Enterprise customers are rapidly adopting virtualization technologies to achieve increased application availability, higher resource utilization and improved operational responsive while reducing the cost of physical hardware and infrastructure. EverON server virtualization technology offers customers the ability to abstract physical ONStor NAS systems into functional instances called Virtual Servers. To end users and applications on the network, EverON Virtual Servers look exactly like individual physical NAS servers with attached storage.

Efficient Server Virtualization

An EverON Virtual Server is a logical instance of a physical ONStor NAS system and has a unique system identity. Multiple Virtual Servers share networking, CPU and storage resources of a physical system without interfering with each other. The users and the applications accessing data on the virtual servers cannot differentiate between a Virtual Server and a physical file server. This masks complexity from the end users and significantly simplifies file storage management. Unlike other commercially available virtualization technologies, EverON server virtualization does not use a resource heavy hypervisor-based design. Instead, Virtual Servers are based on a single instance of EverON OS but with virtualized network and protocol stacks enabling ONStor NAS systems to deploy many Virtual Servers on a single system with no performance degradation. With consolidation ratios of up to 32 virtual servers per EverON NAS cluster, Virtual Servers minimize TCO by increasing hardware utilization and reducing hardware requirements which in turn reduce datacenter rack space, power & cooling.

Secure Data Access & Management

Storage consolidation need not come at the expense of security and control of your storage resources. EverON Virtual Servers enables secure partitioning of network and storage resources so that you can consolidate multiple domains and servers on a single EverON cluster without risk. A Virtual Server provides containment for one or more storage volumes and associated file systems. Storage volumes in one Virtual Server are not visible from other Virtual Servers although they may reside on the same physical NAS system. Virtual servers also provide the ability to easily delegate data management activities depending on the roles of the administrators.

Better Resource Utilization

Typical file system utilization for a server is at an average of 30-40% of available disk space, according to industry experts. EverON Virtual Servers help achieve much higher resource utilization by pooling file storage in to a common resource pool without compromising on the file access security benefits of separate physical file servers. This results in a significant reduction in IT storage costs. Available capacity may be allocated to any Virtual Server. There is no fixed mapping of storage to any physical resource. Because storage is shared by all NAS systems – and can be dynamically provisioned to any Virtual Server – no data needs to be migrated when the capacity of a volume is increased.

Increased Application Availability

EverON Virtual Servers provide live migration capability to increase availability of NAS storage in an EverON cluster. In the event of a hardware failure of a physical NAS system, all the Virtual Servers residing on that system automatically migrate to one or more NAS systems within a cluster. Upgrading systems, decommissioning hardware or adding new systems to the cluster for more performance can be accomplished with no downtime, significantly reducing service outages and end user disruptions.

Improved Workload Management

At times of peak demand for performance, administrators can redistribute Virtual Servers among the NAS systems in a cluster to dedicate all available compute and network resources to the desired virtual servers. Live migration of the Virtual Servers is completely transparent to applications and end users. Application or organization specific Virtual Servers can be created to match the workload characteristics of data to appropriate tiers of storage to optimize the performance and cost of the network storage infrastructure.