SANBlaze Technology Storage Solutions

Target Emulation

SANBlaze target emulation systems for Fibre Channel and SAS provide a virtual, extremely cost-efficient configurable environment for SAN product development, testing and QA.

The systems reduce the need to deploy large farms of physical “scratch” disks or tapes, providing port density, high performance, non-volatile media at a fraction of the cost of physical disks or tapes.

The ability to add latency, have differing read/write sizes, inject a wide variety of errors and save and restore multiple disk configurations provides a flexible and invaluable tool for development, test and QA labs.

Capabilities

Multiple Disk/Tape Configurations
SANBlaze target emulator solutions provide the ability to configure from 1 to 500 disks or "LUNS" per port, allowing a 24 port system, for example, the ability to simulate up to 12,000 drives or tapes. These configurations can be saved and retrieved via a web based interface or script. Each disk or tape can be the same, or have individual attributes, such as speed, personality, errors, etc.

Error Injection and Bad Drive Testing
DVT and Test Labs are often tasked with testing the error recovery capability of their product in the face of errors that previously have been difficult to create in a predictable manner. SANBlaze target emulation systems can emulate exact conditions, on command, and remain in the error state for a number of I/Os, for a period of time or indefinitely, allowing qualification engineering to characterize the ability of their product to deal with specific error cases. Multiple error trigger events allow control of specific error injection cases.

The software can also be scripted to simulate any error condition, including queue-full, lost I/Os, long latencies (seconds to minutes), read and write overruns and underruns, and check conditions with any SenseKey/ASQ/ASC combination, for example.

Performance Testing
SANBlaze target emulation systems perform target reads and writes at full line speed. For example, a 4 port Fibre Channel system will allow for four 4G Fibre Channel ports to do reads and writes at full line rates each. This full line rate throughput allows for testing to be done against a fast, predictable target with near zero latency. BlazterMode provides this performance capability across many ports, providing a very cost effective performance measurement device.