Reducing the Threat of Downtime with the StorMagic SvSAN Witness

Published On: 7th July 2021//2 min read//Tags: , , , //

Modern organizations rely heavily on technology to carry out everyday operations. From order processing, to managing inventory, to communication, and administrative work, technology is a vital component to today’s businesses, and they depend on the functionality of their IT systems to keep them up and running.

When technologies fail or are down for repair, organizations are left to deal with the consequences. IT downtime is disruptive, impacting productivity, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, the bottom-line. Businesses need solutions they can rely on, which is why we developed the StorMagic SvSAN witness.

The StorMagic SvSAN Witness 

StorMagic’s SvSAN witness is an incredibly lightweight and resilient feature that allows customers to eliminate downtime, simplify their operations, and reduce costs.

It enables genuine high availability, delivering 100% uptime for edge and small datacenter environments, and supports up to 1,000 SvSAN clusters per instance. While competing solutions typically require three or more nodes per cluster to support high availability, the SvSAN witness only requires two, reducing hardware expenses by at least 33%.

Another important function that the SvSAN witness serves, is the elimination of “split-brain,” a scenario that can impact both the availability and integrity of customer data. The witness acts as an arbitrator or tiebreaker, providing a majority vote in the event of a cluster leader election process, ensuring there is only one cluster leader. If a leader cannot be determined the storage under the cluster control is taken offline, preventing data corruption.

The SvSAN witness is available to deploy both on-prem and in the cloud. Included with every SvSAN license as a piece of additional software, it can be run as a VM or installed on hardware. Its requirements are incredibly low, needing only a single 1GHz virtual CPU, 512MB of reserved memory and 512MB of disk space. The witness will even run on a Raspberry Pi. Alternatively, it is available as part of a suite of features that makeup StorMagic Cloud Services. Organizations can deploy the witness in the cloud by connecting their SvSAN clusters to StorMagic’s cloud subscription service – Witness-as-a-Service (WaaS).

If you’re interested in learning more about the StorMagic SvSAN witness, check out our white paper, “Explaining the StorMagic SvSAN Witness.” In this white paper, we discuss the SvSAN witness, its requirements and tolerances and the typical failure scenarios that it helps to eliminate. Download a free copy of the paper here.

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