Enabling Breakthrough Levels of Performance and Availability Through Client Connection Load Balancing with Failover.
Isilon® Systems’ exclusive SmartConnect software application allows IT Managers to meet the demands of an always-on, 24x7x365 world by ensuring the highest levels of performance and industry leading high availability. With intelligent client connection load balancing and failover support, SmartConnect represents a breakthrough in optimizing clustered storage performance and availability.
Why is SmartConnect such a powerful tool?
Today’s competitive companies face a tremendous increase in the amounts of data used to conduct their everyday business, driven in large part by an explosion of file-based data. IT managers know that applications using and storing video, audio, images, research sets and other forms of data are pushing the limits of traditional storage—sometimes to the breaking point. In addition, they are faced with the daunting task of managing both an ever-increasing number of clients and increasingly demanding enterprise mandates for failure resiliency. Taken together, these requirements can seem overwhelming.
SmartConnect, a licensable software module of Isilon’s OneFS ® operating system software, now in its fifth generaion, helps to meet these challenges by greatly simplifying client management across the enterprise. Through a single host name, SmartConnect enables client connection load balancing and dynamic NFS failover and failback of client connections across storage nodes to provide optimal utilization of the cluster resources.
Without the need to install client side drivers, administrators can easily manage a large and growing number of clients and rest assured that in the event of a system failure, in-flight reads and writes will successfully finish without failing. Traditional storage systems with two-way failover typically sustain at least a 50% degradation in performance when a storage head fails as all clients must fail over to the remaining head. With Isilon, during failover, clients are evenly distributed across all remaining nodes in the cluster ensuring minimal performance impact.
Consider the following advantages:
How SmartConnect works
Client Connection Load Balancing:
Isilon’s SmartConnect balances client connections across nodes based on policies that ensure optimal usage of cluster resources. By leveraging your existing network infrastructure, SmartConnect provides a layer of intelligence that allows all client and user resources to point to a single host name, enabling easy management of a large and growing numbers of clients. Based on user configurable policies, SmartConnect applies intelligent algorithms (e.g. CPU utilization, aggregate throughput, connection count or round robin) and distributes clients across the cluster to optimize client performance and end-user experience.
