Paul Meyers - Managing Director of Griffin reseller Lynx Internet Solutions believes the main benefits of SANServe are that it ensures 100% data uptime, increased performance and reliability of data processing and storage, is easily scalable and has a unique roll-back in time option for rapid data recovery.
“SANServe offers the channel a robust, high margin and affordable managed hosting option that can be sold by salespeople with little previous experience in the dedicated server market. Despite being a relatively new concept, SANServe has a proven track record and is backed up by glowing customer testimonials.
We manage some of the busiest ecommerce sites in the world and the global nature of our clients means that the concept of a planned maintenance window is rapidly disappearing. Griffin's Managed Hosting solution solved all of our problems and whilst it was initially a big decision to outsource a vital part of the business, our hosting costs have reduced and we actually feel we have more control now than when we ran our own server farm.”
Griffin say that the majority of server down-time is caused by hard drive failures. Griffin's SAN hosting removes the need for hard drive storage as all data programmes and operating systems are stored on the SAN. The arrays of storage ensure that 100% of the data is backed up 100% of the time and in the event of a single server failure the SAN is told to point the data at the standby server.
The SANs have two of every component in the box, so if any part fails, the backup will replace the original. The SAN solution is RAID 50 and data is striped across 12 hard drives (plus 2 redundant) for maximum performance. Up to four disks could fail at the same time before any data would be lost.
Corrupted data caused by human error or virus is also very common and consequently a popular option with SANServe is ‘Snapshots’. Snapshots allow the customer to roll back to a specific time before a corruption occurred in minutes. Achieving this through conventional means (tape or online back-up) often takes hours or even days.