QuantaStor v3 Key Features
| Feature | Description |
| QuantaGrid™ Scale-out Management Technology | QuantaGrid™ technology greatly simplifies management by enabling you to manage multiple appliances as a single unit. The appliances can be the same site or multi-site, virtual or physical appliances with a heterogeneous mix of storage. Scale-out has never been so easy. |
| Integrated Gluster™ Management (Scale-out NAS) | With our unique scale-out architecture QuantaStor is designed for easy management of scale-out storage technologies like Gluster. We make Gluster easy with automatic peer setup, and the full set of gluster volume operations from creation, expansion, rebalance, and more are accomplished using just a few clicks. No more having to use the command line, no additional software to install, just install QuantaStor on your servers and start provisioning scale-out storage with ease. |
| Integrated SSD Cache Management | QuantaStor provides integrated management of the latest hardware SSD caching technologies from LSI & Adaptec so that you can boost IOPS performance for IO intensive workloads by upwards of 12x or more using a cost effective mix of SSD as cache over low cost SATA disks. |
| iSCSI & FibreChannel Support | QuantaStor was designed to be the easiest SAN on the market to manage and deploy with native support for the latest 10GbE network adapters as well as 8Gb FibreChannel via Qlogic QLE25xx and QLE24xx HBAs. |
| REST APIs | Automation of your storage environment has never been simpler. With QuantStor's REST API support you can now fully automate all provisioning and management operations with ease. REST APIs can be also be accessed via command line scripting with the curl utility. |
| DR Fail-over / Pool Remote-replication | With pool level replication you can now replicate from site-to-site with an asynchronous link so that you can failover your virtual machines or other workload in the event of a site or equipment outage. |
| CIFS & NFSv3/v4 Support | NAS file sharing support makes it simple to create network shares accessible over both CIFS & NFS. For quick file recovery QuantaStor also supports instant snapshots of network shares which integrates with Windows Shadow Copy so users can easily recover older versions of their files from within Windows on their own. |
| Client Support | VMware ESX/ESXi, Windows XP, 7, 2003 Server, 2008 Server, 2012 Server, Windows Hyper-V, Apple Macintosh OS/X, Citrix XenServer 5.x/6.x, Linux (RedHat, SUSE, CentOS, Debian/Ubuntu), OnApp, & Proxmox |
| Thin Provisioning / Over Provisioning | Thin provisioning is a technology that enables you to allocate volumes without having to dedicate the storage until it is needed. It's a powerful tool because it allows you to eliminate the guess-work about how much a given application or virtual machine will require. With thin-provisioning you just make the volume (LUN) as large as you like (up to 2x the size of the storage pool), and then you can add more storage to the storage pool down the road as need requires. |
| NIC Teaming / Bonding | NIC bonding allows you to bind together multiple network ports to boost aggregate bandwidth. It also gives you fault-tolerance as in the event one of the ports is disconnected traffic will continue to flow on the other connections in a round-robin fashion. |
| Backup to Amazon S3 & SoftLayer Object Storage | Within QuantaStor you can select any storage volume and make a backup of it to the Amazon S3 cloud. To do so you just enter your Amazon S3 credentials and then create a Cloud Container which will represent itself in the Amazon cloud as what's known in S3 nomenclature as a 'bucket'. From there you can select volumes and make backups. With storage volumes using our Advanced pool type you can do backups while the volume is in use and you can create automatic backup schedules for these volumes (LUNs). |
| Data Compression | With our new Advanced Storage Pool type you can choose to have all your data compressed automatically. This not only boosts ROI through a boost in effective storage capacity, it can also boosts performance as compressed data is quicker to read and write to disk. |
| Audit Logging | QuantaStor automatically logs all operations so that you can easily see what changes were made by who and when. |
| Big Data | Based on Ubuntu Server the QuantaStor platform is flexible and customizable. This means that you can extend the platform to operate as a Cloudera Hadoop data and compute node using some simple documentation on our web site. Now you can tackle all your storage challenges from scale-out Big Data to traditional block and file with a single Software Defined Storage platform. |
| Data Check-sums | Data integrity checks are automatically computed for both data blocks and meta-data blocks with our btrfs based Advanced Storage Pool type. |
| Integrated with Citrix Essentials for XenServer & Hyper-V | Citrix's Essentials for XenServer & Hyper-V fully automates the storage management tasks involved with deploying new virtual machines, migrating virtual machines, snapshoting & cloning virtual machines and replicating virtual machines. Starting with XenServer 6.x QuantaStor now has a native Python based module for Citrix XenServer's StorageLink interface so you can map specific storage volumes directly to specific virtual machines. |
| Unlimited Target Ports | Need more bandwidth? You can freely add additional network ports to your system and when combined with multi-path solutions like Microsoft MPIO or Linux's DMMP you'll boost performance and protect yourself from path failures. |
| Unlimited Sessions | You can connect to a given volume (LUN) from all the nodes in your VMWare cluster or Microsoft Windows Failover Cluster without having to worry about upper limits on the initiator connection count found in other storage systems. |
| Remote Management CLI for Windows & Linux | The remote management CLI allows you to easily script the management of your storage system(s). The CLI runs on both Windows and Linux and includes an XML output mode for easy parsing and integration with custom applications and provisioning tools. |
| QuantaStor Manager web management interface | QuantaStor Manager is our web based management application for managing your QuantaStor system(s). Simply enter the IP address of your QuantaStor storage system into any major browser and you can manage your storage system from nearly anywhere. QuantaStor Manager is a true web application as it was developed using the latest in Web 2.0 development tools to give you that rich experience you get from a traditional desktop application (no page refreshes) without having to install anything on your desktop. Did we mention it's fast too? It's fast. |
| Instant Recovery from Snapshot (beta) | Deleted a file by mistake, or perhaps you need to recover some files from several weeks back, or recover from a bad driver install? Recovery from these common scenarios is made easy with volumes snapshots. You can automate the creation of snapshots or you can explicitly create one before you make major configuration changes to your servers so that you can quickly recover from anything that goes wrong. To recover to a previous point in time snapshot you just right-click on the volume within the web interface, select 'Restore Storage Volume' and all the relevant restore points will be shown. Just pick one and press OK and that's it. It's that simple, and it's instantaneous.. well, 2.5 seconds instantaneous. To recover a single file from a snapshot just assign the snapshot volume to your host and just click-and-drag to recover the files directly from the snapshot device. |
| Automated Snapshot Schedules (beta) | Snapshot schedules allow one to create automatic snapshots of one or more storage volumes and/or network shares automatically on a schedule. This allows for instant recovery back to a previous point in time to recover lost files or other data. With QuantaStor all snapshots are read-write and any volume snapshot can be instantly 'promoted' to a primary/original storage volume. |
| CHAP Authentication | CHAP stands for 'Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol' and it allows you to apply a password on each volume so that you can effectively control and secure access to your LUNs/volumes. QuantaStor also allows you to associate a default password to each user account (and storage cloud) so that users can easily change the CHAP password for all their devices all at once without having to update each volume one by one. |
| Volume Resize | Need to make that storage volume larger, just resize it. Once you grow it you'll need to go to Windows disk manager or other platform specific partitioning tool to grow filesystem on your volume / LUN to utilize the newly available space. |
| Online Pool Grow/Relayout | Running out of disk space? You can hot-plug more drives into the system and grow your storage pool(s) while they're online thereby giving you zero-downtime expandability. |
| Advanced CHAP management | CHAP authentication has always been a challenge to manage and maintain as most storage systems require that a CHAP user/pass be set on each storage volume individually. QuantaStor supports per target/volume CHAP settings, but it also supports a default CHAP settings at a User level and at the Storage Cloud level. This way, as you create volumes within a storage cloud they're automatically protected and when you need to change the CHAP settings you can do it in one place and have it instantly applied to all the storage volumes in the cloud. That not only makes it easier to manage, it makes it must easier to maintain a secure SAN. |
| RAID Layouts | All major RAID layouts are supported including RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, RAID10, RAID50, and RAID60. QuantaStor uses both hardware RAID and software RAID at the storage pool level so that you can aggregate storage across multiple RAID controllers to make storage pools up to 2PB in size. |
| User Groups | User groups represent an arbitrary collection of users and allows administrators to group teams of people together independently from storage clouds. This makes adding teams to multiple clouds easier and reduces complexity. |
| Storage Volume Groups | Databases are often split up between multiple LUNs where one contains the index, another contains the data, and perhaps another contains the database log file. In such cases a given application or machine image will be comprised of multiple storage volumes. Using storage volume groups you can combine these volumes (LUNs) together to improve organization and you can perform macro level operations on the storage volume groups like snapshot and clone. |
| Host Groups | Hosts are often combined into clusters or pools for use with Microsoft MSCS, Hyper-V, VMWare, and XenServer. The host group object allows you to combine these hosts into a group within the storage system so that you can assign storage to all the hosts at once as a group rather than having to painstakingly assign a given volume to each host one at a time. This can be particularly painful with traditional systems when you have to assign several volumes to several hosts. With QuantaStor's easy to use storage assignment dialogs and Host Groups we make it a snap. |
| Storage Clouds | An innovative patent-pending feature that allows you to divide up the storage system into multiple private storage clouds so that the storage system can effectively be utilized and administered by multiple groups of users. Storage clouds enforce a security envelope that ensures that cloud users can only see their resources and those resources that exist within the storage cloud(s) to which they are a member. |
| Storage Quotas | With storage quotas you can set limits on the maximum amount of storage that can be thin-provisioned, the maximum amount of storage that can be physically utilized and the maximum number of volumes that can be provisioned. Storage Quotas are associated with clouds so you only need to create one per cloud and it covers all the users within that cloud. Users can also be members of more than one cloud. |
| SSD Optimized | When combined with LSI MegaRAID controllers and integrated LSI FastPath software you can attain extremely high IOPs numbers with a QuantaStor based SSD solution. |
| Remote Replication | Remote replication allows you to replicate storage volumes and network shares over a LAN or WAN to another QuantaStor system. Ideal for replicating critical work-loads to a disaster recovery site. |
| Advanced RBAC security model | Create custom roles or modify existing ones to better match the needs of your organization. QuantaStor goes beyond basic RBAC by not only allowing you to indicate which actions/operations a given role has permissions for, it allows you to scope that permission to just the user's objects, or to all objects in the user's associated cloud(s), or to the entire system. |
| Instant Snapshots | With volumes and shares residing in our new Advanced Storage Pool type you can create instant snapshots and even create writable snapshots of snapshots. You can promote volume snapshots to primary volume status instantly. |
| Volume Utilization Metrics | Volume utilization metrics can be collected for a tunable number of days (default is 60) to enabled charge-back accounting based on hourly IO utilization and storage utilization. |
| Hardware RAID Controller Integration | LSI 3ware 9xxx, LSI MegaRAID 92xx, LSI Nytro MegaRAID 8xxx, HP P8xx/P4xx, Adaptec 7xxx/6xxx/5xxx, STEC, Fusion IO QuantaStor has dynamic plug-in framework for the integration of 3rd party hardware RAID controllers so that you can leverage the advanced capabilities of LSI, Adaptec, HP SmartArray, Fusion IO and other controllers in a fully integrated fashion. Management integration includes operations like create/delete RAID unit, hot spare management, grow RAID unit, disk identification and more. QuantaStor also fully monitors the health of your hardware RAID configuration so you'll be notified via email or PagerDuty in the event a disk needs replacing. |