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   Unibiz Network Storage

Cluster Servers

Microsoft WINDOWS 2000 and 2003 servers offer cluster capablility. Of all the products on the market we have tried over the years, the Microsoft Clusters are the most dependable redundancy solution we have seen. In its simplist configuration, two servers would share the same Raid 5 hard disk array. If Server A fails, all cluster aware applications would then automatically failover to server B. There is no manually intervention required. We have tested these failovers on-site on many occasions. If you were not watching closely at the moment the failover occurs, you would not be able to detect that any change had taken place. It is that transparent. Unibiz Technology Services is one of only a handful of companies how have successfully configured Cluster Servers. Microsoft currently offers many cluster aware applications including SQL and Exchange. This is the ultimate redundancy solution.

Cluster service enables you to connect multiple servers to create server clusters that provide high availability and easy manageability of data and applications running in the cluster. Cluster service provides three principal advantages in clustering technology:

• Improved availability by enabling services and applications to continue providing service during hardware or software component failure or during planned maintenance.
  
• Increased scalability by supporting servers that can be expanded with additional processors (up to eight processors in Windows 2000 Advanced Server and 32 processors in Datacenter Server) and memory (up to 8 gigabytes (GB) of random access memory (RAM) in Advanced Server and 64 GB in Datacenter Server).
  
• Improved manageability by enabling you to manage devices and resources within the entire cluster as if managing a single computer.

Local Network Mass Storage Solutions

Did you know that your local network can have a network tape storage and a hard disk storage solution? That is all your critical servers can back up to a centralized storage server. Current technology allows for hard disk storage in the terabyte range. Unibiz Technology Services offers hard disk storage towers with redundant gigabyte lan card communications to your local network. Optional high speed SCSI tape backup units can then be connected directly to the storage towers for a removable tape storage solution.

You can also have one or more network tape backup units connected to local PC’s or servers to backup all critical Servers and PC’s. Your solution depends on how much backup storage capacity, speed and redundancy you need.

RAID ARRAYS

Unibiz Technology Services combines Windows Servers with dependable Raid hardware solutions. In general using RAID provides data redundancy, fault tolerance, increased capacity, and increased performance. Data redundancy protects the data from hard drive failures.Fault tolerance goes hand in hand with redundancy in providing a better over-all storage system. The only RAID level that does not have any form of redundancy or fault tolerance is RAID 0. RAID also provides increased capacity by combining multiple drives. The efficiency of how the total drive storage is used depends on the RAID level.

Servers can utilize multiple SCSI drives accessed one at a time, or an improved solution call Raid. Configuring a Windows 2000 server with a Raid 5 or Raid 10 array will allow up to two drives to fail without a system failure for each raid 5 array. The server will continue to run without a performance degradation if one drive fails. It will continue to operate if two drives fail but with a noticeable decrease in performance. Without a Raid configuration however, a single drive failure will lock up your entire server. Unibiz Technology Services installs Raid 1-10 configurations for Windows Servers. The following is a list of Raid configuration we have completed for our customers.

• RAID1 writes data to two drives simultaneously. If one drive fails, data can still be retrieved from the other member of the RAID set. This process is also called "mirroring." Mirroring is the most expensive RAID option (since it doubles storage requirements), but it offers the ultimate in reliability.
  
• RAID 0+1 is a combination of striping and mirroring. This configuration provides optimal speed and reliablility, but possesses the same cost problem as RAID1.
  
• RAID5 employs a combination of striping and parity checking. The use of parity checking provides redundancy without the overhead of having to double disk capacity. Simply put, parity checking involves determining whether each given block has an odd or even value. These values are summed across the stripe sets to obtain a parity value. With this parity value, the contents of a failed disk can easily be determined and rebuilt on a spare drive.
  
• RAID10 employs two raid 5 arrays spanned together.