StorMagic SvSAN, VMware vSphere Storage Appliance Feature Comparison

April 9, 2013 in Comparison, Storage, SvSAN

StorMagic’s virtual storage appliance (VSA) solution, SvSAN, enables organizations to achieve affordable remote site redundancy with less capital and IT investment. A recent big box retailer saved over $10 million in hardware alone with SvSAN and further savings with rapid deployment functionality across their 2200+ stores.

In this side by side comparison between StorMagic’s SvSAN and VMware’s vSphere Storage Appliance, we show that SvSAN is delivering functionality that holds value to organizations managing multiple distributed sites.

comparison date: February 2013

Try SvSAN for 60 Days:  Download Now

 

 

Enable Retail Distributed Store Uptime with Virtualization and Virtual Storage Appliances

March 20, 2013 in Branch Office, Multi-Site, Retail, Storage, SvSAN, Whitepaper

Virtualization  helps drive down the cost of IT by consolidating servers, reducing maintenance costs and lowering management overhead. Just as importantly, advanced features make it possible to achieve high availability for critical store applications. With high availability, applications that support revenue generation and applications that support efficiency, cost containment and risk management are always available. It’s no surprise, then that InformationWeek.com, using data from a recent IDC study, highlighted virtualization as the top priority for CIO’s.

Employees, partners, and customers may access an organization’s applications from virtually anywhere: from the office, from home, or on the road. And they expect the applications to be available, regardless of where the applications run, whether from a centralized corporate data center, from a cloud service, from a remote site or from some combination of the three.

CIO’s and IT administrators responsible for retail IT operations face unique challenges at the store level that have, until recently been barriers to delivering high availability. These barriers are:

  • High hardware and software acquisition costs
  • High maintenance costs
  • The lack of onsite skilled IT staff

Shared storage is a key enabling technology for high availability and an absolute requirement for advanced availability features. Shared storage has also however, been a prime contributor to high acquisition costs, high maintenance costs, and the need for onsite, highly-skilled IT staff.

Download this informative whitepaper to learn how virtual storage appliances are enabling retail organizations to deliver uptime in their distributed store environments.

Download the Whitepaper

Enable Store Availability So You Can Focus on Your Infrastructure Development

March 7, 2013 in Multi-Site, Retail, SvSAN

StorMagic understands the challenges of running business-critical applications at remote sites, especially for large regional or national retail organizations with many locations and no IT resources at the store level.

So how do you achieve affordable application uptime, shared storage, high availability and reliability while eliminating the need for physical storage networks at your retail stores? For infrastructure management teams, implementing network storage in-store ensures availability of business applications, but the expense is too high.

StorMagic’s SvSAN is ideal for remote sites because of the following:

  • Simple to use and manage.
  • Significantly reduced capital costs
  • Automated, fast and easy deployment over dozens, hundreds and thousands of remote sites
  • vSphere integration providing single pane of glass management across all remote sites
  • Low ongoing operational costs
  • Small footprint
  • Hardware independence
  • Excellent application performance
  • True 2 server High Availability (HA) without local quorum server requirement

Read how a big box retailer with over 2200 locations is deploying SvSAN to dozens of sites weekly with an estimated $10m in cost savings. Learn More

Improving Branch Office Infrastructure Efficiency

November 5, 2012 in Branch Office, Events, Webinar

Multi-site organizations are under increasing pressure to improve branch-office efficiency as frequent branch office downtime and IT complexity dramatically effect business operations. The key behind creating efficient branch office environments is through infrastructure simplification, ensuring uptime and centralizing IT management.

Virtualization is the first step as it lowers infrastructure and operating costs, decreases application downtime and recovery time while simplifying deployment of applications. Although virtualization provides essential benefits to improving branch office environments they are still susceptible to hardware and OS failure.

VMware features such as High Availability, Fault Tolerance and vMotion protect branch-office environments from these potential failures, however enabling these features and managing the storage behind them come with challenges of their own.

Join the StorMagic team on the 14th of November and learn how to achieve these 3 key factors for efficient branch-offices.

Learn More

SvSAN 5 for ROBO Environments

September 3, 2012 in Branch Office, Multi-Site, News, Storage, SvSAN

StorMagic recently announced the release of SvSAN 5, the new and improved version of its Storage Virtual Appliance. SvSAN 5 has been developed solely around the needs of organizations managing multiple distributed virtualized sites.

What’s new in SvSAN 5:

  • Streamlined Interface: Enables manual deployment of shared storage in under 15 minutes,
  • Automated Scripted Deployment: Provides deployment of shared storage across multiple environments simultaneously with minimal impact on IT resources through SvSAN’s CLI,
  • SNMP support: Enables monitoring of up-to-the-minute information on SVA and Mirror status from the central office,
  • Load Balancing: SVAs are now able to synchronize across multiple NIC connections improving mirror performance.
Learn More About SvSAN 5

What you get

  • The benefits of shared storage without requiring a physical SAN infrastructure
  • Shared Storage for VMware vSphere ESX/i environments leveraging your server’s direct attached storage
  • Enable Advance VMware features such as VMotion and VMware HA (Requires license from VMware or utilize StorMagic HA)
  • HA without vCenter, achieve HA on free versions of ESXi and ESXi Essentials, where before this was unobtainable
  • Scales without disruption or limitation

Download your 60 Day evaluation at: http://www.stormagic.com/SvSAN_download.php

 

 

VMworld San Francisco

August 21, 2012 in News, SvSAN

Well its that time of the year again when IT folk and solution vendors from all over the world converge by the masses for VMworld. This year’s VMworld is held at the Moscone Center from the 26th – 30th of August (5 days away), which should be a great venue.

Once again StorMagic will be at VMworld to show the world all the great new features of SvSAN 5 which has been developed solely with the needs of organizations managing multiple distributed virtualized environments, so expect great things.

See the StorMagic team at booth #2609 and take the opportunity to see SvSAN 5 in action with our live Demo environment on site.

 

Affordable HA for 100 Green Energy Facilities – CASE STUDY

August 15, 2012 in Branch Office, Case Study, Multi-Site, News, SvSAN, Virtualization

We’re glad to announce the release of this informative case study which highlights how E.ON Climate & Renewables achieved High Availability across over 100 Remote renewable energy facilities across the globe.

The Challenges they faced:

  • Very remote locations
  • No On-Site support
  • Traditional Solutions too expensive
  • Traditional Solutions are prone to failures
  • No Central Management / Deployment possible with other solutions.

Read this case study and learn how E.ON Climate & Renwables overcame these challenges with StorMagic’s SvSAN

Read Here

 

How To Prevent Branch Office Downtime

July 3, 2012 in Branch Office, Storage, SvSAN, Webinar, Whitepaper

The VMware and Storage Virtual Appliance Solution

When: July 18th 2012 at 11:30 – 12:30 EDT / 16:30 – 17:30 BST

Maintaining business continuity and preventing branch office downtime is a difficult requirement for CIOs and IT administrators today. Managing multiple locations, whether national or international, can be costly and require on-site IT resource staffing.

So how can organizations address their branch office management challenges with their existing VMware infrastructure more cost-effectively? How can Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) deliver high availability without associated high maintenance costs?

In our new webinar, How to Prevent Branch Office Downtime, you will:

Learn how SVAs address the barricade of challenges for CIOs and IT administrators to deliver high availability.

Understand how to leverage VMware’s benefits and centrally manage your branch offices cost-effectively and without additional IT resources.

Ensure lower capital, maintenance, and management costs.

Who Should Attend?

This educational webinar is aimed at both IT professionals and business decision makers whose organizations have tens, hundreds, or thousands of branch office locations.

Access Your Free Whitepaper

As a thank you for registering for our webinar, we are pleased to share our informative whitepaper from this topic, “Preventing Branch Office Downtime with VMware and Storage Virtual Appliances”

Presenters

  • Steven Santini: Marketing Development Specialist at StorMagic

New StorMagic Whitepaper: Preventing Branch Office Downtime with VMware & Storage Virtual Appliances

June 19, 2012 in Branch Office, News, SvSAN, Whitepaper

We’re pleased to announce that StorMagic has released a new White Paper “Preventing Branch Office Downtime with VMware & Storage Virtual Appliances.”
To access the White Paper, download it here.

Managing multiple branch locations presents unique IT challenges for organizations as management complexity, and often a lack of IT resources, can make it difficult to maintain continuous up time.

Shared storage is a key enabling technology and an absolute requirement for VMware’s advanced availability features such as High Availability, Fault Tolerance, vMotion and DRS.
StorMagic recognizes that organizations are under ever-increasing pressure to deliver more reliable environments to their branch offices. Especially when routine business operations come to a standstill if and when things go wrong.

Without High Availability and the ability to effectively manage branch environments from the central office, ensuring continuous business up time and effective down time resolution can put increased pressure on IT administrators. This increases both IT costs and complexity.

CIOs and IT administrators face common challenges when implementing shared storage at their branch offices, including:

  • High hardware acquisition
  • High maintenance costs
  • The lack of on-site skilled IT staff

Download StorMagic’s new White Paper, “Preventing Branch Office Down Time with VMware & Storage Virtual Appliances,” to learn how to solve these common challenges.

Download Now

Top 6 Reasons To Use Storage Virtual Appliances For Your Branch Offices!

June 14, 2012 in Branch Office, Storage

Provides shared storage cost effectively

Storage Virtual Appliance’s (SVA) are a very cost effective solution not only from a point of sale aspect but also on daily operations. It’s easy to see where an SVA saves you money on initial purchase, especially when compared to a physical SAN / NAS, but an SVA continues to be cost effect beyond this.

An SVA does not depreciate in value like physical hardware and is not prone to expensive routine maintenance and upgrades commonly seen in physical storage solutions, supported SVA customers can simply keep with the times with a few clicks of the mouse

SVA’s are available from as little as $2,000 for High availability licensed for 2 servers making achieving high availability even more achievable for SMB’s and multi-site environments

Additional Protection

A physical SAN or NAS is essentially a single point of failure, if it fails your data is unavailable until it is brought back online, which depending on the technically trained staff available may take hours and often in Multi-Site retail environments, days!

As an SVA is mirroring data over 2+ servers any of the SVA’s or servers can fail without the business losing access to the critical data. An SVA such as SvSAN can be managed centrally within vCenter, enabling IT administrators to get any downed server/SVA back online quickly.

Leverage the benefits of High Availability, vMotion, and DRS

Shared storage unlocks the real benefits of VMware that are required to achieve true business continuity. Features such as High Availability, vMotion and DRS ensure that your business critical information is always available and that you get the most out of your environments.

Scale performance and capacity as needs grow

SVA’s leverage existing server capacity and resources for mirroring and can be extended to include additional servers as you require. To get more out of your SVA simply update some of the server hardware, add more disc’s, replace servers etc

Share datastores across clustered ESXi servers

Datastores can be made readily available to any servers in the cluster making data even more readily available to users.

Doesn’t require specialized training

SVA’s are simple and do not require any specialist training or staff meaning that existing staff would be able to get to grips with the technology quickly and easily.

As a result Remote Office/Branch office environments and SMB’s no longer need additional Technical IT staff locally.

Learn More about StorMagic and the Storage Virtual Appliance SvSAN

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