FalconStor IPStor Upgrade 5.0 to 5.1
FalconStor IPStor Upgrade 5.0 to 5.1
Our Tier 1 (arguably Tier two storage by some) SAN environment consists of a SUN Storage Array and virtualization software from Falconstor (IPStor).
On Tuesday and Wednesday of this last week we preformed an upgrade to our FalconStor environment to allow for better pathing and a software upgrade from IPStor 5.0 to IPStor 5.1. Besides the underlining performance gains that we where after by the addition of 4 more 4GB Fiber Channel ports to our appliances, I was really after the ability to shrink our snapshots. Previously I would have to disable the snapshots, remove the snapshot space and recreate. This was very time consuming when you started to stack 8+ volumes per server.
I must say that I am impressed with the new version of the application. It does exactly what I was hoping for, now we have the ability to right click on our snapshot space and shrink it! This ultimately allowed me to recover about 1TB of disk space on tier 1 storage in our environment.
I was also impressed that our failover time seemed to drop due to the upgrade. Obviously more changes to the release where made, but this in my eyes had the largest impact on our environment. Recovering 1+ TB of disk stuck in snapshots sure beats going back to budget and requesting more disk.
Overall I am very happy with the upgrade and look forward to spending more time with the upgraded release. This was step one of many that we will be rolling out to take full advantage of about the 50K IOPs that we are after per appliance teamed with our storage.
