Ethernet allows cost-efficient, pervasive storage connectivity, and Fibre Channel and InfiniBand connectivity deliver enterprise-class and HPC storage connectivity.
Thrive. The proliferation of servers and accelerated influx of data drives rapid changes in today's IT environments. RTS storage systems and software can substantially reduce the complexity and cost of data 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 RTS storage results in much higher scalability, flexibility, availability and manageability than other storage options.
Multiprotocol Target
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.
Smart Archive
Dynamic hierarchical archive for snapshots and long-tail content.
Performance and Scalability
Carefully architected for high performance and virtually unlimited scalability. Line-rate throughput on 10GbE, FC and IB networks in both native and virtualized environments.
Compatibility and Resiliency
Best-in-class compatibility and resiliency at lowest TCO by leveraging years of experience with hundreds of open-source installations.
Manageability
Simple installation and management with a powerful and highly scalable, easy cluster storage CLI, API and library, based on a cluster-wide unified namespace.
Storage Architecture
Unified Storage Target and iSCSI Initiator
Generic Multiprotocol Target. The Generic Multiprotocol Target (iSCSI, Fibre Channel, FCoE and InfiniBand), partially available as open-source (at linux-iscsi.org), is the foundational component of the RTS storage software stack. The multiprotocol Target allows a virtually infinite number of LUNs per target, and virtually unlimited file and LUN sizes.
iSCSI Initiator. The Core-iSCSI Initiator allows end-to-end storage solutions that fully utilize the high performance and advanced feature set of the RTS Unified Target.
Summary
- Full standards compliance, e.g. with IETF RFC 3270 and IETF SPC-4.
- Multiprotocol architecture with pluggable fabric modules: iSCSI, FC, FCoE and InfiniBand support.
- Protocol-level multipathing (MC/S) aggregates connections to maximize throughput.
- The underlying generic multiprotocol 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
RTS 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
RTS 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. RTS storage has been architected for uncompromising high-performance. The RisingTide storage 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
2008 - Native environment. The zero-copy implementation of our open-source software delivered 40 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. RTS achieved another industry milestone by delivering 10 GbE line-rate throughput from KVM and Xen VM guests with the optimized RTS software iSCSI initiator and target, together with our partners Neterion and RedHat (Enterprise Linux).
Apple Macintosh
RTS storage used on the Apple Macintosh for commercial movie editing.
Proven Compatibility and Resiliency
Hardened interoperability. The RTS 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 Base
High development velocity. RTS' extensive expertise in open-source 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.
Support for all recent Operating Systems and Virtual Machines
- Microsoft - Windows Server 2003/2008/R2, Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7
- Apple OS X (Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion)
- Linux - RedHat Client, RedHat RHEL 5.x/6.x, SuSe SLES 10.3/11
- Unix - Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, HP-UX
- VMs - VMware ESX/vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle xVM/VirtualBox, Red Hat KVM, Xen
