StarWind Free iSCSI SAN provides an Enterprise Feature set to Evaluate the Benefits of SAN’s, Virtualization and fast Disk-to-Disk Backup. StarWind has announced the release of Free iSCSI SAN software that allows you to build an iSCSI storage appliance based on the Microsoft Windows operating system, with full snapshot and backup capabilities, which can be optionally upgraded up to StarWind HA (High Availability) for dual node redundancy and off-site data replication.
StarWind provides a free and open architecture to eliminate vendor lock-in when selecting SAN hardware, reducing the need to overpay for disks, controller hardware and software licensing. Total cost savings with StarWind allow desktop virtualization to become a reality since one of the biggest hurdles to virtualizing desktops has been the cost of SAN hardware. Not to mention all the other solutions StarWind is ideal for such as providing shared storage for virtual servers to leverage live migration, physical servers to consolidate direct attached disks, server clusters such as SQL or Exchange or for fast backups to disk.
StarWind Free iSCSI SAN offers a unique set of features, including:
- Host operating systems: any modern Microsoft Windows OS is supported.
- Works with all the leading Hypervisor vendors: VMware, Microsoft, VMware.
- Data De-duplication (fully supported, variable block size). Data Deduplication is a specialized mechanism of data-reduction, reducing storage capacity requirements by eliminating duplicated data within and between files.
Unlimited storage capacity & Unlimited number of supported concurrent iSCSI connections. - Full Production use is allowed.
- Support - Free version is covered with a basic support plan (an open public community forum). Support upgrades are available for paid per-incident plans or switching to any commercial version with extended functionality where an annual support plan is included.
- Caching - StarWind has a multi-level cache mechanism implemented. The cache can use gigabytes of RAM and converts it into to extremely fast level 1 write-back or write-through cache, providing superior storage performance over many conventional SANs.
- CDP (Continuous Data Protection) and Snapshots that are completely compatible with VSS (Volume Snapshot Services).
- VTL (Virtual Tape Library) and WAN replication are offered as paid upgrade options.
- iSCSI boot is fully supported with iSCSI boot capable NIC.
“Currently no other vendor is offering free iSCSI SAN software with the same robust feature set as StarWind’s. Such companies as Microsoft, VMware, Citrix offer their hypervisors free of charge and now StarWind Software presents absolutely free iSCSI storage software, with a full set of enterprise features including snapshots to complement the growing need for storage to work with hypervisors or even standalone,” said StarWind's CEO, Artem Berman.
Customers can now test and use iSCSI storage in a production environment without any financial hurdles to evaluate the benefits of SAN’s before investing money into additional storage, support costs and high availability features. The free edition of StarWind iSCSI SAN will further help reduce IT costs, improve data availability and ensure business continuity.
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-free
