December 2015 Review: Key HA-AP Deployment Concepts In its most basic deployment case, a single dual-engine (HA-AP Engine, HAE) appliance is installed between a small set of servers and a pair of RAID5 arrays, as shown in Figure 1. This provides a storage configuration with high data-delivery performance and instantaneous failover capabilities. To the storage, the Engine appears as the SCSI initiator. To the host, the Engine appears as the SCSI target. Servers perceive a cluster of Engine modules as a multi-port, active-active storage system. Figure 1: Basic HA-AP High Availability Deployment The Infinity Solution Deployment Model The Infinity solution is an HA SAN solution enabled by HA-AP for constructing a high-availability storage infrastructure with multiple dual-engine clusters, which supports infinite scalability of capacity and performance. When configuring storage behind HA-AP, the engines are clustered in groups of one to four engines per group. The HA-AP appliance scales in throughput, redundancy, and capacity: Throughput scales by increasing or decreasing the number of storage behind each Engine. For instance, in applications where bandwidth per MB storage is low, significantly more storage, say 12 storage arrays, may be attached behind the two HA-AP engines in Cluster 1 of Figure 4. Redundancy scales up by increasing the number of engines that hosts can access any specific storage array data through. With two-path redundancy as shown in Cluster 1, each host has a separate data path to each of the two HA-AP engines. Each HA-AP engine may then access the storage within the cluster through two independent storage side data paths. In the event of a data path or engine failure, the storage is accessed through the remaining engine using host multi-path support. The HA-AP engines will automatically use any path configured to access storage in the event of a storage path failure. Capacity scales by increasing the number of HA-AP clusters. The clusters are independent of one another. There is no limit to the number of clusters that may be implemented within a SAN. Figure 4: HA-AP Infinity Deployment Model Back to Newsletter >> unsubscribe

Loxoll HA-AP Appliance The Loxoll HA-AP Appliance is designed expressly for adding continuous, HA access and mirror protection to enterprise SAN. The HA-AP Appliance makes it easy to build a high-availability, enterprise-grade storage solution that provides no-downtime storage access. Questions? If you have questions about high availability solutions or this article, please contact us at: info@loxoll.com Newsletter Archive Click here to visit our newsletter archive library.