Xanadu Enterprise Modular Storage Non-Disruptive Upgrade Path

Datasheet

Enterprise Software Services

Technical Specifications

Asynchronous Replication for Heterogeneous Environments

QLogic Alliance Brief

Xanadu Detailed Overview

Whitepaper Download: Silent Data Corruption in SATA Arrays: A Solution

The Xanadu is the industry only solution that eliminates the need to make compromises and trade-offs between availability, performance, and capacity.

The Xanadu provides an industry-unique combination of capabilities to provide unmatched scalability, availability, and manageability, but also the flexibility, performance, and economy required for the future. As your needs grow, the Xanadu modular platform can scale to meet your demands beyond 144 drives by upgrading to the Xanadu-II in a non-disruptive mode.

The Xanadu has the most advanced data integrity technology in the industry today which ensures against silent drive failures and minimizes drive rebuilds up to 50% with its patented disk healing technology. Additionally the solution has a full compliment of enterprise software offerings and the the latest advancements in energy management technology.

Key Features

Highest levels of data integrity - prevents silent data corruption (whitepaper)
Self healing technology
Dynamic provisioning dynamically increases or decreases LUNs
Scalable to 144 SAS/SATA drives or combination of both maximum capacity is 144TB
Next Generation upgrade path to 1536 drives
Energy saving "Green" technology
Enhanced disk recovery technology eliminates rebuilds up to 50%
Standard 4 FC ports expandable to 12 FC ports
Non-disruptive upgrade path to 1536 HDD, 128GB cache and 64 FC host ports
High availability and high reliability with RAID-TM (Triple Mirror)
High performance RAID engine and SAS Wide Link

Extended Data Integrity Feature – prevents silent data corruption

Recent large academic studies have identified the surprising frequency of silent read failures that are not identified or resolved in enterprise SATA disk arrays despite the typical integrity functions. Such errors result in corrupt data being provided by the disk array to the application without any notification or warning, potentially leading to erroneous operations and results. This “silent data corruption” includes misdirected writes, partial writes, and data path corruption with evidence pointing to the errors being uncaught in 1 in 90 drives. By using an extended data integrity feature, silent data corruption can be identified and handled so that corrupt data is not sent to the application. Furthermore, data that otherwise would be lost can be recovered. The Xanadu Extended Data Integrity Feature detects and addresses silent data corruption, while also preventing parity pollution

Self healing technology

The Xanadu has the ability to proactively scan disks for bad sectors or other potential problems that could cause a drive to fail. These drives are taken out of service and fixed before failure occurs automatically without users ever knowing it happened. Doing so reduces the number of drive rebuilds that need to be done, improves data integrity and minimizes performance degradation caused by the rebuild process. Enhanced disk recovery eliminates up to 50% of all drive rebuilds. This technology is especially helpful with the deployment of large capacity SATA drives.

Self Healing

Dynamic Provisioning

Traditionally, logical disks could only be managed in units of the physical sets of disks that made up the RAID. Users had to install a fixed number of disks even if they were not needed. The new dynamic provisioning function permits logical disk capacities to be changed dynamically to either expand or shrink. Physical disks can be added one at a time. The logical disks required can be managed efficiently, and the system is free from physical restrictions.

Scalability

The Xanadu is a mid-range tiered storage solution sclable to 144 SAS/SATA drives with expansion up to 12 FC host ports and 8GB of memory. As your needs grow, the Xanadu modular platform can scale to meet your demands beyond 144 drives by upgrading to the Xanadu-II in a non-disruptive mode. Each Xanadu-II expansion module is connected together using a high-speed X-bar switch architecture which enables true multi-node operation, with performance scaling linearly with capacity. This high performance Fibre solution can be scaled up to 1536 disk drives utilizing up to 128GB of cache and 64 FC ports making it the industry’s only true modular system that can scale to match performance requirements.

Xanadu Upgrade Path

Green technology - Optional

MAID Technology to reduce the power consumption of disk drives
The Xanadu incorporates MAID technology. This technology allows customers to save power by allowing disks to be powered off. Energy savings can be high as 30%. With exploding amounts of data being kept online, power consumption and cooling are rising to the forefront of total cost of ownership for storage. Recently, the concept of Massive Arrays of Inactive (Idle) Disks has become popular, particularly in disk-to-disk (D2D) backups applications. MAID systems power down disk drives that are not being actively accessed. Spinning down disks that are only used as backup targets could yield a 30-60% savings in power and cooling compared to leaving the disks spinning all the time. The Xanadu MAID implementation is available today in its level one implementation. Disks are started and stopped via the command line interface (CLI) from the application host. These operations could be part of the scripts that control the backup software, for example.

High Connectivity

The Xanadu features high connectivity housing up to 12 Fibre Channel ports in just one disk array. The 12 Fibre Channel ports can connect to 12 servers, or 6 servers when in dual redundant mode. The Xanadu can be connected without a Fibre Channel switch, reducing space and total cost of ownership. The Xanadu II has the ability to connect up to 64 FC ports.

RAID Engine

Performance enhanced RAID engine has a high internal transfer speed. The load of the processor can be offloaded to the RAID engine increasing the performance for the most demanding application.

RAID Engine

Dual Redundant Cache Mirror

The Xanadu uses two instances of redundant cache rather than the typical single instance, doing so minimizes the operational impact in the event of failure because writes are redirected to the second instance. Secondly, this technology maintains performance in the event of failure which could drastically affect application performance.

High availability, high reliability

RAID-TM (Triple Mirror) with more advanced high availability
RAID-Triple Mirror using the high-speed RAID engine is adopted. This technology utilizes the high speed of RAID-1 and high reliability of RAID-6 at the same time, and can be used together with RAID-1 and RAID-5 storage pools. The organization can continue even when double failure occurs to the HDD's of the same RAID. Triple Mirror RAID increases availability by providing three parity drives, not one. Additionally, the rebuild process minimizes the impact on I/O performance to less than 20%.This technology is useful especially for database and OLTP or any other application which require high performance and availability.

Triple Mirror

Component Redundancy - Redundancy with field-replacement

Hot-swapping is provided for all major components such as controllers, cache memory, power supplies, battery backup units, and fans - ensuring business up-time even in the rare event of a component failure.

Enterprise Software Services

StorageWatch StorageManager

StorageWatch StorageManager is the integrated storage software package that provides basic control to the Xanadu storage array. This software features GUI display for the configuration, monitoring, error reporting, and performance information on logical disks and controllers.

AccessControl (optional)

Access to the logical disks can be set for individual ports or hosts (LUN masking).

PerformanceMonitor (optional)

Includes real-time status of information on the array's performance, load monitoring, and statistical analysis.

ReplicationSuite (DDR+DSV) (optional)

DDR or Dynamic Data Replication provides for full copies of LUNs. Generally these copies are fractured and re-assigned to other connected hosts for such needs as batch processing, testing with production data, or even parallel backup.
DSV or Dynamic Snap Volume provides for a copy of the changed data between two points in time (PIT). This technology facilitates advanced recovery of data from up to 16 earlier states without the need to locate and search through traditional tape medium. Since only the changed data is written, cost savings is realized over the full copy methodology.