integraStor™ Family of Products

The integraStor™ product family scales from a single box appliance to a multi-chassis scalable solution addressing the storage capacity growth needs for a wide range of customer environments with investment protection for future expansion. The integraStor family solutions are designed with the highest levels of reliability and include innovative technologies, such as the latest SAS and SATA drive offerings, multi-chassis expandability, and a range of data protection offerings, such as Snapshot, CDP, and High Availability (HA) configuration options.

                 
integraStor™ iS5-Series                                                        integraStor™ iS3-Series

Key integraStor™ benefits:

• Simplicity of operations with easy to navigate GUI
• Optimization of storage assets with advanced virtualization technology
• Bullet-proof security with advanced encryption and authentication capabilities
• Advanced network management capabilities for either 1GbE or 10GbE networks
• Flexible storage configuration options (SAS or SATA, single or dual controllers)
• Buy only what you need with flexible choices of data protection applications
• Energy efficient ‘GREEN’ storage based on a highly integrated storage ASIC

The integraStor product family accelerates storage applications over existing IP infrastructures of either 1GbE or 10GbE networks to meet the needs of SMB environments and beyond. The iS3-Series and iS5-Series also leverage advanced security features of CHAP authentication, ACLs to the volume level, and up to 8 VLANs; and SSL encryption securing communications to the management port. All integraStor solutions provide a great out-of-box experience with a simple and easy-to-use 4 click wizard to install storage on the network, and a logical, intuitive management GUI to easily provision & allocate storage on the network.

iS3-Series & iS5-Series both support a range of application solution partnerships, such as VMware for virtualizing server & storage networks and InMage CDP for advanced data protection. With iStor’s Microsoft partnership, integraStor provides complimentary snapshot capabilities via Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and multi-vendor storage management utilizing Virtual Disk Services (VDS).

For more information on multi-vendor storage management using VDS, please read the “Using Windows Virtual Disk Services for Heterogeneous Storage Management” white paper.

Robust Storage Virtualization

integraStor leads the industry by providing robust RAID and volume virtualization capabilities that enable a customer to grow their capacity by combining disk drives of different capacities in a single chassis.

For more information on iStor’s robust RAID and volume virtualization capabilities, please read the “The Data Protection Advantages of iStor Intelligent RAID Management” white paper.

Key integraStor™ virtualization features:

• RAID level migration - dynamically change RAID levels on a volume-by-volume basis
• Online capacity expansion –add drives and automatically expand volumes on demand
• Down-drive –automatically migrate all data from a drive or move volumes from a lower capacity drive to a higher capacity drive for investment protection
• Micro-rebuild – minimizes the need for drive rebuild by caching writes to temporarily unresponsive SATA drives
• Virtual spare rebuild –rebuild volumes utilizing spares out of free space throughout the array without having to dedicate specific drives as spares

integraStor’s intelligent virtualization is built upon a more innovative & flexible technology utilizing storage extents (volume segments on each disk drive) rather than entire drives, providing the following storage system advantages:

• Lower CapEX - optimize the overall storage utilization of the entire integraStor system which saves on buying more capacity
• Disk drive flexibility - volumes can be created from drives of dissimilar capacity and technology
• Lower OpEx - storage capacity growth can occur without volume migration or reconstruction which maximizes operational IT productivity
• Meet service level objectives - multiple divergent RAID technologies can occupy space on the same set of drives to meet the reliability, security and performance requirements of multiple applications

Secure, High-Performance iSCSI SAN Networking

integraStor is designed for applications from the most demanding transaction processing workloads to the bandwidth intensive requirement of video applications. The integraStor family of products supports a comprehensive list of network management capabilities that meet customer objectives for optimizing information systems.

Resilient integraStor™ Network Management capabilities:

integraStor delivers advanced network management capabilities to meet a customer’s specific service level objectives for an effective information strategy. Competitive iSCSI storage systems are limited to only 2 ports, severely restricting the advanced networking capabilities. integraStor uniquely provides 8 GbE ports of connectivity to optimize resilience, as well as bandwidth, utilizing multiple sessions across multiple path configurations, enabling the following resilient network capabilities :

• Dynamic Load Balancing
• Fault Tolerance
• High Availability
• Accelerated Performance

The expanded connectivity and 10G performance architecture of the integraStor product family can be leveraged when using the following features for multipathing between any server & the storage array:

1. Multipath I/O (MPIO) – technique for load balancing to all LUNs exposed to the server providing fault tolerance capabilities with proactive fail-over.
2. Multiple Connections per Session (MCS) - technique for load balancing individual LUNs exposed to the iSCSI session providing fault tolerance capabilities with passive fail-over.
3. Link Aggregation Group (LAG) – technique that uses multiple Ethernet ports on a switch in parallel to increase performance beyond a single port and increase redundancy for higher availability.

Robust integraStor™ Security capabilities:

• Encryption for confidentiality protection
• Authentication for identity validation
• VLANs for access control
• Mapping for access control
• Read-Only Privileges for data protection

integraStor provides robust storage security capabilities to meet a customer’s specific security level objectives for an effective information strategy. integraStor provides many competitive security capabilities, restricting & controlling access to valuable user information.

1.    SSL Encryption –secures the management connection and all management commands for a high level of security and storage system protection.

2.    CHAP Authentication –validates the identity of a host server for access privileges to data volumes based on a secret password shared between an initiator and an integraStor target.

3.    VLAN “Zoning” –restricts and controls communications between specific host initiators & storage targets within the VLAN. integraStor supports up to eight VLANs and provides one-to-one mapping between IP Subnet and the VLAN.

4.    LUN Mapping – utilizes Access Control List (ACL) to assign permissions of access between host initiator and virtual volumes on a specific disk or set of disks. integraStor facilitates a high degree of granularity for host access to specific volumes for flexible access control and strong security protection.

Read-Only Privileges – restricts on a volume-by-volume basis the access privileges for a specific user, group of users, or host server environment to an integraStor with only read privileges to the data for added levels of data protection and archival of key information assets.

Intuitive Management

                                          integraStor includes a management graphical user interface (GUI) with
                                          an easy “4-click” installation that greatly reduces configuration time so
                                          IT managers can focus their valuable resources on supporting their
                                          users instead of maintaining equipment. integraStor’s comprehensive
                                          storage management suite allows remote configuration and monitoring
                                          of integraStor’s SAN storage subsystems. This embedded IP-based
                                          management console is rich in features, allowing users to install,
                                          configure, and maintain their online network storage with uncommon
                                          ease and flexibility. Communication is via a standards-based Storage
                                          Management Initiative (SMI-S) interface which is embedded directly in
the management console for ease of deployment. With integraStor’s GUI, the result is an easy-to-install, configure, and maintain advanced iSCSI storage system which lowers OpEx in addition to CapEx.