FalconStor NIC Express

Improve redundancy in your SAN with failover and load balancing at the client level

By intelligently re-routing traffic in the event of a NIC (network interface card) or software iSCSI initiator failure, the NIC Express feature of the IPStor SAN storage management creates additional redundancy in data path, enabling companies to build end-to-end fault tolerant storage networks for mission critical backup operations.

Additionally, NIC Express acts as a load balancer among data paths, maximizing speed and utilizing your existing bandwidth. Utilizing parallel data paths among simultaneously within your SAN provides the maximum investment protection of your existing and future storage hardware, and increases system throughput. This load balancing is compatible with FEC/GEC (Fast Ether Channel/Gigabit Ether Channel — a Cisco port trunking standard), as well as IEEE 802.3ad.

NIC Express monitors your network by regularly sending a watchdog packet to loop throughout your storage network. If it does not recieve the packet back, and using advanced triangulation algorithms, starts running troubleshooting tests to pinpoint the area of the problem. Based on the rules set by the network administrator, NIC Express starting rerouting SAN traffic with nearly zero packet loss and maximum uptime and availability.

You can also remotely monitor your storage network via a web-based console called Enterprise Manager. With Enterprise Manager you can set up monitor alerts, view the status of any adapater or array, on any server on the network. You can also view and graph out detailed network traffic statistics for analysis.

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