First of is the change made to High Availability (HA) clusters. In the current release you can create a HA cluster containing two nodes. With the release of version 6 you will be able to create three node HA clusters.
On top of that you will be able to swap HA nodes in and out without interrupting the service. And a HA cluster doesn’t have to contain only the same type of Starwind devices ( deduplicated, Thin-provisioned, DiskBridge device).
Secondly there have been made some changes to deduplication:
- Data deletion support. Unused data blocks will be overwritten by new data;
- Memory usage lowered by 30% (2 MB’s per 1 GB of deduplicatied storage on 4kb deduplication block);
- Asynchronous replication of deduplicated storage;
- As an experimental feature you can nu replicate to remote iSCSI targets over a WAN connection.
Furthermore they have expanded on the backup server functionalities.
- Additional features are added for backup and management of Hyper-V virtual machines;
- There is a new graphical interface for managing the backup process;
- Simplified process of connection to ESX and Hyper-V servers;
- Added backup and management for VMware ESX virtual machines.
This new version looks to be offering some great improvements. For those that want to give the beta product a try, you can download it here.
Just like last year Starwind will be present this year at VMworld in both San Francisco (booth 536) and Barcelona, so be sure to have a look at their booth.