Availability of data and services in today’s enterprise is often the difference between success and failure for a company. A server outage or massive loss of data can bring a company to its knees. When companies consider adding new storage to their data center, one of the questions they must always consider is how to ensure data availability. With the SnapServer SAN S2000 and the High Availability option available for their Windows and VMware environments, they will be assured that they can effortlessly deploy an Active-Active Failover solution that gives them the peace of mind that their critical business assets are protected.

Simple to Deploy and Effortless to Manage
With integrated software for managing the SnapServer SAN’s targets directly from within the native Microsoft Windows and VMware vSphere environments, administrators no longer have to utilize multiple tools for managing their iSCSI SAN storage. The SnapServer SAN’s integrated management interfaces and the Wizards that guide you through every aspect of creating and managing your storage remove the complexities of creating your iSCSI targets and managing your High Availability deployment.

High Availability for Microsoft Windows Server
High Availability for Windows can be deployed in different ways depending on the preferred scenario or based on application needs. They may need to have more availability for storage or they may have the need to integrate with a Microsoft Cluster Server or even clustered Hyper-V Servers.

To enhance the availability of the storage component administrators can mirror LUN’s across two SnapServer SAN appliances. If one SnapServer SAN fails, everything keeps running on the host. If the failed SnapServer SAN appliance comes back online, the mirrors resynchronize and the redundancy is restored. There is no single point of failure for accessing the data in this solution. The Windows host itself is the only single point of failure. Multiple hosts can be configured to mirror their data across SnapServer SAN appliances. (Figure 1)

Integrating with Microsoft Cluster Server is a more common deployment in Windows environments. This scenario serves up a common storage pool for the cluster. Redundancy for this solution comes from the Microsoft Cluster Server with multiple hosts and redundant Ethernet ports for connectivity, RAID for disks, and redundant power and cooling on the SnapServer SAN appliance. (Figure 2)

High Availability for VMware
The SnapServer SAN vSphere Plugin for VMware creates a new tab within vCenter allowing administrators to manage their ESX environment natively from within their VMware vCenter Server. The integrated SnapServer SAN software can be configured to enable Active-Active Failover for ESX Datastores. The single interface configuration for S2000 targets, VMware Datastores and VMware High Availability options such as DRS, HA, VMotion, and Fault Tolerance allows administrators to create a resource efficient and cost effective high availability solution that is simple to manage and maintain. (Figure 3)