FalconStor NSS v7 announched

The new version 7 of the FalconStor NSS (Network Storage Server) is announced and brings some new features.

HA failover enhancements

A dedicated Storage Cluster Interlink (SCI) provides continuous synchronized I/O of mirror, snapshot, HotZone, and SafeCache metadata between HA storage controller pairs. This enables rapid failover and reduces the time required to load the data from disk, reducing HA failover to mere seconds versus 30-60 seconds in most other HA configurations.

Maximum LUN size increased to 64TB

As application data grows, so too must corresponding storage volumes. Additionally, as disk drive densities increase to 3TB, LUN sizes must increase to support performance-based RAID configurations to achieve optimal I/O performance. With FalconStor NSS 7.0, the LUN size has increased from 16TB to 64TB. This is a key competitive differentiator, as most vendors only support 16TB LUNs.

This is also beneficial in VMware vSphere v5 environments, as 64TB LUN support translates to higher VM density per VMware ESX host (512 per host) and in turn on VMware vSphere 5 hosts.

VMware support enhancements, including VAAI support

VMware VAAI storage-based hardware acceleration lowers CPU and memory consumption and enables faster deployment, storage vMotion tasks, and disk creation, as well as higher VM consolidation ratios. However, it only works with VAAI-compliant storage arrays, typically tier-1 storage. FalconStor NSS 7.0 extends VAAI hardware acceleration across any heterogeneous SAN or group of storage arrays, regardless of whether those arrays have native VAAI support, and regardless of whether the VMFS volumes span the same brand of array enclosure.

Cost-effective Caching

With FalconStor NSS v7, SSDs can now also be locally run in one of the cluster nodes. The failover configuration remains consistent. HotZone by using local storage as defined requests SSDs are significantly faster. Optimal for NSS v7 are Enterprise SSDs (STEC, Toshiba and others) with sustained high-performance IO/s.

More info:

FalconStor-NSS-7-Whats-New.pdf

FalconStor-NSS-Product-Overview.pdf