The purpose of this white paper is to describe the SAN/iQ storage software platform and how its architecture contributes to it being more scalable, available, reliable, and high performance than competitive platforms.

Every SAN is built from a combination of software, hardware, and services, and in this respect open iSCSI SANs from LeftHand Networks are no different than any other SAN. But that's where the similarity ends.

The SAN/iQ storage software platform uses distributed, clustered technology to deliver all of the features that customers expect of a storage area network -- with the advantage of linear scalability, high availability, per-logical volume configured reliability, performance of almost 50,000 IOPS, and multiple times 10 Gbps throughput. The SAN/iQ storage software platform is better by design, allowing it to deliver features including synchronous replication, asynchronous replication, and remote copy built-in features of its superior architecture--not as a profit-making software option that can cost as much as an entire SAN.