* HYDRAstor provides resiliency and availability
NEC last week gave details of a cool new storage architecture that allows companies to enable grids from industry standard computers.
Called HYDRAstor, it is a scale-out architecture with resilience, availability and policy-driven distributed data management capabilities. In HYDRAstor, a group of smart nodes consisting of industry standard servers, are managed via a distributed architecture that has no single point of failure.
The smart nodes operate as a single pool of storage managed by NEC’s DynamicStor software. Using the HYDRAstor’s Accelerator and Storage Nodes, customers can scale their grid both by performance and capacity. Because nodes are arranged in a grid fashion, nodes can be added and removed from the network without disruption.
When a node needs to be removed or upgraded, it can be quiesced to prevent new data from being stored on it. Old data is migrated to other nodes until the troubled node is repaired or replaced.
As nodes are added, capacity is discovered and utilized automatically, and existing stored data is automatically load balanced to optimize performance and maximize data resiliency.
HYDRAstor also has data duplication and resiliency. Nodes can be geographically distributed for additional resiliency.
The HyDRAstor grid sounds a lot like that from Isilon Systems, which can scale by both performance and capacity. It also leads me to question the difference between a storage cluster and a storage grid.
HYDRAstor grid components are expected to be available later this year.
**** EDITOR’S NOTE: We have 15 copies of “The Business Case for Storage Networks” by Bill Williams, published by Cisco Press up for grabs. To enter to win a copy, answer the question below by April 1, and we’ll pick the 15 best entries. The judges are Deni Connor, author of Network World’s Storage in the Enterprise newsletter, and Linda Leung, Cisco Subnet editor. The question is: Describe your biggest problem in handling storage and why? Would it be over provisioning, over capacity, backing up and recovering files, managing files on file servers, getting your boss to buy the storage you need, or something else? E-mail your entry to Linda Leung.
