| | Details |
| Vendor | DataCore Software Corporation |
| Product Type | Storage Virtualization Software |
| Market Space | Small, midrange and large enterprises |
| Product | DataCore™ STAR HA Solution |
| Description | Enhance the resiliency and performance of your Windows Server Farms |
| Announced | 2011 |
| Current version / Release date | Release 1.0, 2011 |
| Updates | Available for download by customers under annual maintenance contract |
| Packaging | Supplied as a downloadable CD image with context sensitive Help files. |
| Licensed By | Number of Hosts and Total disk capacity under management |
| Warranty | 1 year against software defects |
Main Features
| • Mirrors data drives continuously to redundant disks on a separate, central server
- Redirects requests to central server when the local drive is inaccessible or down
- Brings a replacement drive up to date using the central mirror disk
- Enables other authorized servers in the farm to independently access mirrored copies
• Caches reads and writes using the app server's local RAM & CPUs
• Generates point-in-time snapshots of mirrored disks on the central server
- Thin provisions replicas to occupy less space
• Replicates selected mirrored disks offsite for Disaster Recovery
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| Connection protocol between Hosts and central STAR Server | iSCSI and optional Fibre Channel
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| Access Type | Block disk I/O over a physical or virtual SAN |
| Host Environments Supported | Computer systems running standard Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V R2 operating systems
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| Disks Supported on Hosts (app servers) | Internal drives and direct-attached external storage
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| Disk Supported on central STAR server | Any disks supported by Windows Server 2008 including internal drives, direct-attached external storage and SAN-attached external storage. This includes arrays connected via SAS, SATA, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel. |
| SAN Switches Supported | Standard iSCSI and Fibre Channel switches
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| Network Interfaces | Standard IP network interfaces for management LAN, and remote management console access. Standard IP WAN for asynchronous remote replication between STAR Servers |
| PLATFORM |
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| Operating System Requirements | Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, R2 |
| Processor | Standard Intel/AMD x86/X64 CPUs |
| Memory Required (min) | 1 GB RAM. |
| Disk Cache | Up to 1 TB of processor memory (RAM) per may be used as disk cache |
| Disk Capacity | Several hundred TBs per central STAR Server |
Max Hosts in an HA group
| 15 |
| PERFORMANCE | |
| IOPS/ node | Dependent on configuration of underlying hardware platform. |
| Bandwidth/node | Dependent on configuration of underlying hardware platform. |
| Max # of Virtual Volumes | There could be limitation on number of Virtual Volumes created on the central STAR Server , but the limitation will be defined by size of each Virtual Volume and performance requirements. |
| Min size (GB) of virtual volume | 0.001 GB |
| Max size (GB) of virtual volume | 1 Petabyte = 1024 TBs |
| Max # of Physical Volumes | The max number of Physical Volumes is dependent on the Storage Sub-System Hardware |
| Physical Volumes (max size) | 1 Petabyte |
| Host Initiators (max #) | The central STAR Server may contain multiple (depending on number of slots on the motherboard) multi-port iSCSI NICs or FC HBAs that would be assigned to a number of hosts. |
Snapshots
| Supports Instant Point-in-Time Snapshots along with Full Copy clones (known as complete images. You may periodically update snapshots to a later point in time with just the changed blocks that transpired after the last snapshot. You may also use snapshots to restore the source volume via the Source Update option. Snapshots are readable and writeable. The software uses copy-on-first-write technology as well as thin provisioning to significantly reduce the space taken up by incremental snapshots. The snapshot is available immediately upon request. |
| RAID Levels | Supports software mirroring and striping across physical disks behind the central STAR Server. It can also offload RAID protection to back-end RAID subsystems. |
Mirroring between Hosts and Central STAR Server
| Synchronously mirrors the host data drives to the central STAR Server to keep copies in lock step. |
| Asynchronous Remote Replication | Supports Asynchronous Remote Replication from one central STAR Server to another over conventional LANs and WANs using standard TCP/IP protocols. Secure, encrypted connections such as VPNs and trunked or aggregated multi-link circuits can be used to enhance the privacy and speed of inter-site transmissions. |
| Thin Provisioning | The logical size of a virtual disk used in a snapshot relationship may be larger than the physical capacity of the disk(s) on which it is stored. Only non-zero writes occupy disk space in the physical drives to allow apparent oversubscription.
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| High-speed Caching | I/O Performance: The software reserves memory inside each server that it has been installed on for a storage Cache. Advanced caching techniques inherent in the design accelerate the response time of concurrent reads and writes from application. - Read-ahead: When a request for a block is satisfied, the software will automatically pre-fetch adjacent blocks into its cache on the principal that if “block X” is required, “blocks X+1 and X+2” will probably be requested shortly afterwards.
- Write-behind: Unless specifically told not to cache writes, the software will respond with “I/O complete” when a request is cached. It will then flush the cached request to disk when convenient.
- Write-coalescing: One of the reasons that writes are not normally flushed immediately to the disk is to allow the software to better organize the sequence of writes and to concatenate writes from adjacent blocks into a single operation.
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