We added a video on Cloud-based snapshots. How they operate. The need they address. And the IT costs they eliminate. Link to video is below.
Data snapshots play a significant role in data protection and DR. Customers we speak to express their concerns about growing data sets and fixed backup windows. What made disk-to-disk (D2D) backup solutions popular, they solved the backup window challenge. What they did not solve is – they added more cost and complexity to IT. There is now another box to manage. The box needs to grow with the data sets (after all the data de-duplication is exhausted). Depending upon the D2D vendor, expansion can be a painful and costly process. Companies having deployed CloudArray and using its snapshot capabilities tell us that it solves many of the challenges D2D backup solutions did not address while providing more benefits. Cloud storage snapshots break the barriers of in-house solutions by providing an infinite amount of available storage and at a low cost.
The video describes how CloudArray space efficient snapshots operate. We provide a product demo showing how to take an instant snapshot of a volume and mount it to a server for immediate access.
CloudArray offers several user-definable policies for creating on-premise volumes via iSCSI that appear as locally attached block storage. The video takes you through each of them starting out with “Cloud Volumes”. Cloud volumes appear as native storage to applications with the same characteristics and performance as existing storage systems. What makes them unique is they reside in the Cloud, but are partially cached local to application. “Cloud Replicas”. They too reside in the cloud, but are 100% cached locally. Similar to Cloud Volumes, Cloud Replicas appear as native storage to applications with the same characteristics and performance as existing storage systems. As data is written to a CloudArray Cloud Replica volume it is asynchronously replicated to the Cloud. This provides two copies of the same volume at all times.
“Cloud Snapshots” leverage low cost Cloud storage and reside completely in the cloud. They are mountable by any host with access to CloudArray volumes.
Cloud snapshots are unique in that they are space efficient. After the initial copy of the data set is made, subsequent volume snapshots track only the changes made to the volume. CloudArray uses a system of pointers to reference the initial volume snapshot. This method of pointer-based snapshots consumes less disk capacity than if the data set was repeatedly copied. Cloud snapshot copies are completed instantly and made available for use by other applications such as data protection, data analysis and reporting, data replication, etc. The original copy of the data continues to be available to the applications without interruption, while the snapshot copy is used to perform other functions on the data.
The size of the snapshot volume is dictated by the change rate of your data. For example, a daily data change rate of 5% on a 100 GB volume requires 5 GB of disk space per daily snapshot.
CloudArray snapshots are a cost effective means for data protection and address many of the issues that D2D backup vendors didn’t address.
Enjoy the video.
Video: CloudArray snapshot overview
