New High Availability storage solutions emerged CSY made an early April announcement of new high availability features in MPE/iX, software enhancements that enable users of the EMC Model 10, Model 20 and Symmetrix arrays to boost data availability. The High Availability Array Failover (HAFO), available in the next release of MPE/iX 5.5 and as a patch sooner than that, protects against failures in the other three parts of the I/O path, cards, cables and disk controllers. The software lets MPE/iX look to see if there’s any problem in that part of the path and designates an alternate path to another set of controllers and disks. HAFO offers an alternative to Mirrored Disk/iX, the accepted way to protect disk farms attached to HP 3000s. The alternative is required because Mirrored Disk is a poor choice for 3000 sites protecting more than 100Gb of disk – an unheard-of number a few years ago, but now common in HP’s leading insurance and direct mail sites. HAFO will be HP’s recommended high availability solution for sites with more than 70Gb of disk online, according to CSY’s Solution Team manager Vicki Symonds. CSY is also introducing another software enhancement by supporting EMC’s SRDF shadowing system. This EMC software option in Symmetrix installations shadows data at the raw I/O level to another system, which makes it very efficient for re-synchronizing. You’ll still want to use Shareplex/NetBase if you need immediate access to shadowed data or require load balancing or sharing among clusters. HP also announced a Networker Storage Node for HP 3000s, expected to roll out this summer. The software lets 3000s on a Legato backup network accept backups from other devices on the network. The metadata that tracks files and backups resides on an NT or Unix box with a GUI interface, but it also exists at the head of tapes cut on the HP 3000. The Storage Node, which works with the 3000’s included Store/iX or extra-cost TurboStore/iX, costs between $6,700 and $16,000 per system. Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved