Motion Media

View poolIT Pro vs poolIT Server Comparison Chart

With poolIt you can:

• Combine multiple volumes into a single pool
• Easily expand capacity of your existing volumes
• Migrate data from one storage device to another transparently
• Implement tiered storage for better matching the type of data with the available resources
• Make use of all the available space distributed across your multiple volumes
• Keep recently used files locally but transfer aging files on remote servers
• Create very large volumes safely and easily
• Easily move and repurpose storage resources within your facility

Tiger Technology poolIt brings affordable storage and file virtualization to small and medium size businesses by enabling multiple physical volumes to be combined into a flexible, scalable and easily manageable storage pool. It is ideal to consolidate your SAN, NAS, and local storage resources. With poolIt, your data can now be stored and accessed from a single drive letter or volume - you no longer need to manage projects and files spread across multiple drives. 

poolIt allows you to dynamically add/remove volumes from the pool without any data loss. When adding a volume to the pool, all existing files and folder structures are merged, and exposed in the resulting virtual volume while the original drives are hidden. When removing a volume from the pool, the data it contains remains intact and accessible.

poolIt lets you increase your organization's storage capacity safely and within seconds by simply adding new volumes to the pool — there is no need to reformat, stripe or span existing volumes. poolIt isolates users and applications from changes to the physical storage infrastructure and puts an end to storage provisioning that is expensive and difficult to forecast.

Instead of virtualizing the storage devices themselves, poolIt creates a virtual file system that manages your multiple drives. The resulting volume mounts as a new drive that can be exposed as a network share. User rights and access privileges are preserved. In a domain environment, poolIt authenticates each access against native Active Directory security. Regular maintenance of the pool, such as backup and defragmentation can be done on the individual volume, which simplifies maintenance, reduces down time, and increases utilization. poolIt is storage and vendor agnostic and works with a combination of Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, SAS, SATA, as well as FireWire and USB devices.

poolIt optimizes storage resource utilization and lets you better match the type of storage with the value of your data. SmartWrite™ runtime and maintenance logic strategies ensure that your data can be stored — or moved — to the optimal volume or nearline storage based on the available strategies (affinities, file type, available space, etc.). You easily control where the data that is created gets stored: data that is not critical to your operations can be stored on low cost, commodity storage while data requiring high-speed and/or a higher level of protection can be stored on specialized RAIDs.

poolIt innovates with its non-destructive virtual pool file system and its smart runtime maintenance strategies. These innovations isolate users and applications from the complexities of the underlying infrastructure and allow you to greatly reduce the cost of ownership by increasing your storage options and allowing you to manage them more efficiently.

Each system on which you install poolIt must meet the following minimum system requirements:

• PC with 800-megahertz (MHz) 32-bit (x86) processor or 800-MHz 64-bit (x64) processor
• Microsoft Windows® XP/Server® 2003/Vista/Server® 2008/Windows 7/Server® 2008 R2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM
• 20MB of available hard-disk space for installation
• Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher resolution
• pdf viewer for viewing poolIt documentation (like Adobe Reader, for example)
• Internet connection for activating the product

File Systems Requirements

poolIt is storage and vendor agnostic. To be a supported pool member a file system must be mounted with Read and Write permissions on your computer and if it is on a directly attached device it must be listed in Windows Disk Management.

Here are examples of storage:

Basic disks	OK
Dynamic disks	OK
Internal or external RAID	OK
USB/Firewire drives	OK
USB stick	OK
NAS	OK
RAM Disk	OK*
CD/DVD	NO

*the RAM disk should be listed in Windows Disk Managament