Translating the manageability, availability, and scalability potential of SANs into your competitive advantages is Storage Engine’s mission. After all, what’s the point of high-tech unless it demonstrates practical benefits for your business?

Intelligence Built Right Into the SAN

Synchronism builds intelligence right into the storage network, transcending the limitations that have historically confined SANs to local data centers.

How? By offloading enterprise storage services both from the application servers and the storage devices and putting them right into the SAN itself, at the Synchronism Server, which lies in the network data path. The synergy between Synchronism’s open, standards-based architecture and its cutting-edge in-band design makes this possible.

Thanks to its zero-memory copy architecture and advanced clustering, Synchronism exploits the benefits of in-band architecture to exhibit unprecedented gains in functionality, flexibility, security, and performance while preventing latency problems and maximizing scalability. The result? Complexity and high costs are eliminated.

Elevate Your Bottom Line

Take advantage of high performance, cost-effective Synchronism-based storage networking solutions from Storage Engine that simplify storage management, ensure nonstop access to your valuable data, and boost your bottom line immediately and in the long run.

Total Freedom of Choice

The open architecture of Synchronism software allows you to create a high performance SAN over Fibre Channel and/or IP using industry-standard components – standard connectivity, devices, interfaces, platforms. Synchronism also offers the ability to seamlessly create and provision NAS resources in a single management environment without any additional devices or connections. This provides great flexibility and ease of storage management regardless of whether the organization is Internet Protocol-based, Fibre Channel-based, or both.

Synchronism’s support for all three protocols – Fibre Channel, IP, and iSCSI – is non-exclusive; that is, a single Synchronism server can support connectivity of all three types at the same time, providing the most flexible storage networking solution available.

Synchronism, the technology that grows with you

• Software, so it adapts fast.
• Open architecture infrastructure, to quickly and painlessly incorporate best-of-breed and new technologies.
• Zero-downtime migration, so your enterprise can adapt fast.
• Boundless, easy scalability… no downtime.
  

Frequently Asked Questions About Synchronism

Is Synchronism a hardware or software solution?
Storage Engine’s Synchronism is a pure software storage networking infrastructure solution, built on open standards (IP, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, Linux, SNMP, SMB, NFS, CIFS, LDAP, etc.). It provides SAN, NAS, and a full suite of storage management, data availability, and data recovery capabilities ( enterprise class "storage services"). Synchronism software runs in-band on a standard, Linux (Intel-based) or Sun Solaris box equipped with your choice of standard SCSI host-adapters, Fibre Channel HBAs, SSA adapters, and/or iSCSI HBAs, and in the future, Infiniband HBAs. Storage devices are then hosted by the Synchronism Server(s). Your application/database servers are then connected to the Synchronism Server(s) via Fibre Channel or a standard Ethernet NIC.

What kind of storage systems does Synchronism support?
Storage Engine’s Synchronism supports Fibre Channel, SCSI, and iSCSI devices, whether they are a simple device (DASD) or JBOD, RAID, tape drive or tape library. Since it is the Synchronism Server which performs the sophisticated storage services (virtualization, mirroring, snapshot, replication etc.), the storage devices are exempt from possessing expensive storage management capabilities. This results in the most cost-effective storage management system possible. Because Synchronism's architecture is device-independent, it can easily and seamlessly be extended to embrace future innovations such as InfiniBand.

I have an existing Fibre Channel Storage Area Network with some devices on it, what value add can be provided by Storage Engine’s Synchronism?
There are several important features Synchronism can add to your storage network:

• Storage consolidation: aggregates all available storage across device, RAID/cabinet, vendor/brand, and interface/connectivity protocol boundaries.
• Centralized management: simplifies and centralizes management at a single easy-to-use, go-anywhere Java console.
• Business continuity: support for end-to-end redundancy and no-single-point-of-failure configurations.
• Disaster recovery: ability to use fast remote data synchronization to create remote DR sites across the street, city, country -- even across the globe!
• Security: uses a key-based authentication system to eliminate any possibility of spoofing.
• Full suite of enterprise storage services: enterprise-wide facilitation of replication, storage and server level failover, mirroring, snapshot, and zero-impact backup/restore, disk-based point-in-time journaling, and more.
• Global connectivity: Using IP, any server can access any storage as long as there is an IP link. Traditional islands of Fibre Channel storage area network can now be connected and managed under a single management umbrella

Do I need to virtualize my storage in order to take advantage of Synchronism's storage services?
No, with Synchronism you can choose to not migrate your data and simply service-enable your existing storage without virtualizing it using Synchronism's unique Storage Service Enabler option. This means you can just attach your storage devices to the Synchronism Server and your applications can immediately start taking advantage of Synchronism’s enterprise class storage services (mirroring, replication, TimeMark, active-active failover, zero-impact backup enabler, etc.) for high availability, data recovery, and capacity management.

There are storage devices on the market that can be virtualized and use mirroring. Why do we need Synchronism?
As is true of all Synchronism's storage services, Synchronism’s mirroring and virtualization capabilities are boundless, with the ability to be implemented enterprise-wide while also crossing the traditional boundaries of device, RAID/cabinet, vendor/brand, and interface/protocol (e.g., SCSI vs. FC). Further, when mirroring data to two separate sites, Synchronism’s native IP transport directly makes use of the existing WAN connectivity without requiring expensive Fibre-Channel-to-IP converter boxes.

There are Fibre Channel-to-IP conversion boxes that can link Fibre Channel and SANs together. Why do we need Synchronism?
These proprietary boxes only resolve some of the connectivity issues, while imposing problems, limitations, and high costs. With Synchronism, not only are islands of Fibre Channel SANs joined together, Synchronism becomes a high-level manager of the entire unified infrastructure, providing SAN and NAS with a full suite of enterprise class storage services. Further, if you need to extend the SAN/NAS services to additional application/database servers that are far from the FC SAN, all you need to do is deploy an Synchronism SAN client software driver and the server will have instant access to Synchronism storage resources with full security and manageability. There's no need for costly converter boxes.

I have a lot of existing data on SCSI. Does Synchronism have any migration tools to help me preserve the data?
Synchronism has the ability to discover and preserve existing partitions and data found on storage devices. Therefore, all you need to do is physically unplug the existing storage devices and then plug them into an Synchronism Server. Synchronism enables you to smoothly migrate your active and static data in minutes rather than days, with the most safety and simplicity - whether you are migrating from a traditional SAN to an Synchronism storage network, from a legacy storage system to a new storage array, or from one geographical location to another (as in the case of locations merging or splitting apart, creation of new data centers, or transfer of data to SSPs). And only Synchronism's Storage Service Enabler option allows you to simply plug your existing storage into the Synchronism network, without having to copy your data, and immediately take advantage of our enterprise-class storage services.

Software Components  I  Synchronism Technology  I  Competitive Advantage