The Collax V-Store uses a technique called the Embedded SAN to produce an economical and preferment, highly available shard storage system. The principle is actually very simple to explain and the results remarkable.
The basic principle is this: The Collax V-Store is told to manage a portion of a Collax V-Cube server's disk. When this is repeated on a second machine you then tell this machine about the first. The Collax V-Store then locks those two machine storage areas together and then keeps them identical to one another. This means that when something is written to either of the two machines’ disks it is immediately available on the other machine too. The end result is:
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Local disc access speeds
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High Availability of the data stored in the Collax V-Store
This really is the perfect specification for a cluster shard storage area and with no extra hardware requirements! (See comparison table)
The other feature of this solution is simplicity of networking. In a traditional High Availability SAN architecture you require complex networking designs, two high performance switches, a dual HA SAN and a support engineer that understands this.
With the Collax V-Store you only require the two nodes and communication between the nodes: Simple, efficient and very cost affective..
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The True Cost of Network Storage in a Cluster
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Collax V-Store
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Standard NAS
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iSCSI based SAN
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Fibre Channel based SAN
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Administration Interface
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Built into the Cluster Management UI
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Separate Administration Interface
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Separate Administration Interface
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Separate Administration Interface
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Ease of Use
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Simple wizard driven:
No specific expertise required
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Knowledge of 3 separate interfaces required: Cluster, SAN and Switch
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Knowledge of 3 separate interfaces required: Cluster, SAN and Switch
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Knowledge of 3 separate interfaces required plus FC expertise
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Hardware Requirements
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None
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Appliance
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Drives, Bays and Controlling Application
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FC Switch, Drives, Bays and Controlling Application
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Network Complexity
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None
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High
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High
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Very High
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High Availability
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Comes as Standard
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Add-on with only some vendors plus complex networking
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Add-on usually with complex networking
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Add-on usually with complex networking
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Scalability
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Free to scale.
Only limit is hardware limits
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Scalable with some vendors. Appliance limits
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Scalable. Usually vendor dependant and at a premium price
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Scalable. Usually vendor dependant and at a premium price
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Control over Performance
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Full flexibility:
Select any hardware required
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Minimum flexibility: Appliance limitations and often vendor dependency
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Good flexibility: Often vendor dependency and at premium price
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Good flexibility: Often vendor dependency and at premium price
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Operating Costs
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None
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Software maintenance, Hardware maintenance and running costs (electricity, cooling space etc.)
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Software maintenance, Hardware maintenance and running costs (electricity, cooling space etc.)
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Software maintenance, Hardware maintenance and running costs (electricity, cooling space etc.)
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Purchase Price
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€ (Annual Subscription)
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€€
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€€€
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€€€€
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Economical and simple share storage for clustering
Traditional HA SAN systems are usually expensive to purchase as well as to implement: To achieve “no single point of failure” (the main point of high availability) with a SAN you will need two high-speed switches and plenty of cross cabling. To reduce the complexity and cost of a clustering solution Collax developed the Embedded SAN (the technology behind the Collax V-Store). This provides a fully resilient shared storage solution with two nodes of a Collax V-Family cluster with no requirement for clever networking or extra hardware.
Simple implementation
With only a few clicks of the mouse the Collax V-Store lets you lock together the hard drives of two cluster nodes into one highly available shared storage system. The Collax V-Store management system then ensures that the contents of these drives are kept identical. All virtual machines then write to their own local Collax V-Store drive. This means that they can subsequently be started on any node in the cluster and use the same data.
Bundling of network connections
Bandwidth is always important in any network based solution, but bandwidth comes at a premium. The Collax V-Store lets you utilize more cost effective network components (e.g. 1-GBit technology) and then scale it up by bonding several of these together to achieve higher throughput. In this way networks can be scaled as demand requires, but economically and without the use of, for example, fibre Channel or 10-GBit-Technology.
Comparison table
Minimum System Requirements*:
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Fully Installed Collax V-Family Cluster
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Two Servers each equipped with:
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Intel Core 2 or compatible with:
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Intel VT or AMD-V Support
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64-Bit Support
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Bootable CD-ROM Drive
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RAID Hard Drive Assembly (Recommended: RAID 6)
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Two Network Interfaces
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Memmory: 1024 MB
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VGA Monitor (Only required for installation
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One STONITH Device
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One STP and VLAN Enabled Switch
The whole Collax V-Family (Collax V-Cube, Collax Inter-V and Collax V-Store) is available as a hardware alliance (Prebuilt including hardware).
*Note this is the minimum requirements to make the cluster function and does not take into account applications and virtual machine requirements.
To speed up all support calls please make sure you have your "Server License Number".
