iStor Management Center
Ease of Use
iStor’s Management Center is an intuitive, easy to use interface that simplifies management of iStor’s IP SAN storage arrays. The JAVA based GUI allows any host to manage all of your iStor systems. Wizard driven provisioning is as simple as selecting a volume size and the appropriate application type from a menu. Seasoned storage administrators have the option of defining volumes with more granularity if desired, plus a Command-Line interface (CLI) is available to automate any routine monitoring and maintenance operations. The advanced intelligence of the system allows for multiple virtual volumes with mixed RAID types to coexist on the same drives.
Traditional RAID architectures result in isolated islands of storage. Drives are grouped together (RAID Groups) and dedicated to predefined RAID types. The RAID groups cannot share capacity with RAID groups of different RAID types. Management is complex, resulting in poor disk utilization and non-optimized performance.
Reduce Your Costs
Provisioning storage from a single pool means you do not need to dedicate drive groups or entire arrays to single RAID types or to manage individual LUNS, resulting in less time spent managing your storage. Sharing unused capacity among all volumes significantly increases disk utilization, allowing you to delay purchase of new disks until you need them. Fewer drives reduces overall power requirements as well. Take advantage of larger disk drives when making future purchases since iStor’s technology utilizes 100% of the capacity of drives regardless of the size of existing drives, so future purchases can take advantage of larger drive capacities. Growing the total storage pool is as easy as adding a disk drive of any size to the system. As application needs start to outgrow their assigned capacity, volumes can be expanded on the fly. If QoS needs change over time, RAID levels can be migrated real time with no interruption to the user.
Increase Your Performance
By eliminating RAID groups, volumes can span across a greater number of disks in the system, thereby increasing performance. The coexistence of multiple RAID types across drives in the storage pool allows for RAID levels to be tailored to each application. This benefit becomes increasingly critical in the mixed workload environments propagated by virtual servers.
Benefits of Virtual Storage
Lower Cost
- Decreased management requirements
- Reduced capital investments in drives
- Reduced power requirements
- Increased disk utilization
Higher Performance
- Volumes can span across all disks
- Optimized RAID level for each application