The new version of StarWind’s iSCSI SAN software is coming soon, and promises to add full high-availability clustering, with fail-over and fail-back support. While I’ve had a look at their video demo, I haven’t had a chance to actually install it or play with it yet, so no full review, obviously. What I like about StarWind has always been that it’s an affordable solution in the small to mid-sized business space, where paying 10’s of thousands for a SAN just isn’t in the cards for most of us, but where we have a very real need to rationalize our storage options.
What I’ve been concerned about, however, has been the risk of putting all my eggs on a single iSCSI server. Now true, if you build/buy a good, highly redundant server, build it with multiple NICs, a good RAID 6 array with a hot spare or two, and give it redundant power supplies, you’ve gone a long way towards protecting yourself. BUT, if you have a catastrophic motherboard failure, say, you’re out of business until that StarWind server is rebuilt. Well, now you will be able to rest a good deal easier when version 5 is released. Yes, you’ll have to buy and build a cluster to give you high availability, but you knew that was going to be the requirement regardless.
It looks like they’ve also significantly updated their management interface, something that isn’t likely to get any objections here. All in all, I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new version.
Charlie.
If you noticed that the blog suddenly went back to basic ugly, that was an unfortunate and unanticipated side effect of preparing to move my blogging to a new location. We'll be moving to http://msMVPs.com/blogs/russel shortly, but in the process of getting things configured for that move, we appear to have lost our look and feel a bit. Susan has enough to worry about handling the move, so I'll just wait until she's done before trying to fix the look.
So, why am I moving? Because, frankly, 64-bit is no longer particularly interesting in and of itself. It's become the norm we all use on the server side, and is fast replacing 32-bit even on the desktop for new machines. So the problems specific to 64-bit are going away, and thus the need for a resource devoted to them is less important. So it made sense to change and move to a more general purpose blog. Which is, ultimately, what I'd already been doing, so this just reflects that reality.
Does this mean I don't care about 64-bit any more? Hardly. It just means the world has caught up to those of us who were on the bleeding edge of the transition. So, what will I focus on moving forward? Hard to say. A bit of this, a bit of that. Software and hardware that I really like. And probably some I don't. For example, I'm hoping to get my hands on a new version of StarWind Enterprise Server shortly. Version 5.0 will add high availability active-active clustering of your iSCSI storage, something usually only available on very, very high end SANs. I've also been looking at a new deployment technology for Windows 7 from Prowess called QuickDeploy. Expect to see posts on both of these soon, but probably not until after we make the move to the new digs.
Charlie.