Highlights of Synchronism Advanced Open Technology

• Synchronism enables the existence of a seamless, two-dialect storage farm (SAN and NAS)

• Any-to-any connectivity (Fibre Channel, IP, iSCSI, SCSI, CIFS, NFS, etc.)

• Puts intelligence (enterprise class storage services) into the storage network

• Centralized management of entire storage network and storage services from a single easy-to-use, go-anywhere Java console

• High availability of data with no single point of failure

• Dynamic expansion of storage volumes

• Lightning-fast zero-impact backup and immediate recovery

• End-to-end security

Without storage services, a SAN simply cannot deliver its potential. Synchronism software from Storage Engine was designed from inception to facilitate storage services delivery so that enterprises could lower their total cost of owning storage by benefiting from efficient capacity and data management, 24x7xForever data availability, and accelerated data backup and recovery.

To this end, Synchronism provides an open software infrastructure platform for storage networking, allowing for the consolidation of heterogeneous storage environments along with the seamless creation and provisioning of both SAN (block level) and NAS resources (for general-purpose file sharing) from the same storage pool, both of which are essential for efficient and cost-effective IT operations. This innovative architecture simplifies administrative tasks because Synchronism’s advanced storage services all work identically for both SAN and NAS resources, eliminating the need to manage yet another box.

Upon this open platform, Synchronism delivers the widest array of enterprise class storage services – the “killer-apps” of the 21st century – to new or existing SANs. Synchronism's network-based management paradigm off-loads and consolidates traditional, individual server-based storage management tasks such as backup, restore, volume management, mirroring, snapshot and replication from the application servers, resulting in further reduction of administrative overhead. Everything, including diagnostics and reporting, is managed from a single easy-to-use Java console that can be located anywhere.

Myth:  An organization has to make difficult decisions weighing the qualities of SAN and NAS and hope that whichever solution it ultimately picks is enough, not to mention sifting through a quagmire of disparate solutions for storage services.

Fact:  Synchronism software delivers SAN and NAS and enterprise class storage services, seamlessly under one management interface and with just a few mouse clicks, without any specialized hardware or additional software

Synchronism's enterprise-class storage services include High Availability, Synchronous Mirroring, Remote Replication, Zero-Impact Backup Enabler, DynaPath for dynamic multi-pathing, and TimeMark/TimeView for scheduled disk-based change-journaling and instant data recovery. With Synchronism’s zero-downtime migration capability, applications can immediately take advantage of Synchronism's network storage services to help protect data against hardware failures, software failures, and virus attacks.

A high performance in-band solution, Synchronism lies in the middle of the data path, or stream, serving as a gateway to storage and providing true any-to-any connectivity. Downstream (Synchronism Server to storage) Synchronism supports any SCSI- or Fibre Channel-attached disk and tape storage devices. Upstream (Synchronism Server to clients) Synchronism supports Fibre Channel, IP, iSCSI, and—as soon as properly equipped devices are available—InfiniBand. Any standards-compliant storage arrays can be connected together via the Synchronism Server, and can then make full use of Synchronism’s enterprise class storage services.

Synchronism’s open, standards-compliant software architecture is, by definition, future-proof. Planning for tomorrow means ensuring compatibility now and in the future, and Storage Engine continuously engineers Synchronism to be compliant with all current and upcoming standards. Synchronism is open architecture software that is certified to work with—and serves as the bridge between—the full gamut of industry-standard storage hardware, interfaces, OS platforms, and connectivity protocols, all irrespective of vendor. Synchronism enables organizations to provision and use both SAN and NAS resources in a single management environment. This provides great flexibility regardless of whether the organization is Internet Protocol-based, Fibre Channel-based, or both.

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. Rather than leaving storage pooling and storage management functions in the hands of disjointed niche vendors, these features should be part of the network storage infrastructure.

Because storage services are located on and activated from the Synchronism Server, the requirement for multiple software licenses and individual management of storage software for each server and storage device is eliminated, resulting in huge cost savings and ease of use. 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.

Software Components  I  Synchronism Technology  I  Competitive Advantage