Posts Tagged ‘Cloud Storage’

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How do you make Veeam Software’s VMworld Best of Show product even better?

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

by Greg Roody

Congratulations to Veeam Software:  Best of Show at VMworld 2010.

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Veeam Software took 4 separate awards at VMworld 2010, including Best of Show for Veeam Backup and Replication V5.  They also won a Gold Award for vPower, a powerful new technology that  includes Instant VM recovery, Universal Application-Item Recovery, and SureBakup™ recovery verification which automatically verifies the recoverability of every backup .

Veeam has the details on their website (http://www.veeam.com/go/best-of-vmworld-2010/ and http://www.veeam.com/veeam_vpower_datasheet_ds.pdf),   You can also read about it at VMblog, http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/09/07/veeam-wins-best-of-show-at-vmworld.aspx.

Of course, when combined with TwinStrata’s Cloudarray software, Veeam Backup & Replication gives organizations easy access to secure, highly scalable, pay-as-you-go Cloud Storage for their VMware backups (B2D2C).

TwinStrata’s CloudArray is the first purpose-built software solution to enhance data protection at a substantial cost savings compared to traditional off-site storage, delivering simple, affordable, and secure storage solutions to enterprise environments. With this new joint offering from Veeam and TwinStrata, companies using tape systems or disk-to-disk backup for data protection can select CloudArray as the backup target for Veeam Backup & Replication. To ensure data security and privacy, CloudArray  encrypts data prior to transporting it to cloud storage. When combined with Veeam Backup and Replication’s advanced deduplication capabilities, the two products offer a high degree of savings for both bandwidth and end point storage requirements. In addition,  CloudArray Compute-Anywhere allows businesses to restore on-site, offsite, or in the cloud.

You can read about the joint solution at Veeam’s website.  http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html#fragment-5, or at one of our Partners, Sublime Solutions (http://blog.sublimesolution.net/VirtuallyPerfectBlog/bid/29769/Veeam-and-TwinStrata-Provide-Cost-effective-Cloud-Storage-for-VMware-Backups/Default.aspx?RewriteStatus=1).

Of course, you can also visit http://www.twinstrata.com/VeeamBackupReplication.html.

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Of 3PAR, blocks and cloud storage

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

No doubt you may have heard about the bidding war for SAN storage vendor 3PAR between HP and Dell. In case you missed it, a high-end block storage vendor (3PAR) is fetching a spectacular acquisition price that has continued to climb in a bidding frenzy, perhaps culminating this week at an astronomical $2.4B.

While there is certainly more to 3PAR than block storage, all this fuss may lead you to ask what makes block storage so desirable in customer data centers. And in the same vein, does block-access make sense for cloud storage? After all, file storage can run on similarly fast networks and offers native file sharing capability. Who needs blocks, right?

Well, the reality is that thousands of customers are purchasing block storage with good reason. While the argument between block and file can sometimes be as insightful (or uninsightful) as arguing about what type of bag to package your groceries in,  I offer three of the inherent advantages of block storage that make it attractive for a variety of customer environments:

1. The ability to support any file system

Block storage supports any file system: NTFS, ZFS, Ext3, NFS, CIFS. The choice is yours for a filesystem optimized to your applications. If you are considering an on-premise gateway to cloud storage, wouldn’t you prefer to keep using the file systems  you already have? With block storage, you can do just that as no “rip and replace” is required.

2. The ability to provision raw data volumes directly to applications

Many applications such as databases benefit from raw volumes that do not have the overhead of a file system. In fact, without the additional overhead, performance naturally improves. If you are using local copies of data that are replicated to cloud, it makes sense to optimize the performance of local access. If you are using server virtualization, VMware allows raw device mappings (RDM) from SAN attached raw volumes that minimize the I/O stack to maximize performance.

3. Benefits of block level granularity

When you are replicating data, say from a local copy of data to cloud copy, it is not always efficient to copy entire files to the cloud when only a small portion of the file is modified. For larger files especially, it is more efficient to send block level updates where a block represents only a small portion of the file. Also, with technology such as deduplication, it is more efficient to identify and consolidate duplicate blocks within files than duplicate files. See our deduplication performance blog post for more about this.

In summary, when considering deploying cloud SAN solutions or cloud storage gateway solutions, you’d be wise to consider the solution that has the maximum flexibility to meet all of your application needs, both present and future.

File or block storage? Which works best for you?

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Cloud Storage Performance series: Implications of Deduplication

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

by Greg Roody

Deduplication is an advanced data reduction technique which can have a large impact on the amount of storage space required for data.  In the case of backup, it is especially effective because typically the same data will be repeatedly sent to the backup store.   Almost every backup product on the market today offers deduplication based backup to disk (B2D), and the rest have it on their roadmaps.

Because you can configure these backup-to-disk servers to write to a Cloud Storage appliance like CloudArray (and thus replicate your backup store to Cloud Storage, B2D2C), how you configure your appliance will end up having a large impact on performance due to the unique characteristics of deduplication engines

Read the full story after the fold…. (more…)

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Busy week: 3PAR bids-counterbids, VMworld buzz – Cloud Storage is here to stay

Friday, August 27th, 2010

By Greg Roody.

News wise, this week has been a bloggers paradise.  Not so much for vendor bloggers like me (though I am sneaking this one in – ;) ), but if anyone doubts that Cloud computing and Cloud Storage have arrived, are viable, and will become a real force in the market, they haven’t really been paying attention.

Lets start with  the 3PAR highlights.  Three companies approached 3PAR at more or less the same time and 2 are now in a heated bidding war.  The eventual sale price could far exceed $2B.  And what does 3PAR have that is worth that kind of attention?  They have a highly scalable, easy to manage, highly efficient storage platform that is being snapped up by Cloud Service Providers and which is being well accepted in Enterprise accounts.  Clearly HP and DELL believe that the HW that provides the basis for Cloud Storage environments is critical to their future.  Cloud Storage is indeed very healthy and its future is bright.

On the other front, VMworld kicks off next week and promises to be a vPaloozah.  The hype/buzz has been building for weeks and lots of vendors will be making announcements – almost all of them having something to do with Cloud Computing and Storage.  It should be a fun week to watch and listen.  Unfortunately I have other committments and can’t attend this year (first time in 4 years), but my heart will be there.  It’s one of my favorite shows.

So the net effect of all of this is that we seem to be at that mystical tipping point.  All the concern over whether “Cloud” is real, whether it is mature, and whether it is affordable, will quickly fall away as early adopters lead to innovators and then full deployments.  Then, the hard work begins.  Should be a fun ride.

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Performance Considerations for Cloud Storage appliances

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

by Greg Roody

Everything about  Computing is a trade off.   The old joke is “Speed, Capacity, or Cost”, you can control 2.

Cloud Computing and Storage are no exception.    How you configure your environment can have a direct impact on your performance levels, but it can also have a direct impact on your budget.

More after the fold…. (more…)

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The Economics of Public Cloud Storage: The laws of mathematics still apply

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

By Greg Roody


Once you cut through all the hype surrounding the benefits of Cloud Storage, specifically the economics of Public Cloud Storage, it becomes clear that there are use cases that do shine.

At the heart of the analysis are tried and true factors effecting storage costs like OPEX and CAPEX, deduplication, thin provisioning, compression, utilization, TCO, ROI, Business Opportunity costs (downtime, business recovery, business restart), etc.

Data Storage may be cheap and getting cheaper, but storing less data is always cheaper than storing more, and cutting costs – both operational and capital – is still critical.

(more…)

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VMware Use Cases for Cloud Storage: more than you think…..

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

by Greg Roody

]We get asked how VMware environments can take advantage of Cloud Storage often enough that I thought I’d mention a few options here for use cases that make financial and operational sense.

Backup

I’ve covered using CloudArray with VDR here before, so I won’t dwell on this other than to mention that any backup application that makes use of the new vStorage API’s,  performs deduplication and can write to disk is an excellent choice to reduce backup expenses as well as gain an offsite storage component with Cloud Storage.

Archival

Another interesting use case is archival of older VM’s, Templates, or infrequently used VM’s such as test environments.  In these cases, you can use Storage vMotion to migrate the datastore for these VM’s from your primary SAN to Cloud Storage.  They will still appear as though they are local to your ESX server, but the data will be kept resident in offsite Cloud Storage.  If you need to use them at any time, they can either be used with their datastore on Cloud Storage or they could be migrated back for the time they are needed.  You can also Clone VM’s, or Clone VM’s to a Template with the target being cloud storage volumes.

Migration/Replication

By now you are seeing that Cloud Storage can be an excellent way to store VM’s you don’t need immediate access to, either by using a backup product such as VDR or by simply archiving your VM’s.   But there is another valuable use for Cloud Storage use as well; as a migration “swing” set.  For example, if you have some VM’s that you want to transfer between datacenters, or even between ESX hosts, you can use Cloud Storage as a place to first write the VM files from one host or site, and then read them to another host or site.

Pay as you go, provision it yourself

Remember, Cloud Storage is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.  If you need a few TB of storage to do a migration, you will only pay for the storage you actually use until you destroy it.  Additionally, it is elastic and can be self provisioned.  You don’t have to make a request to a Storage Administrator to provision and assign the storage resources.  A VMware administrator could easily manage this themselves.

Is Cloud Storage ready for VMware?  Absolutely, and so are you.

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