Disaster Recovery on Demand

May 21, 2013 / / No comments

Our prior post, A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure: Disaster Recovery and Data Protection, discussed both the benefits and limitations of a cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) strategy. As we highlighted last week, traditional disaster recovery options leave open a huge hole: At one extreme are high-cost, quick recovery time options using hosted or colocation sites and at the other extreme are low-cost, long recovery time options such as tape or disk backup.

As a result, organizations who cannot afford a cold or hot standby site have been left to either cobble together a complicated and risky DR strategy or rely solely on offsite data protection, which affords them limited business continuity.

You’ll recall that we outlined three cloud-based options that are beginning to fill this hole:

  • Recovering applications on virtual servers through a cloud provider’s catalog
  • Recovering virtual machines directly in cloud compute
  • Importing on-premises virtual machines into the cloud via conversion scripts and tools

Unfortunately, these cloud options, while viable (and certainly better than data recovery only options), still present an extraordinary amount of risk and complexity – exactly the opposite of what you want during a disaster.

Last week, we promised you a fourth answer that helps you address those issues. Today, TwinStrata launched a new solution: on-demand DR infrastructure that is completely interoperable with on-premises virtualized environments. Unlike traditional DR strategies, CloudArray DRaaS overcomes the hurdles to DR on-demand, offering:

  • 2-4 hour spin up times of DR infrastructure, whenever it is needed, without having to pay for it in the meantime. The only time organizations need to pay for the infrastructure is during disaster and disaster test scenarios.
  • A VMware environment that work seamlessly with customer’s on-premises environment. All controls and privileges are available to customers so that they can orchestrate failover and failback as seamlessly as an on-premise to on-premise environment.

CloudArray with DR On-Demand

  • No need for a time-consuming spin up and rebuild of individual servers from a cloud provider’s catalog. Instead virtual machines can be recovered via standard hypervisor tools.
  • No need for risky conversion utilities to move virtual machines from one hypervisor format to another, potentially compromising recoverability.

Most importantly, it positions an affordable DR offering that rivals and sometimes even improves upon the recovery times of cold standby disaster sites or hot-standby DR sites for a fraction of the cost.

Disaster Recovery Options: Traditional vs. TwinStrata

The far-reaching implication is a viable disaster recovery plan for virtually any organization, particularly the IT-constrained mid-market organization that may not have the wherewithal to build or manage a secondary data center. Moreover, smaller organizations struggling with a DR plan can now be compliant with regulatory standards (i.e. HIPAA, FINRA, etc.) that require them to have a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Larger organizations, which already have a DR plan, can still benefit from substantial cost savings. Either way, an affordable, enterprise-class disaster recovery strategy has just become attainable for virtually any organization.

You can read the full press release for more information or join us for our webinar on May 30th, “Affordable, On-Demand Disaster Recovery: Introducing CloudArray DRaaS.”

Category: backup, Cloud Storage, cloud-integrated storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , , , , , ,

A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure: Disaster Recovery and Data Protection

May 16, 2013 / / No comments

Our prior installment in this series discussed building a roadmap to using cloud infrastructure services starting with data storage expansion as Phase 1. In today’s installment we get into Phase 2 of our proposed roadmap: using the cloud for disaster recovery (DR) and data protection.

For many mid-sized businesses struggling to maintain existing IT infrastructure, implementing a strong disaster recovery and data protection plan is either financially out of reach or difficult to maintain from a resource perspective. After all, DR planning traditionally involves purchasing redundant infrastructure that is housed off-site (e.g. remote office, co-location facility, hosting provider, etc) and remains underutilized until a disaster occurs, offering little immediate ROI.

However, you don’t need to look very far to prove that lacking a disaster plan can be perilous. Consider the amount of business lost during hurricane Sandy, which hit the northeast US in late 2012. Only a month after the hurricane, financial analysis firm IHS Global Insight estimated that the total lost business activity from Sandy totaled $25B, a staggering sum. While natural disasters are relatively infrequent, they can shut down unprepared businesses for days or weeks and result in substantial revenue losses or even business closure.

In spite of the risks, many organizations simply roll the dice, hoping that they won’t be afflicted by a disaster. They do this not out of a predilection for gambling, but rather because their resource or budgetary constraints make true disaster recovery simply unattainable. For highly regulated industries, however, rolling the dice isn’t even an option. Regulations such as HIPAA in the healthcare industry require businesses to have a disaster recovery plan in order to be compliant. In these industries, a disaster recovery plan is a requirement rather than an option.

Using Cloud for Data Recovery

Data protection is often the cornerstone for DR and many businesses have been moving to the cloud in the form of online backup. Unlike tape, data that is backed up to the cloud stays online and is available for immediate recall, meaning a restore process can be started instantly and discrete bits of data can be recalled immediately. Online backup effectively provides shorter recovery times than recovering data from tapes offsite, as illustrated in the figure below.

However, for many organizations, data recovery is simply one element of maintaining business continuity. Applications must also be restarted once data is recovered in order to get a business operational. If application servers are lost or damaged during an outage, it may take days to reconstruct an application environment. For this reason, many organizations opt for faster recovery times by using cold standby or hot standby disaster recovery sites. Both of these cases require infrastructure for hosting applications in the event of a disaster. In spite of the substantially higher costs, as illustrated in the chart above, alternatives for rapid application recovery have not emerged until recently.

Using Cloud for Application Recovery

Since one of the tenets of cloud is on-demand provisioning of infrastructure, it naturally represents a more efficient way to activate redundant infrastructure for disaster recovery — on-demand and only when needed in the case of a disaster or a disaster test. A pay-as-you-go model substantially reduces costs over dedicated DR infrastructure and eliminates the inherent underutilization. Cloud also alleviates the need for an off-site DR location.

When it comes to application recovery using the cloud there are several approaches, each of which requires careful consideration. Three of these include:

  • Recovering applications on virtual servers through a cloud provider’s catalog: Although this recovery process may be viable for small workloads, it can be a time consuming manual process. This is particularly true when attempting to recover tens or hundreds of servers.
  • Recovering virtual machines directly in cloud compute: A faster approach than the above involves recovering virtual machines in the cloud, similar to failover of virtual machines between hypervisors. This is possible if the same hypervisor runs on-premise and in the cloud. However, while moving virtual machine (VM) images between like hypervisors is generally straightforward, many cloud providers may not offer sufficient administrative privilege in their virtual compute environments or simply may not be compatible with on-premise hypervisors.
  • Importing on-premise virtual machines into the cloud via conversion scripts and tools: The promise of this approach is that it addresses hypervisor incompatibility between on-premise and cloud environments. However, it is important to ensure that conversion scripts and tools operate correctly across all virtual machines, since an import failure during a disaster can be a show-stopper. Also, be sure to confirm that the scripts/tools can operate bidirectionally, meaning they allow a way to eventually fail back virtual machines back to the on-premise environment.

Like any major IT project, DR in the cloud requires a certain degree of planning and also regular testing — but the payoff can be substantial in terms of reducing disaster recovery costs, improving resilience and achieving compliance with regulatory requirements.

Next week, we’ll look at a fourth option that addresses many of the failings of the options outlined above while still delivering on all of the benefits.

 

Category: backup, Cloud Storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , ,

A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure: Data Storage Expansion

April 30, 2013 / / No comments

As discussed in our prior installment, while there is no “one-size fits all” path to cloud infrastructure adoption, a roadmap can ease and simplify the transition to cloud while minimizing IT disruption. More importantly, a phased approach (as shown in the figure below) enables organizations to take advantage of on-demand infrastructure sooner than later, leveraging scalability, cost advantages and rapid deployment capabilities of cloud.

Data storage expansion may be one of the easiest ways to leverage cloud infrastructure, which is why we list it as phase 1 of our roadmap. Besides the simple integration path, storage is a foundational building block of a cloud-based IT strategy – once data is in the cloud, more cloud services can be rolled in. Need another reason to begin with storage? Storage is growing rapidly, with the digital universe set to exceed 40,000 exabytes (40 billion terabytes) by 2020. With a data explosion looming, nearly every organization needs to formulate a plan for dealing with storage capacity sprawl.

For cloud storage “newbies,” integration may not appear very simple. In fact, the object-based APIs of cloud storage do not natively interface to many of today’s applications.

While writing directly to object-based APIs can be a complex undertaking, cloud-integrated storage solutions have made integrating cloud storage into an existing on-premise environments as easy as integrating on-premise SAN or NAS storage, with the performance and security of traditional infrastructure.

Once past the integration hurdle, there are a number of advantages of cloud storage versus on-premise traditional storage. These include:

  • On-demand, unlimited capacity expansion: With cloud storage, organizations never have to worry about running out of storage capacity. Capacity is always available and can be increased or decreased on demand.
  • Pay-as-you-go pricing: Traditional storage purchases occur in 3-5 year cycles, where organizations purchase capacity up-front to last several years. This means capacity is over-purchased and largely underutilized during most of its useful lifetime. Cloud storage changes those dynamics by only charging for capacity used at any given time, eliminating all waste. When you need more storage it’s simply there – easy to obtain, easy to use, easy to access.
  • Reduced floor space: Data storage occupies valuable data center floor space and expands over time to require more. Cloud storage allows organizations to grow capacity while keeping their local storage footprint fixed. Over time, as organizations become more cloud-centric, local storage footprints can also be reduced.
  • Virtually no administration: Maintaining traditional data storage generally requires hundreds if not thousands of yearly operations (see below), ranging from backups to software upgrades to addressing and fixing failures. With cloud storage, all of that maintenance is effectively outsourced to the cloud provider, freeing up staff to address building/maintaining key business applications rather than tending to the bane of infrastructure maintenance.

  • No need to to upgrade, migrate, replace: Traditional storage is sometimes viewed as a gift that keeps on giving — but not in a good way. As mentioned earlier, storage system refreshes happen every 3-5 years. Updating and then migrating and replacing storage infrastructure is an arduous task that introduces significant IT risk and administrative overhead. With cloud storage, the cloud provider does that for you, so the 3-5 year data storage life cycle disappears.

The end result of using the cloud for storage capacity expansion is a much better way to deploy, maintain and scale storage infrastructure. While solving the problem of capacity management and growth is of tremendous value by itself, storage also serves as the foundation of the next phases of our cloud adoption roadmap.

Some of the more profound benefits of the cloud that can be realized are in the areas of disaster recover (DR) and Big Data. Stay tuned for our upcoming installments as we discuss these next phases.

Category: Cloud Storage, cloud-integrated storage / Tags: , , , , , ,

A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure

April 11, 2013 / / No comments

With the increasing prevalence and acceptance of the cloud as a viable alternative to on-premise IT, today’s IT organizations are faced with a wide range of options. In fact, had you just woken from a five-year slumber, you might find the available array of cloud service options quite daunting.

At just a moment’s notice, you can spin up pretty much anything, with Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings all readily available. Services can reside on public clouds in multi-tenant environments, private clouds within the four walls of an organization, community clouds shared between a limited set of tenants, or even a hybrid arrangement.

For the many IT organizations mired in maintaining server and storage infrastructure, IaaS appears a very attractive alternative to managing hardware in-house. While it’s still a rare organization who seeks to move all their IT infrastructure to the cloud, there is a long list of  benefits to strategically and selectively partitioning infrastructure using a hybrid strategy. Take a look at just a few benefits: reduction of capital expenses, maintenance expenses and avoidance of the often dreaded refresh cycles required on a 3-5 year basis.

But if you currently have all your infrastructure in-house, the dizzying array of options can obscure your view into where to even begin the incorporation of cloud into your environment.

For those organizations, it can be helpful – if not critical – to build a roadmap to cloud infrastructure services that provides simple entry points and can grow incrementally to encompass a broad set of high-value services.

While there is no “one-size fits all” path to cloud infrastructure adoption, a roadmap can ease and simplify the transition while minimizing disruption.

Below is a practical roadmap for rolling our cloud infrastructure in a phased approach:

Over the course of the next few blogs, I’ll be tackling each of these phases in greater detail. By taking a phased approach, you can much more easily transition from existing in-house IT to a hybrid cloud environment that minimizes the disruption to existing applications while still providing a clear path toward the increased use of the high-value services offered by cloud providers.

The first step? Data storage expansion. Stay tuned for my next post that will elaborate on this further.

Category: Cloud Storage / Tags: , , , , ,

Maximize your data storage strategy using the cloud

March 19, 2013 / / No comments

Earlier this year, Gartner published their list of Top 10 Cloud Storage Providers, highlighting key features and differentiators of the top cloud storage providers in the world. More importantly, the report highlights the emergence of a maturing industry of cloud storage providers offering a new option for businesses thinking about their next data storage purchase.

Although each cloud storage provider has a unique set of strengths, nearly all offer a common set of cloud storage benefits that include:

  1. A nearly unlimited supply of on-demand capacity: organizations can avoid the dreaded cycle of refreshes, upgrades and migrations from running out of capacity
  2. Multi-site redundancy: most cloud storage providers offer multi-copy and data center redundancy for disaster tolerance
  3. Reduced maintenance: cloud storage means never having to touch or replace a disk drive or go through storage maintenance cycles, instead outsourcing all storage management to the cloud
  4. Zero capex expenditure: pay-as-you-go models enable paying only for the capacity in use, eliminating capital equipment expenses, over-purchasing and underutilization
  5. Reduced cost of ownership: the costs of purchasing, maintaining and managing a local storage infrastructure can be substantial. Forrester has demonstrated a 74% cost savings of cloud storage versus traditional storage.

By integrating the cloud into their storage environments, organizations can relieve themselves of the unrelenting storage cycle burden – data growth –> storage scramble –> endless maintenance –> tech refresh/data migration –> rinse and repeat.

Another consideration when moving data to the cloud is the additional value of cloud-integrated storage, which makes accessing cloud storage as easy and secure as local storage. Cloud-integrated storage enables familiar NAS and SAN interfaces for instant application compatibility and fast local-speed data access among its many benefits.

But while today’s primary drivers toward cloud storage often equate to building a better mousetrap, forward-thinking organizations have stretched their vision and have begun to outline how moving their data to the cloud can be used for competitive advantage. Beyond the common capabilities and benefits, what are other key considerations when looking to deploy cloud storage?

A recent GigaOm article calls cloud storage the crack cocaine of cloud computing. Though this is not an ideal analogy to describe an offering with a very compelling value proposition, truth is, there are various high-value services that can make the cloud more than just a resting place for data. On-demand business continuity/disaster recovery and analytics services are perfect examples of using the cloud as an extension of compute infrastructure in addition to storage. Both represent a great way to derive additional value from moving data to the cloud.

The verdict? Today, cloud-integrated storage can deliver a solution that is more efficient, cost-effective and lower maintenance than traditional storage. And that in itself is probably enough to seriously consider implementing it. But that’s only the beginning. Tomorrow, that same solution will do more than just alleviate you of storage pain – it will unlock a host of services and capabilities that will strengthen your business and deliver competitive advantage.

The cloud storage industry is rapidly maturing and can offer nearly any organization a wealth of benefits. It is worth consideration as a bona fide alternative to traditional storage. Look for differentiators that can provide additional value to your business.

 

Category: Cloud Storage, cloud-integrated storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , , , , ,

5 Ways Cloud Can Improve Your Business’s Top Line Growth

January 26, 2013 / / No comments

 

While IT vendors typically lead a product pitch with cost benefits, it should be no surprise that cost savings alone don’t always drive IT purchases. For many organizations, revenue growth may represent an even more compelling driver.

Cloud compute and cloud storage have in many circles become synonymous with cost savings and improving an organization’s bottom line. Perhaps a lesser known aspect of the cloud is the ability to help organizations increase their top line revenues.

How exactly does cloud enable you to do this? Let’s examine 5 ways below:

  1. Stand up more IT infrastructure than you could otherwise afford: While this may seem counter-intuitive, successful organizations have the ability rapidly scale  their business based on customer demand, and this often requires a relatively massive IT infrastructure. For example, think about the impact on a little-known website with a great idea that suddenly gets an influx of traffic after a positive New York Times or Wall Street Journal article. Traditional IT infrastructure requires capital and maintenance requirements that may be unfathomable for companies still in the growth phase. Unlike creative financing solutions which only ease the capital expense, cloud eliminates the capital, setup and maintenance burdens, providing on-demand IT infrastructure to help your business grow.
  2. Focus your next hires on growing your business: A 2012 ESG survey showed that up to 72% of IT dollars go to maintaining existing infrastructure. With storage capacities growing at a rapid pace, why continue to add headcount to maintain infrastructure at the same pace? Instead, use cloud storage to minimize IT maintenance, focus existing IT personnel on delivering business-driven initiatives (such as new premium services – see below) and hire strategic talent in marketing and sales to directly increase revenues.
  3. Create new premium services for your clients: Deploying a new service for your clients may involve a development, test and production effort, requiring a significant financial commitment toward infrastructure during the planning stage. With pay-as-you-go cloud, there is far less investment and commitment in going from concept to deployment. Simply start small and as development reaches milestones, continue to add necessary infrastructure on demand. With cloud, you can roll out new services and high-value premium services with a new level of agility your competitors will envy.
  4. Use your data to sell smarter. Often the most powerful data to grow your business is sitting in front of you, but may not be accessible if you don’t have the infrastructure to store and analyze it live. Whether it is customer profile data, purchase patterns or customer usage data, current and historical data may hold the key to growing your business. With cloud, years of data can be online and available for analysis via query engines available on-demand. Harnessing your data via the cloud can drive the right decisions to grow your business.
  5. Recover quickly from outages. Let’s face it, nothing puts a damper on revenues like outages. Prospects and customers alike may lose confidence after a significant amount of downtime and may never return. A recent survey shows respondents using the cloud recover from outages must faster than those who do not. Cloud enables the secondary server and storage infrastructure that can help your business recover quickly from outages. With rapid recovery, your customers may never realize an outage even occurred.

If these potential top-line benefits are meaningful to your organization, consider introducing cloud into your IT strategy. At the same time, you’ll also benefit from the bottom-line cost savings of cloud.

If you already use the cloud, tell us what top- and bottom-line benefits you’re experiencing on Twitter or on our Facebook page.

Category: Cloud Storage / Tags: , , ,

Is Cloud Storage Ready for Liftoff?

January 16, 2013 / / No comments

by Lorita Ba

Every now and then, we at TwinStrata like to take a pulse of the industry. While we have conversations every day with prospective and current customers, partners and industry analysts, it’s good to pop up from those conversations to see what the rest of the world is thinking.

And so TwinStrata’s Cloud Storage Adoption survey was born. You may recall the first iteration of that survey, the results of which we released in June of last year, shortly after the Cloud Computing Expo. We continued to collect survey responses throughout the second half of 2012,  and today we released an update of those findings.

We knew we would be getting a relatively cloud-savvy group – our respondent pool was predisposed toward cloud computing – but we figured that this group would give us some unique insights into the attitudes, experiences and direction of the industry.

So what did we learn?

In June 2012, we found, “5 out of 6 respondents indicated that they were either already using or plan to use cloud storage in some capacity – making it the most widely planned cloud initiative (even more than software as a service).”

Today, that number is 9 out of 10.

A whopping 80% of current cloud storage users claim that they can recover their data in less than 24 hours, with nearly a quarter of cloud storage users estimating instantaneous recovery. Meanwhile a shocking one in six respondents who do not use cloud storage estimated that it would take more than a week to recover their data in the event of a disaster.

More than a week. Can your business sustain that kind of delay?

How long would it take you to recover your data in the event of a disaster?

80% of cloud storage users can recover their data in less than 24 hours in the event of a disaster. One in six respondents who do not currently use cloud storage estimate that it would take more than a week.

Today’s findings demonstrate a critical mass that’s forming around cloud storage. Although other cloud computing technologies like software as a service has experienced greater adoption to date, more and more organizations have recognized that cloud storage delivers a simple, practical and cost-effective solution to problems such as exponentially increasing data growth, disaster recovery and out-of-control costs. Want more proof? 70% of cloud storage users intend to expand their use of cloud storage. It’s clear that the time for cloud storage is now.

There’s a lot more in the report, and you can download a full copy of it here.

We’ll continue to keep the survey open, collect responses and report back on the results.

In the meantime, if you want to find out more about how organizations are using cloud storage to solve the problems cited below, please register for our January 31st webinar, Cloud Storage in Action: Cost Savings, Lower Maintenance and Improved Disaster Recovery.

 

Category: Cloud Storage, cloud-integrated storage / Tags: , , , , ,
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