product description

In a drive toward utility computing and standardization, enterprises are migrating off proprietary UNIX systems and NAS appliances to modular, industry-standard clusters of SUSE LINUX servers.

PolyServe Matrix Server helps enable this migration with Shared Data Clusters. In shared data clusters, all servers in the cluster view, access, and share all of the data. The result is scalable data sharing on-demand: scaling application workloads across multiple servers, flexibly allocating server and storage capacity based on application needs, and a fault-tolerant infrastructure for a wide range of database, file serving, and file-based applications.

The cornerstone of shared data clustering on SUSE LINUX is PolyServe Matrix Server. Built to run on industry standard servers and storage with Linux, PolyServe shared data clusters make it possible to leverage existing investments in hardware, software, and operational processes.

Unlike proprietary UNIX systems, PolyServe builds on the same industry standard servers and storage your company has already deployed. Choose any brand of Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron server and any brand of FibreChannel SAN to add capacity to a given cluster.

NAS appliances, by contrast, use proprietary software—on costly, proprietary hardware—that can not be easily upgraded or reconfigured. And, appliances do not scale beyond a single appliance. Once capacity is reached on a given appliance, data must be partitioned and replicated in order to scale data access.

New in Matrix Server v3.1:

1. Full 64-bit SLES 9 support for Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron servers
2. Enforceable and advisory Quotas
3. Matrix Manager console for managing applications and other cluster resources
4. Performance Dashboard tools for collecting, analyzing, exporting and displaying performance information cluster-wide

key features

PolyServe Matrix Server Features:

• All servers to concurrently read and write all data on a SAN storage
• No single point of failure (fully symmetric with no central lock or metadata servers)
• Single point of administration for all applications, servers and storage in the cluster
• High availability services for wellness/failover of applications, middleware, servers, etc.
• Full journaling for fast, on-line file system recovery without interruption
• Add servers and storage dynamically, on demand, without disruption
• Highly scalable (up to 16 servers/cluster)
• Quickly right-size applications to servers based on peak and off-peak usage period -- move applications around the cluster using drag and drop.
• Performance dashboard provides an easy to use, graphical performance monitoring tool for viewing both individual server and aggregate cluster performance.

PolyServe Cluster Volume Manager Features:

• Enforceable and advisory quotas to limit storage usage by user, group, and file system.
• Collapse storage silos into a single shared storage pool for higher storage utilization
• Single shared pool of storage to provision, manage, and backup
• Fit storage provisioning to existing IT processes
• Grow capacity online as needs dictate
• Stripe across devices within and between arrays for best performance
• Use many cost-effective arrays instead of a single expensive array
• Select storage based on price-performance criteria
• Low-cost: SATA or SATA2
• Higher-end: SCSI
• No application changes required

system requirements

• Matrix Server supports industry standard Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron platforms, and industry standard FibreChannel attached SANs. See the PolyServe compatibility guide for more information at: http://www.polyserve.com/support_compatibility.php
• Matrix Server also supports Linux applications, industry-standard protocols (HTTP, NFS, CIFS, and FTP), and management frameworks.

purchasing OES

To purchase PolyServe Matrix Server, contact a Novell Authorized Reseller in your area.