StarWind Software Release An Update To Their iSCSI SAN Software With An Advanced Management GUI And Data Deduplication
The latest StarWind iSCSI SAN Software release, version 5.6, provides new interface features to simplify time intensive storage management tasks and includes an experimental Data Deduplication option.
Burlington, MA - StarWind Software, a global leader in storage virtualization and a pioneer in iSCSI storage, recently announced the release of StarWind 5.6, iSCSI SAN software which turns any industry-standard Microsoft Windows server into a highly available fail-safe, fault-tolerant SAN. StarWind iSCSI SAN protects data with redundancy across two storage nodes in HA (High Availability) mode.
The latest software release includes many enhancements to the user interface, improving overall ease-of use when deploying, provisioning or managing the StarWind iSCSI SAN software. The management applications GUI has been re-focused to provide a far simpler approach and additional clarity to the user experience. The StarWind event log monitors the state of the iSCSI SAN. Advanced event notification provides alerts by e-mail, records to the Microsoft Windows Event Log and to text files.
Data deduplication is included as an experimental module, allowing reduced disk requirements as only unique blocks of data are stored to disk. StarWind's Data Deduplication is implemented as an inline process – since StarWind iSCSI SAN software runs on industry standard commodity servers it's easy and cost effective to provide enough processing power in the SAN hardware to allow inline deduplication to perform well, and reducing the disk space oversizing required with post process deduplication.
"This update to our user interface provides significant value, since the GUI is the command and control center of any application or appliance. Our Product Managers and Developers were tasked to deliver on customers' expectations, by improving Wizards and the overall layout to ensure key storage administration tasks can be completed with fewer mouse clicks. StarWind has always been the leader in iSCSI SAN affordability and reliability, and now we've hardened and matured the user interface to make sure the products strengths are easily and conveniently accessible," said StarWind's CEO Artem Berman. "We're committed to moving StarWind to the next level, from our roots dating back to 2003 as an engineering focused, R&D shop, to today with a customer centric product, where ease of use is just as critical as performance, scalability and uptime."
"Data deduplication is the holy-grail of storage, customers can achieve an amazing reduction in the number of physical disks required, depending on the nature of the data stored in a dedupe repository may see anywhere from a 10 to 40 times reduction in disk space, and in some cases such as with virtual machines as much as 100 times savings on disk space," added Roman Shovkun, Chief Sales Officer of StarWind Software. "With the spiraling growth of data and the need to retain data for longer periods for compliancy with industry regulations, data deduplication will help constrain storage costs and permit companies to search digital repositories instead of resorting to paper or tape archives which are error prone and extremely time consuming to collect data from."
StarWind iSCSI SAN is available in single or dual node configurations, with a variety of advanced storage management features including snapshots, thin provisioning and replication. Since StarWind software runs on any server capable of running a Microsoft Windows Server OS, StarWind allows unprecedented flexibility when implementing SAN storage, removing vendor lock in at the hardware layer, while providing far better performance and storage management capabilities than dedicated iSCSI SAN appliances.
SOURCE: StarWind Software