FalconStor DynaPath®

Load Balancing over SAN

The DynaPath Agent maximizes data availability and performance across your storage architecture by providing FC and iSCSI HBA load-balancing. transparent failover, and fail-back services. DynaPath, a software feature of IPStor, automatically distributes server traffic among the server's storage paths to optimize your Fibre Channel- or iSCSI-based network storage infrastructure, by greatly improving resiliency, availability and other performance capabilities of these protocols.

How Does It Work

This “filter” driver resides between the disk device drivers and the file system drivers, with the actual layered driver architecture.

As I/O requests are passed from the file system through a layered driver, and ultimately to the hardware, DynaPath acts as a “traffic cop”, by automatically distributing server traffic among the servers’ multiple storage paths for higher throughput and eliminate data bottlenecks. DynaPath can support up to 32 data paths from one server.

In addition DynaPath also transparently reroutes application server traffic to redundant storage paths without interruption, in the event of storage network problems, to ensure constant data availability across your SAN. Creating these additional I/O paths from the server to the storage system also provides automatic path failover protection.

Creating additional I/O path(s) from the server(s) to the storage system provides automatic path failover protection. In the configuration example below, the system is operating normally. The DynaPath agent distributes I/O data between the two paths and takes advantage of the extra bandwidth provided by the additional data path to and from the storage system.

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