It's RAINing SANs at LeftHand

Last week during a call with a customer prospect I was in the process of explaining LeftHand Networks’ unique IP-SAN storage clustering technology and the benefits it brings to IT environments, and the customer responded “do you mean RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes)?” He clearly understood what RAIN was, and he was right, it is a very good example of what LeftHand Networks provides

Most IT professionals that deal with storage have a good understanding of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives), a widely used technology that is inherent in most storage solutions today. RAID makes use of multiple physical hard disks in concert to limit the chances that a hardware failure will result in a loss of data. For example, if you have 12 drives in a RAID 6 configuration, there are 2 copies of parity so that up to two drives can fail in a RAID set and the computer can still operate. RAID 6 is important because larger drives take longer to rebuild, increasing the likelihood that a second drive will fail during the rebuild of a first failed drive.

A newer, more advanced way of protecting computer storage is through Redundant Array of Independent Nodes or RAIN. LeftHand refers to this as Network RAID. While traditional RAID relies on specialized drive controllers or operating system device drivers, Network RAID relies on software to organize multiple separate storage servers to provide data reliability. Instead of storing multiple copies of the same data on physically separate hard disks on the same storage system (i.e., disk shelf or cluster node), data is replicated to multiple storage systems. The software that manages the cluster of Network RAID storage systems knows where the multiple copies live. In the event of a storage system failure, the applications continue to operate normally because the Network RAID software maintains additional copies of data as necessary to keep the user-specified level of redundancy and availability.

LeftHand’s SAN/iQ Network RAID takes RAIN to a new level by allowing users to set redundancy levels to accommodate multiple disk failures, array failures and even complete site failures without the SAN data volumes going offline. With LeftHand’s Multi-Site SAN capability, data can be made redundant across 4 sites and accommodate up to 3 sites failing without losing access to data. LeftHand is establishing a new paradigm in highly scalable, redundant SANs that are simple to manage, and more and more customers are finding them easy to rely on.