Posts Tagged ‘Cloud storage use cases’

5 Reasons to Back Up Your Data Remotely with CloudArray

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

With a variety of ways to back up your data off-site, ranging from tape transport to online backup software, why back up to cloud storage via CloudArray™? If you consider all options, there a number of good reasons to choose CloudArray for off-site backup and we thought we would share five of them:

5) It works with your existing backup software. You’ve already made the investment in backup software because it meets most of your needs. Why change your backup process, deal with a learning curve and risk losing functionality? Simply point your backup jobs to CloudArray disks, which appear local, and CloudArray takes care of securely moving the data off-site.
4) Network bandwidth is expensive. Even if you have lots of external bandwidth, you don’t want backup to monopolize it. Cloudarray caching minimizes the amount of bandwidth that goes through your external internet connection. The cache can use any type of local storage with cache sizes ranging from a few GB to a full local copy, providing a very fast first line of restore without going to the external network. Compression/deduplication further reduce your bandwidth requirements and some of our upcoming technology that minimizes bandwidth may just knock your socks off.
3) Your data needs security. With CloudArray, data is not only encrypted in-flight via SSL, but it is also encrypted at-rest when it is stored at your provider. That means every bit of data that leaves your premises is encrypted and stays that way until you need it back.
2) Access your data when you need it, where you need it. When we say Compute Anywhere™ access, we mean your data is instantly available on-site, off-site or even in cloud compute, such as Amazon EC2. All you need is an instance of CloudArray software, your configuration credentials and our one-button restore process. Unlike most online backup, your data is not just stored in a one-way vault that requires hours or days to retrieve a single file. Unlike tape, your data is available immediately, not just for disaster recovery, but also for validation, test or development purposes. When was the last time you validated your backups?
1) Cost savings and choice. There are no capital or administrative expenses for the off-site data stored by CloudArray; no dedicated hardware or facilities. CloudArray gives you a choice of cloud storage providers so you always have access to the best pricing on the planet. Want Amazon RRS starting at $0.10 GB/mo? No problem. Want to rotate backups across multiple providers? We can do that, too.

Finally, CloudArray is simple to use. It’s a downloadable virtual appliance you can start using in 30 minutes.

Still need convincing? Try CloudArray free for 30-days. It’s on us, including all the cloud storage you need.

Cloud Storage That Solves Business Problems — Customer Proof Points

Monday, May 24th, 2010

This weekend, I was glancing through a blog by George Crump entitled “When To Use Cloud Storage?” George concludes “Cloud storage providers and ISVs should focus on solving the business problem, not on the value of putting a bunch of data out in the internet.” We couldn’t agree more with that statement.

You may have seen our press announcement today regarding two recent customer wins through our partner Tricore Solutions. Let’s look closely at the customer use cases: Color Kinetics, a division of Phillips, is using CloudArray to improve their Oracle RMAN backup process. Tape costs disappear, backups complete faster and restore speeds improve. Tanya Creations, a large jewelry manufacturer is using CloudArray to enable Microsoft Exchange 2010 off-site replication and recovery, providing enterprise-class availability for their email system; all without the capital and administrative burden of building and managing a secondary site.

The message from these customers goes a lot deeper than removing cloud storage adoption hurdles to create a new tier of data storage. At the end of the day, CloudArray enabled business solutions that improved the operation of each respective enterprise. The cost savings over traditional off-site storage solutions makes the case even stronger.

It’s no secret that IT departments that were once technology-driven have become more and more business-driven. While cloud storage technology may or may not be a business priority today, compelling solutions for protecting and enhancing access to business data certainly are.

More to come…

Cloud storage / CloudArray Customer Use Cases – Significant Cost and Operational Benefits (Video)

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Customers are leading the charge in how CloudArray and Cloud storage are getting deployed and discovering their benefits. We captured two customer use cases in a video (link to video provided below) using CloudArray software together with Cloud storage. There are not may documented Cloud storage use cases on the Web for mid-sized and global companies, so this video and its contents should provide interesting data points for those of you considering to augment your current application infrastructure with Cloud storage. The focus of these customer use cases are more on the impact of applications as opposed to using Cloud storage for file/print or as a specific tier of storage.

The video also gets into the reasons why companies need an IT infrastructure that is dynamic and can respond quickly to changing business needs. The video outlines several categories of business applications that are driving rapid data growth and require a more dynamic storage infrastructure to accommodate this growth.

Topping the charts, we see data protection, DR and collaborative applications impacting storage growth the most. Some analyst firms predict rapid data growth in the coming years and companies need to not only plan for today’s requirements, but the demands of tomorrow.

Many arguments can be made that Cloud storage indeed reduces the amount of on-premise infrastructure needed to accommodate growth for data protection and DR applications. The facts are the facts. Leveraging Cloud storage reduces necessary capital for IT expansion. And it drives efficiency and reduces operational costs.

The video describes an high level overview of CloudArray software. It shows how CloudArray enables businesses to seamlessly integrate in-house applications to Cloud storage without any changes to applications or programming to Cloud storage APIs. A list is provided of the host virtualization platforms it operates on such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. CloudArray supports public cloud providers such as Amazon, AT&T and EMC. The hosts that are supported are Windows, Linux, Mac and HP-UX.

One of the key points of the video is that CloudArray presents iSCSI block storage to applications in the form of data volumes. This means any existing in-house application can seamlessly integrate with Cloud storage. The video describes the policies of CloudArray volumes in that they are user-definable for caching and replication.

Enjoy the video – of course comments welcome.

Video: CloudArray software overview with Use Cases

CloudArray Software Overview Video