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StarPort Raid-0 (Stripping) and Storage Link Aggregation

A RAID-0 (also known as a stripe set or striped volume) splits data across two or more independent/separated disks. RAID-0 is normally used to increase performance and combined volume capacity.

The data written to a RAID-0 (striped volume) is written to the disks according to the below sample of two physical disks:

RAID-0 (Striped Volume)


The primary purpose of a RAID-0 configuration is extending the bottlenecks caused by the limitations of read/write speed of a single hard drive. Combining two hard drives into a RAID-0 array allows nearly doubling of the read/write performance.

When building an iSCSI network, a break-through idea would be to create iSCSI targets which would work similarly to a simple RAID-0 or Striped Volume configuration. Adding iSCSI protocol to this configuration would add the advantages of iSCSI SAN to the advantages of RAID-0.

Standard way:

The standard way of implementing an iSCSI SAN on a separate dedicated box would cause the following issues:

  1. DAS limitations. The maximum amount of jacks for IDE/SCSI/SATA devices on the Motherboard is limited. Moreover, the connection interfaces length is also limited: Parallel ATA only allows cable lengths up to 18 inch (460 mm); SCSI SSA - 984 inch (25 m). Also, there is a limitation in the amount of devices that one can connect to a single interface port.
  2. CPU limitations. No matter how many storage arrays or disks there are on the iSCSI Target PC - the amount of CPU remains the same.
  3. BUS limitations. One cannot extend the transfer rate of an existing BUS. No matter how many network interfaces there are in an iSCSI network.


The standard way


StarWind way:

StarWind Software StarPort allows creating a software RAID-0 configuration via iSCSI which allows creating Storage Link Aggregation for achieving higher data transfer performance between your iSCSI targets and initiators. Using a single iSCSI target even with NIC teaming or MPIO implemented will not allow extending the performance limit of the target hardware.

StarPort allows creating Storage Link Aggregation that splits the data between two or more storage systems implementing the true software iSCSI RAID-0 functionality.

And because StarPort fully implements iSCSI client side protocol enabling you to connect to remote storage appliances, you can achieve the functionality of iSCSI SAN configuration combined with RAID-0 functionality combining the benefits of using iSCSI and the benefits of using RAID-0.

By separating the storage link NICs and storage arrays onto two or more separate links dedicated for storage network you can achieve the combined benefits of RAID-0 and iSCSI technology.

StarWind way


Pros:

  1. SAN Benefits (remote storage is recognized as local; no BUS length limitations while the files on the remote SAN are still accessed on a block level as if they were local).
  2. CPU Independent (One can distribute the data between two or more storage links).
  3. Bus Independent (Single target bottleneck is no longer a problem).

Please fill out the form below to download the product. An installer link together with the license key will be sent to the e-mail address that you’ve specified. You may check the Free vs. Paid document if you are unsure about which StarWind Virtual SAN version you would like to try. Aside from this, there is a totally unrestricted NFS (Not For Sale) version of StarWind VSAN available for certain use cases. StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V release notes are available here.