Inevitability is an IT administrator’s sworn enemy. What is certain is that failure of some kind or another is guaranteed in every infrastructure. It’s up to the admins to prepare for the situation without knowing when or where it will strike.

Virtualization is often that first line of defence as it simplifies branch office environments by reducing hardware requirements and improving downtime resolution which improves business uptime and reduces IT operational costs.

Although virtualization improves branch uptime and reduces downtime resolution, it does not prevent down time, it only prolongs the “inevitable”.

As we know VMware High Availability solves this for us, but how do we achieve it?

It comes down to shared storage (traditionally a SAN), which holds all data and is separate from the servers which are processing and serving up data to the business users. The issue here is that traditional physical storage solutions are very costly to implement, maintain and are complex, requiring storage specific IT administrators on site for deployment. Hold on, high availability is implemented to protect against hardware and OS failure, a SAN is hardware………. so if it fails?

For a large organization, SAN solutions are just not suitable for their multiple branch locations.

Storage Virtual Appliances (SVA) such as StorMagic’s SvSAN on the other hand are an ideal solution for large organizations. SVAs leverage the internal storage disks of servers to mirror data across 2 (or more) hosts and present that mirrored data as shared storage to vSphere.

Benefits of SVAs:

-          Cost Effectively deliver shared storage for enablement of VMware features

-          No single point of Failure

-          No depreciation of hardware or additional energy costs associated with new hardware

-          vCenter integration for single-pane-of-glass vCenter management

-          Deployment, resolution and management from the central office.