New StarWind iSCSI – High Availability for SMBs
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.