LeftHand Networks iSCSI SANs Now Citrix Ready

LeftHand Networks announced that its iSCSI SANs are now Citrix Ready vendor verified with Citrix XenServer 4.1. LeftHand Networks iSCSI SANs complement Citrix XenServer 4.1, providing customers with highly available server and storage solutions for their data center environments.

Powered by SAN/iQ storage software, LeftHand Networks’ iSCSI SAN solutions deliver a rich, fully-integrated feature set, advanced data protection, centralized management and a best-in-class solution for optimizing performance and manageability in virtual server environments. By allowing customers to assign and allocate storage resources virtually against a pool of physical storage devices, the SAN can be easily scaled up to any required capacity or performance level without incurring any downtime. This flexibility makes LeftHand Networks’ iSCSI SANs an ideal complement to Citrix Systems’ virtual server infrastructures.

“The full benefits of virtual server environments are realized when used in combination with a shared storage solution that provides data protection and availability. With more applications per server and the increased loads inherent in a virtual environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure that a business’ data is available and protected,” said Barry Davis, vice president, business development, for Citrix Systems.    

“LeftHand Networks’ iSCSI SANs deliver unprecedented data protection and storage system manageability for virtual environments,” said Larry Cormier, vice president of marketing, LeftHand Networks. “Citrix XenServer 4.1 offers a powerful and easy-to-use server virtualization infrastructure that fully leverages LeftHand Networks’ storage and SAN management capabilities.”   

LeftHand Networks iSCSI SANs Optimize Virtual Environments
“The virtualized iSCSI SAN from LeftHand Networks adds significant power to our Citrix XenServer solutions,” said Paddy Harrington, vice president of technology and CIO of Covisia, a Citrix channel partner. “The combination of LeftHand Networks’ iSCSI SANs and XenServer 4.1 allows us to provide our customers with a complete virtual environment that is flexible, protected and easy to manage. LeftHand’s SAN is a must for anyone who wants a highly available virtualized environment.”

LeftHand Networks’ iSCSI SAN and Citrix XenServer 4.1 provide an ideal storage solution for virtual environments due to SAN/iQ’s rich storage virtualization layer.  Customers can combine virtualized storage on a LeftHand Networks’ iSCSI SAN with Citrix XenServer 4.1 virtualized servers to streamline both storage and server infrastructure management. In addition, capacity planning is easier and less time consuming, accommodating changes in the storage pool quickly and easily while maintaining a highly available environment that keeps applications up and accessible. With LeftHand Networks certified iSCSI SANs combined with XenServer 4.1, customers can benefit from a number of enterprise-class capabilities including:

• Quick, Efficient Deployment of Virtual Servers: Citrix XenServer 4.1 enables the creation of new virtual machines to meet increasing infrastructure demands in the production data center or to create new environments for software development and testing.  LeftHand Networks iSCSI SANs complement the process by allowing users to clone storage volumes almost instantaneously and with minimal additional use of storage.
• Zero Downtime: The Citrix XenMotion feature in XenServer is migrated by running virtual machines with the operating systems and applications from one physical server to another with zero downtime, allowing users to balance workloads or to perform server maintenance without affecting service levels. LeftHand Networks iSCSI SANs offer similar storage functionality, allowing volumes to be moved from one cluster to another with zero downtime and without modifying the XenServer environment.
• Uniform Business Continuity: XenServer Resource Pools provide uniform business continuity for all applications by grouping servers in different physical locations together into a pool whereby virtual machines can be moved from one site to another in the event of the loss of an entire data center. LeftHand Networks multi-site SANs allow organizations to distribute the storage pool in the same manner, providing for full data availability under the same circumstances.