I see The Register is having a Storage Love-In. True,  people don’t ask for opinions on storage vendors everyday, maybe because they’re not considered that cool. Well, here’s an announcement from a vendor who looks pretty cool to me – StarWind Software. In fact, so cool, I’m not sure they realise how cool the potential they offer to unleash a storage super solution is…

Starwind’s iSCSI storage software allows virtual environments to take advantage of VMware HA and VMotion to increase data and application availability and reduce the risk of downtime of virtual machines. It looks to be an excellent solution. I really like the idea of using industry standard servers and converting them into SANs, rather than buying into proprietary storage vendors. Makes a whole lot of sense.

I have to take issue though, as you would expect, with the jumbled up message regarding continuous and high availability. The StarWind solution might be continuously available if you use the synchronous replication capabilities. No HA product delivers continuous availability by itself though.

StarWind also state that “Server Virtualisation is only half the solution. You also need Storage Virtualisation to maximize the payoff”. Well, in my book, storage virtualisation is only half the story.

Combine this type of SAN replication with fault tolerant servers though – and that’s what I call a solution. Even better, run StarWind on a fault tolerant platform – now that’s a super solution!

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