Thrive. The proliferation of servers and accelerated influx of data drives rapid changes in today's IT environments. RisingTide has self-managing IP storage that can substantially reduce the complexity and cost of storage, and offer inexpensive solutions to current storage management headaches, such as dynamic incremental growth, disaster recovery, automatic snapshots and hierarchical storage management. Consolidating data in RisingTide IP storage results in much higher scalability, flexibility, availability and manageability than other storage options.

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iSCSI and FCoE Target and Initiator

Ethernet as a cost-efficient, stable and pervasive network infrastructure allows highly effective multiprotocol storage connectivity.

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Fast Snapshots

Best performance via redirect-on-write (ROW) technology and an end-to-end consistency protocol allow coherent rollbacks and replays of application stacks.

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Smart Archive

Dynamic hierarchical archive for snapshots and long-tail content.

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Performance and Scalability

Carefully architected for high performance and virtually unlimited scalability. Measured line-rate throughput on 10 GbE networks in both native and virtualized environments.

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Compatibility and Resiliency

Best-in-class compatibility and resiliency at lowest TCO by leveraging years of experience with hundreds of open-source installations.

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Manageability

Simple installation and management with a powerful and highly scalable, yet easy single-system-image cluster storage CLI and API.

IP Storage Architecture

Multiprotocol Target and Initiator

iSCSI, FCoE and FC (HBA) Targets. The iSCSI, FCoE and FC (HBA) target (partially available as the open-source LIO Core target) is the foundational component of the RisingTide IP storage software stack. The target allows an infinite number of LUNs per target, and virtually unlimited file and LUN sizes.

iSCSI Initiator. The iSCSI initiator allows end-to-end IP storage solutions that fully utilize the high performance and advanced feature set of the RisingTide iSCSI target.

Summary

  • Full standards compliance, e.g. with IETF RFC 3270 and IETF SPC-4.
  • Multiprotocol architecture with pluggable fabric modules: iSCSI, FCoE and FC support.
  • Protocol-level multipathing (MC/S) aggregates connections to maximize throughput.
  • The underlying generic target engine supports multipathing spanning multiple protocols.
  • Unlimited storage, number of LUNs per target, and LUN size.
  • Supported backstores: SATA, SAS, SCSI, SSD, DVD, BluRay, USB, IEEE1934, ramdisk, files.
  • iSNS Server and Client support.

Fast Snapshots

RisingTide IP storage comprises an innovative high-performance ROW (redirect-on-write) snapshot engine that functions reliably on commodity hardware platforms. The engine supports a theoretically unlimited amount of snapshots with minimal performance degradation as the number of snapshots increases. Thin provisioning is supported both on volumes and the number of snapshots, as both can dynamically grow without pre-configured limits.

Summary

  • ROW snapshot design and algorithms deliver best-in-class performance.
  • Unlimited number of snapshots per target, minimal performance impact.
  • Thin Provisioning eliminates preset limits on volume size or number of snapshots.

Smart Archiving

RisingTide IP storage integrates an advanced hierarchical storage management system for cost-efficient dynamic archiving of snapshots and long-tail content.

High Performance and Scalability

Designed for scalable performance. RisingTide IP storage has been architected for uncompromising high-performance. The RisingTide IP software stack delivers line-rate throughput on 10 GbE networks in both native and virtualized environments, and symmetrically scales up to hundreds of storage nodes.

Breakthrough Performance

2005 - Native environment. The zero-copy implementation of our open-source software delivered 10 GbE line-rate throughput on non-accelerated commodity x86 hardware, achieved with our partners Neterion (10 GbE network adapters) and Force-10 Networks (high-performance switches).

2009 - Virtualized environment. RisingTide achieved another industry milestone by delivering 10 GbE line-rate throughput from KVM and Xen VM guests with the optimized RisingTide software iSCSI initiator and target, together with our partners Neterion and RedHat (Enterprise Linux).

Summary

  • Zero-copy stack scales up to 10 Gb/s line-speed in native and virtualized environments.
  • Automatic NIC trunking and multipathing for increased performance and resiliency.
  • Clustering (full SPC-4 compliance, incl. PR, ALUA and I/O Fencing).
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Apple Macintosh

RisingTide IP storage used on the Apple Macintosh for commercial movie editing.

Proven Compatibility and Resiliency

Hardened interoperability. The RisingTide IP storage stack has been widely used for years as open-source software. It is now in production deployments with head nodes on all major operating systems.

Open-Source Software

High development velocity. RisingTide's extensive expertise in open-source IP storage software with hundreds of deployments and a vivid open-source community lays the intellectual ground work for its commercial software products - assuring best-of-breed technology, compatibility and resiliency at the lowest TCO. The result is a mature, robust, highly compatible and proven commercial product.

Broad Operating System Support

  • Microsoft - Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7
  • Apple OS/X (Leopard and Snow Leopard)
  • Linux - RedHat Client, RedHat RHEL 4 & 5, SuSe SLES 10.3 & 11
  • Unix - Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, HP-UX
  • Virtual Machines - VMware ESX Server, Sun VirtualBox, KVM, Xen

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.