Storage engineered by Storage Engineers

Published On: 16th November 2018//3.4 min read//Tags: , , , , , //

A lot of ‘on premises’ storage has been developed based on the needs of the datacenter, a complete solution that combines hardware and software. Gartner predicts that by 2022, 75% of all data will be generated outside of the traditional datacenter. This suggests a shift towards processing data at the edge, which is something that a lot of these datacenter solutions weren’t designed for.

Technical teams should not be trapped into buying excessive hardware just to provide the storage and performance that they need at the edge. Luckily, there is a flexible solution that is specifically designed to solve the common pains of the edge.

Hans O’Sullivan and Chris Farey recognized the limitations of traditionalstorage for edge environments and founded StorMagic, so that they could develop SvSAN. An early pioneer of virtual storage, SvSAN is different because it makes complex storage simple, and accessible to edge environments.

How?

By creating a management interface that includes as much automation as possible. The solution saves users from mundane tasks (such as finding IP addresses and configuring RAID) by doing the discovery, automatically configuring the information and then presenting it to the end user. This technology will be developed even further in the future: by building levels of AI into the management interface StorMagic is planning to roll out a solution that is simplified even further.

The ability to process data quickly, without breaking the bank is an arduous task for a lot of organizations at the edge. A lot of storage solutions that enable performance caching are based on datacenter technology where the caching algorithm is simply based on the last bits of data used and perhaps the most frequently used.. SvSAN’s caching algorithms are different.hey understand data patterns used in a virtual environment, recognize what data is likely to be needed next and preload the cache. This technology provides end users with up to ten times the performance on a single disk drive and in many cases eliminates the need for expensive all-flash arrays.

Hans and Chris developed SvSAN to save the customer money. Firstly, by providing an alternative to a physical SAN, which incurs huge operating costs and can be a single point of failure leading to outages. Secondly, by delivering performance analytics tools that helps determine the most efficient hardware design and prevents over-provisioning.,

A large StorMagic customer has deployed SvSAN on over 2,000 sites and has saved $26 million from their refresh budget by using our analytics tools (while exceeding their reliability and performance targets). This was because SvSAN analytics revealed that they were originally overspending on the hardware they had scoped. In contrast to competitor solutions, they increased their performance, while scaling down their hardware, by switching to SvSAN.

Equally, E.ON Climate and Renewables have deployed SvSAN on over 100 remote sites. Why did they choose StorMagic?

“StorMagic’s SvSAN enables us to cost effectively implement simple, 2-server highly available systems with minimal hardware requirements. With VMware and SvSAN at each location, we dramatically reduce the risk of downtime for energy-production applications and eliminate the need for on-site support. High availability is essential for us to maintain continuity of operations at our remote sites. However the extreme location challenges we face mean that physical shared storage solutions are prohibitively expensive for us to implement.” – Uwe Fischer, Head of Asset Information Systems, E.ON Climate & Renewables

What is the secret sauce that makes SvSAN an effective solution?

A purpose designed solution for the edge of the enterprise. An extremely thin implementation that runs as a stack that was developed from scratch to use as little resource as possible, allowing the customer to significantly lower their hardware and management costs. . Rather than fitting a datacenter solution to the edge (and be burdened with the costs that come with it) SvSAN is effective because it’s simple, thin, and easy to manage remotely.

If you would like to find out more about SvSAN then you can check out the product overview here. Alternatively, you can chat to the team by emailing [email protected]

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