It's quite a while ago that I wrote about a small Indian startup called QUADStor and their free storage virtualization software. It enables you to turn a physical or virtual FreeBSD or Linux box into a multi-protocol (iSCSI, FC, NFS/CIFS) storage server that features thin provisioning, transparent compression, inline block-level deduplication and VAAI support for VMware ESXi 5.x!
And now there are even more good news ...
- Clustering and high availability (currently in beta): Multiple nodes can form a cluster - then one node will have a Controller role, and the others are Clients. Ideally each node has access to the same shared storage (if not the client node would forward the IO to the controller). One of the client nodes is selected as a Master and can take over the controller's role if it should fail.
To prevent split-brain scenarios fencing is implemented mandatorily. - Synchronous mirroring and high availability: A QUADStor VDisk is synchronously mirrored between two stand-alone hosts (not combinable with Clustering). Access can happen in Active-Passive mode (again fencing is mandatory), but also in Active-Active(!) mode provided that the clients accessing the storage use SCSI-3 persistent reservation and/or ATS commands (I suppose VMware ESXi does).
I have not yet tried these new features in the lab, but it looks like it will be fun playing with it.
The next great news is that the QUADStor storage virtualization software is now Open Source! The source code was released under the GPL and is available on Github. QUADStor's business model is to provide commercial support for this product, and I hope that this will pay off for them.
Another product that QUADStor open-sourced already a while ago is their Virtual Tape Library (VTL). VTLs use hard disk storage to emulate conventional tape libraries (that are still used a lot for backup and archiving purposes). The new version 7 of Veeam's Backup & Recovery product (once it becomes available) will support archive to tape and VTLs, and I will definitely give this feature a try using the QUADStor VTL.
Another product that QUADStor open-sourced already a while ago is their Virtual Tape Library (VTL). VTLs use hard disk storage to emulate conventional tape libraries (that are still used a lot for backup and archiving purposes). The new version 7 of Veeam's Backup & Recovery product (once it becomes available) will support archive to tape and VTLs, and I will definitely give this feature a try using the QUADStor VTL.
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