Broadcom Affordable High Availability
SMBs and ROBOs face cost, complexity barriers to deploying high-availability servers
Ready, reliable access to growing volumes of critical data for business agility and competitive advantage has become a fundamental requirement for businesses of all sizes, driving higher demand for fast, high-availability, easy-to-scale server storage. Traditionally, high-availability storage deployments – consisting of costly, clustered storage area networks (SANs) with high-end Fibre Channel connections – have been the domain of datacenters, requiring specialized IT staff and considerable budgets to procure and manage them.
For small and medium businesses (SMBs) and remote offices/branch offices (ROBOs) requiring greater application uptime, the cost of these complex, clustered systems can be prohibitive. What’s more, many SMBs and ROBOs lack the IT skill set necessary for their deployment and management but still need a solution for business continuity.
The single-node servers and direct-attached storage (DAS) commonly used in SMB or ROBO environments are easy to scale – simply add more servers and more storage. But the problem with these configurations is that, because stored data is not shared, they fail to address high-availability (HA) access to data or deliver critical application uptime.
Delivering high availability using inexpensive, scalable storage
A cost-effective alternative to traditional clustered systems is a small form factor server cluster with failover and inexpensive, scalable storage. Small form factor clusters offer failover for planned and unplanned outages to ensure high availability of critical applications. They also feature both manual and automatic failover and modular, hot-swappable components to reduce support requirements while maximizing uptime.
These new systems offer scalable direct-attached hardware RAID-based storage, or shared DAS storage, that performs transparent failover in the event of a failure and enables IT non-specialists to make timely repairs, greatly streamlining remediation.
Syncro® solutions bring high availability to the masses
Syncro solutions are designed to provide HA application uptime at a fraction of the cost of traditional HA solutions and to greatly simplify deployments and management while reducing latency and power consumption. Using two RAID-enabled controller cards, Syncro internal connect solutions allows an administrator to build a redundant, simplified server failover cluster with volume servers and an off-the-shelf JBOD. In DAS configurations that use serial attached SCSI (SAS) for controller-to-controller connectivity, Syncro CS clusters streamline shared server storage and provide continuous availability.
For Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) solutions like those provided by system integrators, Syncro external connect solutions the are available.