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StarWind iSCSI Target

StarWind Turn a Microsoft Windows machine into iSCSI Target appliance!

StarWind (see presentation) is an advanced, full-featured software-only iSCSI Target for Microsoft Windows (both commercial and free versions). StarWind enables anyone to quickly install and configure an IP SAN solution that delivers immediate benefits allowing storage to be consolidated, virtualized and centrally managed. StarWind (commercial edition) is an ideal choice for any sized business.

StarWind is a hardware-independent, cost-effective and scalable storage management solution that enables the benefits of Storage Area Networking such as enhanced disaster recovery and increased regulatory compliance and does not consume additional resources on application servers. StarWind does not require any additional hardware, it utilizes the existing Ethernet and IP network infrastructure and leverages existing storage hardware.

StarWind's volume snapshot feature allows simple scheduled or on-demand snapshots of critical data for backup. If necessary all backed up data can be retrieved at once, or individual files can be retrieved as needed. StarWind's unique ability to virtualize and share physical storage hardware also eliminates the need to have an expensive DLT, AIT or LTO tape or high-capacity Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burner.

Key Benefits:

Storage Management: StarWind is network data and storage menagement software which enables you to organize storage management system in the very efficient way whether it s disaster recovery solution or mini storage management systems.

Storage Consolidation: Consolidate all storage in the server room to increase application "up time" and simplify administration. The entire storage pool can be centrally managed eliminating the need to separately maintain "islands" of disks. It's also possible to completely remove all hard disks from client machines (boot from SAN) using an iSCSI HBAs or a software-only iSCSI boot solution, dramatically lowering network TCO and IT administration expenses.

Disaster Recovery and Backups: Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) compatible dynamic volume snapshots and automatic incremental backups make disaster recovery and backup initiatives a breeze, completely eliminating the need for manual backup activities. Now you can perfectly "roll-back" any volume any time.

Leverage Existing Storage: StarWind can leverage existing direct attached storage (Serial and Parallel ATA and SCSI, Fibre Channel, USB and FireWire) making it available as iSCSI storage.

Create Mirrored Fail-Safe SAN Volumes: StarWind can perfectly maintain a RAID-1 (mirror) over different physical hard disks. There's no need for an expensive RAID controller or dedicated software RAID volume configuration.

Automatic Replication: Replicate mission-critical data to another site over a low-bandwidth connection.

Share Physical Devices: Tape drives and ultra-modern high-capacity Blu-Ray and HD-DVD burners can be shared over a standard IP network, leveraging existing tape backup and CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD burning applications allowing backups to a remotely located tape or optical media drive.

Regulatory Compliance: Reduce complexity and simplify data retention, backup and disaster recovery for compliance with regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

Create Media Libraries: Standard ISO images can be mounted to virtual iSCSI DVD-ROM drives creating media libraries exported via IP SAN, eliminating the need to handle physical CD/DVDs.

Outstanding Performance: StarWind iSCSI Target has a matching "domestic" iSCSI Initiator called StarPort. This combination provides unbeatable performance compared to the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator and third-party iSCSI targets.

Our SAN storage virtualization software with snapshots, data protection and mirroring functionality can be used to organize the following for an enterprise: company data protection, windows backup systems, network and volumes mirroring, remote data replication.

Key Features:

StarWind serves virtual storage hardware using the cross-platform iSCSI protocol. Currently StarWind is capable of emulating hard disks and DVD-ROM drives. Future versions of StarWind will support VTL (Virtual Tape Library) emulation and Microsoft VDS (Virtual Disk Services) making disk-to-disk-to-tape backup and storage management even easier then today.

Automatic or manual Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) compatible snapshots, volume cloning and incremental backups with unlimited number of "roll-back" points.

Auto-provisioning is fully supported by StarWind. There's no need to allocate data until it's needed by the user.

I/O read and write caching. StarWind uses the target's RAM as a cache to improve both throughoutput and response time.

StarWind integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Windows NTFS compression and encryption capabilities. StarWind SAN image files stored on NTFS formatted partitions can be encrypted (disk images copied to removable media will be encrypted) and compressed (without excessive access overhead).

StarWind comes with it's own iSCSI-based replication engine. Replicate mission-critical data to another site over low-bandwidth iSCSI WAN connection.

Control multiple servers running StarWind from a single Management Console (Windows or Web interface). Future versions of StarWind will implemented the interface as an MMC (Microsoft Management Console).

StarWind is able to use Serial and Parallel ATA and SCSI, Fibre Channel, USB and FireWire storage hardware. Export an entire disk or a single file or partition on the hard disk as an iSCSI virtual disk.

Storage hardware (tape drives, automatic tape libraries, high-performance Blu-Ray and HD-DVD burners, DVD-ROM changers etc.) can be "networked" using StarWind.

Supports Shared Volumes for clustering servers. With StarWind it's possible to use an iSCSI volume as quorum disk for Microsoft Cluster.

StarWind fully supports iSCSI boot from SAN. This allows you to completely eliminate the need for dedicated hard disk drives installed on client machines.

Software RAID-1 (mirror). With StarWind you don't need to place exported iSCSI disk volumes on hardware RAID controlled disks and you don't need to create software RAID volumes with operating system facilities.

StarWind leverages RAM installed on the server. It caches both read and write requests for virtual iSCSI disks.

Create ultra-fast iSCSI RAM disk drives for temporary data storing and network stack tuning.

No restrictions on individual disk capacity, total number of hard disk installed, number of CPUs or CPU cores, Ethernet ports or the amount of RAM.

IPv4 and IPv6 support out-of-box.

iSNS integration for easy iSCSI targets look-up.

IPsec encryption for secure tunelling of private data over insecure WAN IP connections. The entire session content is encrypted and in other words totally unusable for anything. Your company secrets and "know how" would stay secure even if you replicate the main site data to another continent.

CHAP authentication provides additional security.

StarWind supports critical event logging to assist troubleshooting. It also supports e-mail notifications of the monitored events with the help of SNMP.

Native 32-bit and 64-bit binaries for x86 and x64 machines. Unlike some iSCSI target vendors we don't force our customers to use 32-bit binaries on x64 machines (AMD64 and EMT64) in WOW (Windows on Windows) emulation mode.

StarWind supports MPIO (Multi-Path I/O) through multiple sessions when using the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator.

StarWind has iSCSI DVD-ROM emulation support built-in. It exports existing DVD-ROM ISO images as mounted iSCSI DVD-ROM drives. This prevents the original DVD-ROM media from possible physical damage or loss, allows client machines without optical drives and allows storing DVD backup data on a single server.

Fully conforms to the latest iSCSI Standard 1.0 (former Draft 20).

Supported Platforms:

StarWind is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/Longhorn/Storage Server 2003 R2.

StarWind is tested for compatibility with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator versions 2.03 or 1.06. StarWind has also been tested for compatibility with various Linux and UNIX software iSCSI initiators, iSCSI HBAs from Adaptec and QLogic and hardware iSCSI accelerators from Alacritech.

System Requirements:

Minimum System Requirements:

Windows XP (with Service Pack 2 installed)

800 MHz Intel Pentium III class processor

512 MB of RAM

50 MB of disk space for StarWind application data

Shared disk volume for Windows installation, Windows swap file, StarWind executables and StarWind iSCSI image files

Fast Ethernet connection

Recommended System Requirements:

Windows Server 2003 (with Service Pack 1 installed)

2 GHz Intel Xeon class processor

4 GB of RAM