Auspex Introduces High Availability System

Auspex Systems has released the NS3000XA (Xtreme Availability) high availability system for its NS3000 series of Network Attached Storage (NAS) servers.

According to the company, the dual-server configuration with Auspex’s ServerGuardV software helps businesses avoid interruption of data delivery through system and component redundancy, the ability to automatically failover multiple faulty components rather than an entire machine, and geographically remote mirroring that facilitates disaster recovery from a server failure.

Auspex said the ServerGuardV software also will be used to provide high availability for its new NSc3000 Network Storage Controller, a multivendor SAN-to-NAS gateway announced last month. A future release of that product will permit two NSc3000 controllers to be connected with ServerGuardV, providing a redundant file serving solution with automatic failover for Storage Area Networks from all leading vendors.

The company also said the XA high availability system for Auspex’s network servers consists of ServerGuardV software linking two Auspex NS3000XR (Xtreme Reliability) fault-tolerant machines. All components are redundant, including power supplies, storage subsystems, and dual RAID controllers and fibre channel host bus adapters in each server that supply two independent data paths to every disk array to ensure that all data on all disks remains continuously available to end users.

The XA system can be deployed as a new installation or as an upgrade from a single Auspex NS3000XR network server. The built-in fibre network gives administrators the option to utilize optical tape devices connected to one of the system’s fibre-channel host bus adapters to perform fibre-based LAN-free tape backup. According to Auspex, the fibre connectivity also paves the way for Auspex to plug into third-party SAN networks in future releases in order to provide interoperability with disparate storage subsystems.