Worldwide

DataCore™ STAR HA Solution

Enhance the Resiliency and Performance of your Windows Server Farms

Eager to leverage the invaluable characteristics of a shared SAN, but uneasy about moving all your data into one big disk array? This hybrid solution may be just what you need. You’ll gain access to powerful storage networking services while your data remains safely housed on your servers. Expect your systems to stay up longer, your applications to run faster, and your time to recover from the unexpected to shorten.

The DataCore STAR HA (high availability) solution is primarily aimed at the large installed base of Microsoft servers running lines of business applications as well as Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint, eager for better data protection and performance.

DataCore's STAR HA Solution

Benefits
Features
Challenges Addressed
Advantages

Choose this Product when:

  • Critical data is housed on server drives
  • Need quick access to disk contents when drives or servers go down Disk latencies are slowing down your applications
  • Need snapshots of disks for analysis, testing, or to roll back unintended changes
  • Require offsite clones of disk drives for disaster recovery
  • Concerned that solving these problems by moving all your data to a central SAN will be risky and disruptive
STAR HA Diagram

Benefits

Ensure uninterrupted access to disk contents despite data drive outage

  • Replace drives and restore contents without disruption

Quickly resume operations following a server outage

  • Access centrally mirrored copies of data drives from another authorized host

Speed up reading from and writing to disks

Consolidate advanced storage functions in central server

  • Snapshots and asynchronous offsite replication

Use same approach for servers running one app or many virtual machines (VMs)

Specially designed for Windows


Features

  • Mirrors data drives continuously to redundant disks on a separate, central server
    • Redirects requests to central server when the local drive is inaccessible or down
    • Brings a replacement drive up to date using the mirror disk
    • Enables other authorized servers in the farm to independently access mirrored copies
  • Caches reads and writes using local RAM & CPUs
  • Generates point-in-time snapshots of mirrored disks
    • Thin provisions replicas to occupy less space
  • Replicates selected mirrored disks offsite for Disaster Recovery

Challenges Addressed

IT operations vulnerable to storage & server outages

  • Takes too much time to restore environment from backups
  • Most recent updates lost
  • No other servers have access to latest server state
Applications run slow due to disk bottlenecks


Advantages

Operational
From an IT operations perspective, this solution offers many of the benefits of a centralized SAN while your data remains on distributed server drives. There is no need to undertake disruptive data migrations to a new or unknown system. You may continue with normal procedures even if the central server is temporarily taken off-line. The software leverages local memory resources and surplus processing power on each host to speed up disk response. At the same time, you off-load the other advanced storage networking services to the shared, central server.

Financial
The DataCore STAR HA solution extends the useful life and value of low-cost server drives already in place. You may use the same, server-class disk drives for redundancy on the central STAR Server. As importantly, you amortize your investment in business continuity across the entire Windows server farm.