Wednesday, September 16, 2009

How StoneFly’s StoneFusion-Powered IP SANs Leverage Windows Volume Shadow Copy Services for Easy Snapshot Management

NavigateStorage's "StoneFly’s" fully featured IP SANs powered by the StoneFusion Operating System provide centralized storage management, advanced storage services and integration with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) to simplify storage provisioning. To enhance data availability and host integration, StoneFly utilizes the core technologies of the Microsoft Windows operating system to interact with IP SAN volumes.

StoneFly IP SANs have offered integrated snapshot technology since StoneFusion version 3, when StoneFly Snapshot was used to implement nearline data recovery and improve system backups. StoneFly Snapshot is designed for recovering critical data quickly with point-in-time images of a live volume, which can be created nearly instantaneously. Snapshot volumes appear as regular read/write volumes to the host, and modifications do not impact the live volume. Unlike full volume copies, snapshots occupy a small fraction of available space. StoneFly

Snapshot technology reinforces the focus on data recovery by offering rollbacks to previous valid data in the event of a disk failure, volume indexing, file deletion or virus.
Microsoft enhanced its operating system-wide snapshots with a new technology called Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS), which offers improved support for snapshots across NAS and SAN volumes in the Windows Server 2003 operating system. StoneFusion-based IP SANs utilize VSS to ensure continuous volume access for Windows-based workstations or servers for snapshots, online backups or other applications.

Initially the only VSS-aware applications were file systems, local volumes, Exchange and SQL. The increased demand for networked storage including IP SANs required this technology to evolve so that snapshots could be supported across the network instead of being limited to the host. As a result of the rapid increase of iSCSI across Windows Server platforms, StoneFly continued to develop its IP SAN offerings to provide more host-level integration and to ensure continuous disk access for mission-critical applications including email, databases and disaster recovery, eliminating the potential for data corruption. The StoneFly VSS agent provides a single snapshot mechanism for the IP SAN and Windows Server environment.

StoneFly IP SAN Options
StoneFly offers a wide variety of IP SANs for Windows environments, ranging from entry-level IP SANs-In-a-Box to modular high-availability, high capacity IP SANs. StoneFusion-powered storage can be easily deployed in environments requiring tiered storage, high availability or scalability.

How Microsoft VSS Works
Microsoft developed the VSS technology to provide snapshot capability (back-ups executed without closing down application I/O) to support VSS-aware applications and back-up software. The VSS utility uses a framework approach, communicating with the application server, a writer, a back-up application and the storage device.

Give NavigateStorage a call 978-318-9000 to learn more. read more about Stonefly's OptiSan and Voyager IP SAN storage systems.

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