Why use Sanify?

In short, Sanify provides peace of mind and improved performance at a lower overall cost than traditional storage technologies.

Security

Not all data can or should be stored off site. Decoupling tablets, laptops, and desktops from storage allows sensitive data to be stored in a secure location. If a client machine is lost or stolen, your data stays in your equipment room. With current technology, it is even affordable to utilize encrypting hard drives to secure a cluster in the event that your servers are stolen.

Eliminate Emergencies

Turn emergencies into routine maintenance with Sanify high availability. Typically when a computer fails it takes 3 to 6 weeks for it to be replaced, reconfigured, and the data restored to it. If you or your business depend upon that data, the failure immediately disrupts normal activity and starts accumulating costs. Typically less than ideal new hardware gets purchased on short notice to work through the crisis. A lot of time and effort is spent on recovery and other important work gets delayed. Downtime can prevent new business or even damage existing relationships.

Sanify can't prevent hardware from failing, but it can help eliminate the emergencies and downtime caused by typical failures. Your data will still be accessible with minimal effort and without reinstalling, reconfiguring, or recovering from backups. With Sanify, when a piece of hardware fails, it can be replaced at your convenience.

Maximize Safety

Sanify has the ability to tolerate the failure of an entire storage node, or even the simultaneous failure of multiple nodes, potentially avoiding catastrophic events affecting a room, a building or even an entire site.

Sanify is designed to provide real, no single point (or even no double points) of failure storage within your network, not just within a single chassis. Consider that typical RAID devices have one or more single points of failure; even active-active implementations generally have single points of failure and redundancy is typically maintained within the device.

Equipment MTBF should not be the only consideration when building a reliable system. A published system MTBF is derived from a limited range of time, temperature, humidity, vibration, noise and voltage but may not reflect your actual operating environment and doesn't account for many remarkably common real world events that Sanify can sidestep simply because it replicates over your network.

Even if every component of a chassis can be hot swapped, consider what can happen to the rest of the device if a component overheats, burns, leaks, or explodes. Single events that can cause premature and complete chassis failure include blocked air vents, failed fans, bumped hard drives, dropped screwdrivers and screws. With Sanify cluster it is even possible to intentionally separate nodes into separate equipment rooms so that isolated fire, air conditioning failure, gunfire or stolen equipment won't lead to data loss.

Utilize Hardware

Over its useful lifetime, storage hardware in traditional configurations is dedicated to a single host, is often idle, and in most configurations, a large portion of the space is unused. Sanify provides a higher performance, lower cost, more environmentally friendly solution.

Extra space exists for a variety of reasons: to accommodate future increases in stored data, to occasionally provide large amounts of temporary space for a project or operation, or simply because it is not known how much space will be needed. Often when using direct attached storage, extra space exists because a dedicated drive was the closest appropriate physical size available, represented the highest capacity per watt, capacity per drive, or best value per byte.

With Sanify there is no need to over provision a host with dedicated storage which is unavailable to other hosts. In a Sanify cluster, all available disk drives participate in io, parallel workloads generally experience higher random iops and free space is available for allocation by any host or for migration in the event of a failure.

Mix Equipment

Sanify can combine different kinds of hardware into a single cluster. This allows performance tiering or transition to new equipment with little or no downtime. Performance and reliability can be customized with nearly any hardware ranging from low cost commodity to high performance enterprise equipment. Sanify works with high capacity SATA hard drives, hybrid drives, solid state drives, pci flash devices. It can even be used to combine battery backed RAID boxes.

Virtualize

Historically, the primary, fundamental thing which has tied an operating system or application to a given piece of hardware is its storage. Sanify of course works with host virtualization software, but it is even possible for any compatible computer to natively boot an hardware agnostic operating system via iSCSI without host virtualization.

Virtualization can be used, for example, to reduce electricity costs by switching to low power servers when load is low, or to high performance servers when demand is high. Repairing, upgrading, or replacing host computers no longer requires significant downtime when another computer can boot up as the server.

Simplify

Not only is Sanify easier to manage, but fewer trips to the data center, less screwdriver time, less administration, and lower down time also translate into lower costs.

Sanify uses iSCSI, which is a widely adopted network storage protocol, so your data is accessible from virtually any operating system anywhere in your existing ethernet network. With iSCSI you don't even need to leave your seat to add disk space to a computer, move it to another one, or reclaim the space for other uses. Without the need for storage specific hardware adapters, cabling, or switches required by other storage area networking solutions, you won't need to spend as much time or money maintaining costly storage specific hardware. In addition to it's simplicity, iSCSI is also a good long term storage strategy since it is far more future proof than any storage specific hardware.

Relax