Aberdeen Releases New Web-Based GUI

In most cases, it’s safe to say that the more parts something has, the more complicated it is. This sentiment fits the world of mass storage solutions perfectly. It’s relatively easy to locate and manage one hard drive in a single desktop computer or even as many as eight hard drives in a larger storage platform, but the difficulty increases to new highs when dozens or hundreds of drives are involved. While current ZFS-based offerings allow enterprises to alphabetize hard drives according to unique identifiers, it’s an intuitive way to know where that drive is in the array.

"Adding, removing, or replacing a hard drive typically rearranges the list," says Yuval Bymel, R&D engineer at Aberdeen. "These hard drive changes make it impossible to have a label on the system showing the correct order of the drives at any given time. Under ideal conditions, this may be an adequate solution. But when a drive fails, or if it completely disappears from that list, there is no easy way to identify the slot in which that drive resides."

  
Aberdeen’s AberSAN Z-Series

To help data center and IT managers overcome this hard drive hassle, Aberdeen LLC built its Z-Series line of scalable storage products with its proprietary Web-based GUI to identify the hard drive but also pinpoint its exact location in the array. This GUI goes above and beyond the traditional ZFS system to make hard drive swaps or fixes quicker and easier.

Scalable Storage Products
Z-Series is a line of scalable storage products designed to be customized to an enterprise’s needs. Whether an enterprise needs to store a few terabytes of data or as much as a petabyte or more, the platform can handle it. Aberdeen also made sure these solutions would be ready for future use and offers 10GbE or 8Gb FC connectivity to the storage solutions as an optional add-on.

The GUI built into Z-Series line of solutions creates a graphical representation of the array, letting administrators see the physical location of a server’s hard drives without manually searching through the array. When an admin clicks an individual drive, the GUI shows its location on the server itself as well as its physical location within the array. And it will also take any changes an admin has made into account.

"You can rest assured the GUI matches the server’s hard drive slot label and retains that order no matter which drives you use, how many you have, or even if you have to replace a failed drive," Bymel says.

The GUI also lets administrators select which drive they want to replace while keeping all of the hard drives in the correct order. An admin can even rearrange the order at any given time or move the drives to another enclosure. Regardless of how the admin chooses to arrange or manage the drives, the GUI will keep up and provide the same identification and location information based on the new configuration.

Aberdeen’s addition of the Web-based GUI serves to make the Z-Series easier to use in the data center. The platform is scalable enough to support a range of storage needs and can scale to as much as a petabyte of storage or more because the GUI makes it easier to locate, swap out, or move hard drives.