth in cloud and big data architectures means rapid change and highly dynamic enterprise architectures. IT organizations are expected to manage complex environments with the same or fewer resources. To keep up with these demands, administrators require the ability to allocate storage for any application based on the latest business needs, and to do so non-disruptively, quickly and easily.
EtherDrive VSX is a new class of storage appliance that provides advanced storage virtualization for an entire Ethernet SAN, allowing IT administrators to respond to complex storage needs quickly and reliably. VSX supports advanced storage features such as logical volume management (LVM), snapshots, cloning, mirroring and remote replication for data efficiency and data protection, reducing the cost and risk associated with large scale storage deployments.
The VSX is a semi in-band appliance, essentially acting as a storage router in the network by storing metadata on logical to physical mappings. Read and write requests are forward to the appropriate SRX shelf, with all storage processing managed locally. Responses, however, go directly from the SRX to the host. This scale-out design addresses the bottlenecks of traditional controller-based arrays.
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Logical Volume Management | VSX virtualizes physical storage resources, enabling users to build and resize flexible virtual volumes that span multiple storage shelves |
| Mirroring | VSX supports no-single-point-of-failure (NSPOF) configurations where data can be synchronously replicated to two separate storage arrays |
| Snapshots | VSX delivers block-level data snapshots, enabling rollback of computing environments in case of IT disruptions |
| Snapshot Scheduling | A feature that extends the VSX snapshot capability by allowing the automated scheduling of snapshots. This is useful for backup applications or in conjunction with TCP Shadow to provide a fully automate replication and data protection capability |
| Clones | These “writeable snapshots” provide the ultimate in flexibility for copying and branching existing application environments. Clones are popular in test/dev environments where multiple experimental versions are required |
| Asynchronous Replication | Coraid’s TCP Shadow™ functionality enables snapshots to be copied over the WAN for disaster recovery and other purposes, with no latency impact to the production systems. VSX tracks all metadata and buffers WAN latency |
| Wide Striping | This feature improves I/O performance by spreading chunks of data across multiple physical volumes in a pool. Unlike concatenated pools, which write data to one physical LUN at a time until it is full, wide striped pools use all the physical volumes across the pool |
| Thin Provisioning | Thin provisioning of logical volumes improves storage utilization by deferring physical storage allocation until it is required, allowing administrators to achieve better storage utilization |