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Vmeter Appliance Solutions

"Not only does Vicom's appliance ensure we get uninterruptible access during post-production operations...but it enables us to easily scale up performance and availability as we grow our SAN."
Jeffrey A. Howard, Senior Executive
Engineering & Broadcast Technologies
NFL Films/NFL Network
Using Vmirror appliances with your Xsan and Xserve RAID storage systems provides a powerful, enterprise-grade, business continuity solution at less than 1/3 of the price of alternative NAS, SAN, iSCSI, or turnkey video solutions.

IT and Video Solutions

You can use Vmirror to create high-availability Apple storage solutions for both IT and video applications. Vmirror's embedded hardware mirroring offers the added benefit of higher performance for both, increasing IT server performance by as much as 60 percent and video applications by up to 30 percent. In IT applications where IOPS (input/output operations per second) is a key metric, Vmirror will deliver up to 50,000 IOPS -- suitable for demanding database operations. Because Vmirror increases the availability, performance, and scalability of Apple storage, customers are finding a broad range of applications for this combined, high-availability solution.

Examples include:

  • Video content consolidation for post-production, graphics, broadcast, and web, in single centralized SAN
  • High-availability data protection of metadata only in a large video SANs for first-level protection of critical Xsan metadata
  • High-availability data protection for business-critical company data, workgroup projects, and high-end print server jobs
  • Local and remote replication of server data over Fibre Channel and Optical Carrier (OC 48) networks

Basic High Availability Configuration

raid storage A Vmirror-Xserve RAID high availability solution consists of a fully redundant set of Xserve RAID storage, a dual engine Vmirror, two Fibre Channel switches and either a single server with dual-ported HBA, or for true end-to-end fault tolerance, clustered host systems. The purpose: create two redundant data paths between host and storage that Vmirror will switch between should a component fail on either path. A basic Vmirror-Xserve RAID solution configuration is shown in the Mirrored Xserve RAID Storage diagram. (Please note: this configuration uses redundant HBA port connections, but full redundancy actually requires clustered servers.)

Here, the configuration is divided into redundant left and right side data paths, with each path passing through a Vmirror engine. RAID R1-U and R1-L is mirrored to R2-U and R-2L, respectively, to provide continuous data protection. Inter-switch links (ISL) are used to ensure connectivity in the event of switch failure, while clustered Vmirror engine operation enables side-to-side failover between paths. Embedded hardware mirroring delivers failover in 200 milliseconds, while failover logic for FC fabric events requires up to 2 seconds -- well within the range of ensuring no frames are dropped in video streaming applications.