Software Defined Storage Virtualization Solution

Primary Contractor

Project Scope

Customer had multiple Fiber-Channel Storage systems, which could never be used as a consolidate storage solution and in the same time consumed very high technical admiration overhead. The other requirement was to provision the block-I/O storage to the host without Fiber-Channel HBA’s. The industrial virtualization solutions were unacceptably expensive as by CAPEX, as well as by OPEX. Only the custom solution could solve the task.

Goals and Benefits

Having a set of non-standard and mixed requirements born an idea to develop a virtualization solution utilizing Fiber-Channel devices at the back-end and provisioning iSCSI at the front-end. The team of highly qualified engineers could build custom appliance for this purpose .The need to have separate peripherals for both iSCSI and Fibre-Channels SANs no longer applies after deploying of the new appliance, any host with Ethernet now have access to the Fibre Channel SAN.  Performance has many unique features to maximize performance and ensure your data is transferred to the peripheral devices in the shortest possible time.

Return on Investment Maximizing the return on any investment has been critical for this particular case. Use of new custom appliance to connect existing Fibre Channel devices to the iSCSI Network not only maximizes your investment, but also adds a new level of functionality and flexibility.

Hardware products used

IBM PureFlex, IBM DS, IBM System-X, Dell PoweEdge,

Software products used

Enterprise Linux, Self-designed and written system applications

Timeline

Oct 2016 – Nov 2016

Reference

AZ