A Node is an individual system on which the SANware agent software is installed.

A SuperNode is an individual system providing resources to SANware and hosting all or a portion of the Distributed File System (DFS). Each Supernode passes instructions along to and retrieves data from a given set of nodes. From an average system perspective, for each 10 nodes, one will be a Supernode and will govern its set of nodes.

Yes. Compression is attempted on all files, however depending on the file type the amount of compression varies.

There are 2 ports that need to be opened for both TCP and UDP - 20014 and 20015.

SANware uses the network device with the lowest metric. This setting can be changed in order to direct SANware to use a particular network device.

You can add network drives to a workset just by navigating to the drive in the explorer window for choosing files/directories. However, for the replication to function, the network drive must be available on the system on which the workset was created during scanning of the files or replication will not occur.

SANware uses only about 10% of the available bandwidth on a given network connection when replicating files. During latency periods, SANware will register at below 1% usage.

The agent takes approximately 30MB on the hard drive and 13MB of RAM when loaded.

The agent will take only 3%-5% of the CPU in normal mode with occasional spikes like any other application.

During service creation, Windows will occasionally try to shut down the installer. Simply move the message to the side and installation will complete normally.

The agent can run on the following operating systems:
Windows - 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, Vista Pro, Server 2000 & 2003
Linux - Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva, Ubuntu, SuSe
Unix - AIX, HP/UX
Solaris 10.4+

Hardware requirements are minimal. The equivalent of a Pentium III 500Mhz with 64MB of RAM and at least 4GB of free space (otherwise what's the point) can run and be a productive member of a SANware installation.

SANware installations which are not created together cannot be joined. However, you can use systems residing anywhere in the world as long as those computers have network connectivity to the rest of their SANware installation via a VPN or direct network link.

SANware is self-managing and self-healing. Files stored via SANware are always stored in multiple locations to accommodate a computer's random behavior. If a computer becomes unavailable, the other computers in the SANware installation will compensate for the loss such that your data is protected.

SANware's patent pending storage method ensures that viruses and spyware/malware cannot exist on an installation. Because SANware automatically splits every file into at least 2 pieces, viruses and spyware cannot survive until they are retrieved. RevStor recommends always having adequate virus protection on your computer.

Yes. The Local Settings will allow you to exclude drives from being used for storage.

No. In order to maintain the security of your data, RevStor has no access to your data and all data stored via SANware is automatically encrypted. The only way to retrieve data stored on SANware is via your username and password. Any hole opened in the security would be one that could be exploited by hackers and hence none was opened.

SuperNodes exist at a ratio of one SuperNode for every 10 Nodes.

Yes. SANware maintains statistics on all nodes to ensure that tasks are given to nodes with available resources (CPU, HDD and Bandwidth). This helps to load-balance the processing of storage requests as well as the storage of file chunks.

Yes. However, we reccommend that you keep the computers on while turning off the monitors instead. Though no data would be lost if all computers were turned off at night, access to data would be interrupted until enough computers were back online to provide the necessary file chunks. Also replication would be shut down during that time.

There is nothing you need to do with SuperNodes after starting the first SuperNode. Once your SANware installation is up and running there is nothing you need to do for other SuperNodes to promote. SANware handles all aspects of promoting and demoting SuperNodes for the installation.

SANware does not currently work on computers running Apple operating systems, however we are committed to supporting this community and will be releasing a Mac-enabled agent in the next 12 months. If you would like to backup data residing on a Mac, the Mac's drive can be accessed if it is mapped to using a Windows or Linux computer.

The data pool created is accessed using SANware. It is not a CIFS or NFS share.

There are no theoretical Node or Volume size limits. SANware has been simulation tested up to 10,000 nodes with 500 Petabytes of available data.

Node loss is recovered from automatically. There is a dynamic hierarchy employed within the mesh, hence individual node loss does not impact performance or availability of data.

You can set redundancy levels for each Workset created in SANware. The redundancy levels are from 2 (mirroring) up to 20 (90% permanent total loss of systems do not impact data retrieval).

Backups are incremental at the chunk, or piece, level. As a file changes, so will its component pieces, only the new/changed pieces are backed up.

The data depository is SANware, if SANware is installed in a central location and all contributors are contributors only (hosting no data chunks themselves), then the data will be stored centrally.

PST files can be backed up when Outlook is closed or using St. Bernard Software's SANware plugin when they are open.

Worksets can be created which mirror the source directory structure, so when a new folder is created in the source directory, it will be reflected in SANware.