Your business's increasing reliance on data calls for a well-designed and well-built data storage system. Agile, easy to deploy, and intuitive to manage, HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions provide all of the functions that organizations expect to see in a Fibre Channel SAN—at an affordable price point that makes centralized storage an economical option even for small- and medium-sized businesses. Because HP LeftHand SANs are built with a superior architecture, they are more scalable and offer higher availability, more reliability, and higher performance than other iSCSI SAN products.

HP LeftHand SANs are based on iSCSI technology - SCSI over standard Internet protocols (IP). This allows companies to use the standard iSCSI drivers that accompany server operating systems to access storage over standard IP networks.

HP LeftHand SANs use a process called true clustering. True clustering means that every storage system in a cluster participates equally in sharing both the cluster's workload and storage capacity. The cluster manages itself. With true clustering, organizations can administer a single entity while configuring virtual volumes and per-volume network RAID levels. They can also take snapshots, make remote copies, scale the cluster, and even take storage systems down for upgrades or maintenance—all without affecting data availability.

HP LeftHand SANs deliver the enterprise storage management features that companies expect of Fibre Channel SANs. However, the similarity ends there. The purpose of this white paper is to describe the benefits of a clustered architecture in comparison with traditional controller-based architectures, and to discuss the technology that makes HP LeftHand SANs better by design.