Smile. Scale. Groove. Cloud computing, virtualization and IP storage are complementary. RisingTide IP storage delivers measured line-rate 10 GbE throughput in native and virtualized (KVM and Xen) environments. It significantly improves the density and cost of highly scalable IP storage by providing high-end storage features, such as high availability, failover clustering and unlimited LUNs per target on cost-efficient commodity hardware. RisingTide end-to-end IP storage solutions can increase computing and storage densities by a factor of 10x, and decrease operating cost per virtual machine by up to 90% - redefining data center economics.

image

Scalable Cloud Storage

RisingTide IP storage redefines the economics of highly scalable IP Storage.

image

Effective Storage Virtualization

Effective storage virtualization allows to increase compute and storage densities and drives corresponding cost reductions.

image

Efficient Analysis and Management

Swift analysis and precise management with a powerful yet easy cluster storage CLI and API. The CLI and API eamlessly scale to hundreds of storage nodes, making them ideally suited to symmetrically monitor and manage large IP storage deployments.

Scalable Cloud Storage

Seamless location transparency. RisingTide iSCSI and FCoE storage can be put anywhere on the network, making storage in or for the cloud easy to implement and scale.

Unparalleled Storage Density

Virtually no limits on storage objects. With storage features such as unlimited LUNs per target, each LUN with managed QoS attributes, virtually unlimited storage per target, petabyte file and LUN sizes, high availability and failover clustering on cost-efficient commodity PC hardware, RisingTide IP storage significantly improves the density and cost of highly scalable IP Storage.

Precise Quality of Service

Deeply manageable storage. Each LUN has a carefully designed set of service attributes, such as capacity, bandwidth and I/O rate. RisingTide IP storage allows unlimited LUNs per target, so each user or Virtual Machine can be assigned a dedicated LUN. The result is deeply manageable storage, with precise sandboxing of LUNs, which allows to dynamically contain users, operating systems and virtual machines.

Effective Storage Virtualization

Changing industry dynamics. Virtualization is one of the most prominent trends in the server industry. While the IDC estimates the 2009 total server market to remain flat at 5.1M units, the growth areas are where computing densities are increased: virtual servers are projected to grow from 0.9M units in 2007 to 1.7M units in 2010, and blade servers are projected to grow from 1.1M units in 2007 to 1.7M units in 2010. The corresponding increase in computing densities is motivated by the goal to offset significantly rising operating costs - energy, real estate and management.

Effective I/O Virtualization

Paranative storage for KVM and Xen. I/O and storage virtualization have been been lagging CPU and memory virtualization. Effective I/O and storage virtualization are incrasingly possible by advances in CPU and hypervisor technology. RisingTide technology has achieved 10 GbE line-rate throughput for KVM and Xen VM guests with its iSCSI initiator and iSCSI and FCoE target.

Changing Storage Economics

10x increase in computing density. The unparalleled IP storage throughput that RisingTide can deliver in both native and virtualized environments allows to increase computing densities by an order of magnitude. The cost of storage per MIPS (or virtual machine) can correspondingly be reduced up to 90%. The resulting landslide in server CapEx and OpEx can fundamentally change hosting economics.

Powerful and Easy Management UI and API

Designed for scalable manageability. RisingTide's user interface provides powerful, scalable yet easy control for all cluster management tasks. Online capacity expansion, dynamic RAID-level migration, dynamic iSCSI, FCoE and FC configuration, volume creation, and host-to-volume mappings give administrators full control over their storage systems and the ability to make effective and swift changes when necessary.

Unified Cluster Storage Object Tree

Single-system-image. The RisingTide CLI and API significantly reduce the complexity of installation, configuration, management and diagnostic tasks. The CLI and API are based on a library that maps all storage objects in the storage cluster into a fabric-agnostic unified object tree with a cluster-wide single system image.

Symmetric scale-out. The single-system-image semantics allow unlimited scale-out and keep CLI and API operations perfectly symmetric across clusters of any size. Object contexts can be named, saved and restored, which allows easy experimentation with diverse storage setups (targets, portals, LUNs, etc.). Management operations are pre-filled with context-sensitive smart default parameters that can easily be modified.

Syntactic and semantic sugar. The CLI provides tab auto-completion on every operation, further increasing the usability of the cluster storage. The API allows remote management of the entire storage cluster through any single API instance.

Easy manageability. The resulting ability to make swift and sweeping changes with only a few powerful operations takes storage manageability to a whole new level.

Summary

  • Powerful, easy, scalable and fully scriptable management interface.
  • SNMP and email notifications.
  • Volume management with online resizing.
  • The management library maps an entire IP storage cluster into unified object tree.
  • Storage operations operate symmetrically on the unified object tree.
  • The resulting CLI & API semantics allow virtually unlimited storage scalability.