INTRODUCTION      

INTRODUCTION

Scale-out storage from Gridstore allows small-medium sized business to take advantage of a simple building block approach to storage that offers significantly better performance, reliability and scaling.

A Gridstore NASg Storage Node is enabled out of the box to automatically detect and attach to a gridstore. You simply connect it with power, a network cable and switch it on the first time.

Simple, storage building blocks.

Designed for the small-medium sized business Network Admin who is not a storage systems engineer but who needs to provide a reliable storage infrastructure to their business. Now adding capacity or dealing with failed storage components does not need to be a stressful or “career defining” event. Simply attach a new storage block to the network with a power and network cable and its NASg Sensor will detect a gridstore, install the current version of software you are running and appear in your unallocated nodes ready for you to allocate to a pool or replace a failed node.

The GS-1000 combines advanced technology from Intel, Microsoft and Gridstore into a simple block of storage capacity. Using the simple Gs-1000 building block, you can combine any number of these into While the individual storage node is simple – any number of these can be combined into a powerful, scalable and fault tolerant storage system.

NASg 2.0 Scale-out Storage Platform
The worlds most advanced storage platform for SMBs.

NASg 2.0 uses an advanced grid-processing platform to dramatically lower the cost of scale-out storage and make it available for the small-medium sized business. By leveraging distributed, parallel processing and parallel IO - NASg also increases the scale, performance and reliability without adding complexity. Now small-medium sized business can enjoy the benefits of scale-out storage without having to hire a storage guru or have an enterprise budget.

Reliability, scale, performance and cost drive buying decisions – but eliminating complexity drives ease of use. NASg offers both through advanced capabilities such seamless and instant capacity expansion and automatic self-healing from faults by simply adding a new storage node to your network. No complex RAID strategies, controller configurations or backplane networks with lists of certified switches. Just advanced technology that works so you don't have to.

Gridstore Architecture

Gridstore NASg system is built upon several key components that work together to provide a highly reliable and scalable storage platform. The key elements are:

• NASg Storage Nodes
• NASg Management Service
• NASg MMC Snap-in
• NASg Core
• NASg Sensor

NASg Storage nodes:
Gridstore NASg-1000 storage node is a purpose built dedicated storage appliance that also functions as a building block to creating a larger enterprise storage system. The appliance consists of two main components, an integrated Intel Atom board and a SATA hard disk. The machine is equipped with 1 GB of RAM memory with 95% of its utilization dedicated to file cache and buffering. The operating system is Microsoft Windows Embedded 7 Standard (WES7)

NASg Management Service:
The NASg Management Service performs all background tasks related to deployment, configuration, out of band management, Windows & Active Directory integration and monitoring of the storage platform. The management service provides back-end support to the a) GUI MMC Snap-in, b) creation of storage pools, & volumes, c) node discovery & operation, d) configuration synchronization, e) startup & shutdown of volumes, nodes or the Grid, and f) monitoring its performance. The management service is highly integrated with Windows operating system and provides a transparent platform blending in the functions of remote Windows administration with the Gridstore NASg management.

NASg MMC snap-in:
The MMC snap-in is the administrator GUI for the NASg storage nodes. All common administrative tasks are performed from the console. The design of the Gridstore snap-in closely resembles all standard Windows snap-in. The Gridstore snap-in can be integrated with other standard MMC snap-ins, additionally the management console can be used to connect to a management service on a remote computer allowing the administrator to remotely manage multiple storage grids.

NASg Core:
The NASg Core is a low level Windows service directly responsible for forming, operation and access to individual NASg Volumes. The NASg Core has a separate instance (service) per each storage volume in operation. On the storage nodes the NASg Core performs a function of a ‘Aggregator’ and ‘Formation’ of a Volume Quorum. On a client machine the NASg Core performs the function of a software RAID controller and over the network file level access. Furthermore the NASg Core on a client machine is responsible for CIFS integration and providing native access via Mapped Disk Letters such as G:\ or UNC paths such as \\gridstore\Volume1.

NASg Sensor:
The NASg storage node is equipped with Grid Sensing Technology. The function is an integral part of the embedded operating system and allows storage nodes to be shipped without NASg Software pre-installed. New nodes connected to the local network will detect and install the latest gridstore software from other existing nodes, ensuring all nodes are running the same software revision.