Info-Tech Research Group recently published a very thorough 30+ page cloud storage vendor landscape report, the first of its kind that compares cloud storage gateways and appliances head-to-head. The report compares product offerings from a number of vendors including CoreVault, CTERA, Nasuni, Panzura, Storsimple, TwinStrata and Zmanda, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each respective solution. It goes on to choose a set of champions based on specific use cases that include:

• Mounting Storage to Cloud IaaS Servers
• Unstructured Data/NAS Replacement
• Global Distributed Enterprises
• Private Clouds

You can download a FREE copy of the report here.

I should mention that this report was not commissioned or sponsored by TwinStrata and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of all solutions, including ours.

If you are using or considering adding cloud storage to your IT environment, we think you will find this report very illuminating.

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The BNMC Cloud Backup Service using CloudArray greatly enhances your business resiliency by providing seamless “zero-U” iSCSI storage that “stretches” your backup infrastructure or your VMware High Availability into the cloud.  The solution plugs right into your existing VMware environment (as a virtual machine) or can be added as a separate appliance in a physical environment to work alongside  your existing backup infrastructure to protect all assets.

Online Registration for the event:  http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventId=903608

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We regularly see a number of mid-size businesses that store all of their primary data at a single location, with perhaps tape backups or online backups stored off-site for disaster purposes. A looming question for many of these businesses is what happens if a disaster strikes resulting in data loss at a primary location and how quickly can business applications get back up and running. If the answer is days to weeks, as experienced recently by the state of Virginia, the business may suffer significant monetary losses, irrepairable harm or even effectively close.

Disaster planning can often help IT administrators mitigate the risk of long outages by quantifying Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), or how long it takes to get application back up and running before disaster strikes. It also help quantify Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), representing the amount of data loss that can be tolerated often measured in time. Disaster planning can also highlight the perils of typical off-site data protection, such as:

1) the fact that tape backups fail 60% of the time on average, but are rarely checked, resulting in rolling back to much older copies of data than anticipated (or none at all)
2) the fact that there is significant time required to go from a tape to restored data and running applications
3) the fact that it may take days to restore an online backup over the network

So what can be done aside from setting up a standby recovery site with dedicated hardware and infrastructure, often at prohibitive cost?

Moving your backups to the cloud is a good first step. It avoids the issues of tape altogether, making it easier to spot check backups to ensure they are correct and consistent. With products such as CloudArray that offer a virtual appliance that runs in the cloud (that may be used in tandem with your virtual or physical appliance on premise), it means your data can be recovered rapidly from a cloud compute site local to your cloud storage provider. Finally, it opens the possibility of standing up your applications in the cloud as part of a full business continuity solution. Think about an off-site business continuity strategy with on-demand compute and storage resources. The future may be a lot closer than you think…

Stay tuned as we’ll have a lot more to say on this topic in upcoming posts.

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1. Two-Site DR: It’s expensive to have a second site for DR purposes so having your data stored in the cloud can provide smaller and medium sized companies with instant, optimized, and low cost second-site disaster recovery capabilities. And if the solution is flexible enough, then you can also select from alternative DR methods that helps to improve overall DR readiness with a direct disk to cloud architecture.  
2. Security and Compliance: Any business that hands off their data to someone else will want to know how secure their data will be. However, it may not be good enough to just secure data at rest while at the cloud storage provider site.  An optimized solution will also secure the data while in-flight providing an added level of security.
3. Investment protection:  Once on-site backup software is configured and regularly operating, the last thing IT wants is something that will cause a disruption to data protection operations or introduce another layer of complexity in order to extend the backup process off-site. Off-site data protection solutions that can enable transparency through seamless and non-intrusive interoperability with existing backup operations, work with different backup products, and automate off-site data protection and DR operations will be much more attractive to IT organizations already strapped by resource constraints.
4. Choice of cloud storage provider: All cloud storage providers offer something a little different and because they do it may require companies to create special APIs in order to connect to them. This also has a tendency to “lock” you into the storage provider when you may want choice as part of your strategy. The solution that can provide you with a wide array of integration choices relative to server support, virtualization software, back-up tools, and back-end cloud storage providers will prove best for companies reaching to the clouds for affordable, on-demand/pay-as-you-go capacity expansion, and compute anywhere accessibility.

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Come learn how a combined Hosted Solutions Stratus Cloud Storage and TwinStrata CloudArray solution can allow you to easily, reliably, securely, and affordably manage and control your storage “intelligently”, using a combination of on-site and off-site storage. 

Simply click below to register.

http://go.hostedsolutions.com/?elqPURLPage=20

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Data Protection is a natural fit for cloud Storage since it affords you a low cost, offsite, service oriented storage model for a function that is critical to your business.

Data Protection isn’t  a complex operation.   It’s the process of ensuring that applications and servers can be restored in the case of a failure or loss of some kind.  Backup is a good example of a typical DP application, but certainly not the only one.  DP is a lot of things, risk reduction, securing your assets, business continuity and disaster restart.

But at its core, DP is about Continuance, Restart, and Recovery; not backup.

Traditionally, backups are spun to tape, and then shipped to offsite storage for safe keeping.    Tape  is well known and understood, but has a lot of drawbacks.

First, it’s a serial media.  You physically have to advance the tape to a specific location to begin to read off data you are looking for, so restore operations can be slow.  That’s assuming the tape is even readable (studies have claimed up to a 40% read error rate)); if either the index or data segment you are looking for is corrupt, you won’t be able to restore the data.

And of course, someone has to find the correct tape at the offsite storage location (remember the Iron Mountain tape losses?) and then ship them back to you.  All of this elongates the recovery process and  increases risk and expense.

A better way – B2D

In more advanced environments, customers will use a backup to disk (B2D) or B2D2T process in place of traditional tape backups.  This has several advantages, first, since the data you want to recover is online, it is extremely easy to find and restore just the data you are looking for.  Secondly, it is far more reliable than tape.   A 1 in 3 or even 1 in 10 chance of not being able to restore the data you need from tape is not a very good metric.

But B2D alone also has disadvantages.  First, it’s a local solution only.  Unless you replicate that disk (very expensive since you need infrastructure in two data centers), you have no offsite copy of your data.  B2D2T is an alternative here, you gain the benefits of short term storage on disk and long term archival offsite, but you are still burdened with the expenses and unreliability associated with tape.

B2D is Good, B2D2C is better

If you could extend your B2D solution to offer low cost, secure, and reliable, offsite storage at the same time, that would be the best of both worlds.  And in fact, B2D combined with CloudArray from TwinStrata enables you to do just that.

With fully cached volumes, you not only have a local copy of your disk based backups, but you gain an automatic offsite copy at your Cloud Storage Provider (public or private).   Of course it’s secure as well.

Even Better, you already have the Backup Software

Chances are, whatever backup product you are currently using to write to tape can be used to write to CloudArray storage volumes (and ultimately to the Cloud).  Almost every major backup application vendor now supports a B2D option in their software, and most will run concurrently with local tape operations.  You may have to upgrade to a later version of their product, but you won’t have to rip and replace your current backup solution.

Adding the Cloud component is easy

To configure the two to work together, all you would need to do is create a local CloudArray volume and mount it to your backup server.  The backup application can then be configured to write to this volume just like it would any local volume, and CloudArray will then copy that data safely to your Cloud Storage Provider.

If a restore becomes necessary, it would be serviced directly from the local cache, and you wouldn’t need to go out to the cloud at all.  Since CloudArray cache is persistent and can be dedicated to specific volumes, there is no risk that your backup data would be flushed out by another more active volume.

In the event of a local site disruption, the Cloud resident backups could be restored to any location of your choice, even a Cloud  Computing environment such as Amazon EC2.

Data Protection is about Recovery.  Reducing risk, and decreasing costs.  It isn’t about doing unnatural acts with Robocopy because that is the only tool that will work with your gateway software.

CloudArray can be used today with leading backup application products such as Net Backup, Backup Exec, Veeam, Visioncore, and a host of others.  Visit www.TwinStrata.com for a free trial.

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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.

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Why is this interesting to CloudArray customers? Because many CloudArray solutions involve secondary tiers of storage in the cloud with full copies of primary data on-premise. In these cases, RRS is a great cost-saving tradeoff for the secondary storage tier in the cloud with very little impact on overall data availability thanks to the full on-premise copy.

It is important to use this new tier of storage wisely. For those solutions using primary tiers of storage in the cloud without full onsite copies, it may make sense to stick with the standard S3 service.

Because CloudArray makes storage providers and policies flexible and transparent, our customers now have the benefit of a more cost-effective tier of storage for backup, data replication and business continuity solutions to Amazon.

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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…

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One of the challenges we are focused on is to protect Oracle databases using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Cloud storage. The challenge faced by most enterprise customers is to reduce cost and drive efficiency to protect Oracle databases and improve restore process. Companies using tape and off-site vaulting services to store Oracle database backup data are shouldering a mountain of costs that will continue to increase linearly with database growth. Costs for such items as media (tape), tape transportation, and vaulting fees to house data offsite. And the process for restoring data is difficult and time consuming taking anywhere from hours to a week to retrieve data. In today’s business environment, expectations for information retrieval should be near real-time if not “real time”.

The solution we provide is an on-demand, expandable, low cost storage tier integrated seamlessly with Oracle RMAN. This solution is made up of CloudArray software together with public Cloud storage and services performed by TriCore solutions. The CloudArray solution enables users to provision volumes on-demand having policies to store backup data locally (cache) having a replica in the Cloud. CloudArray also encrypts and compresses data prior to delivering it to Cloud storage thereby providing security and performance.

We provide an overview of the solution in the following presentation:

Benefits:
The solution lessens the need to store backup data to tape and eliminates the cost involved in managing tape off-site by third party tape vaulting companies. Depending upon retention policies and the amount of data stored off-site, the cost of physical media is the largest cost component of the backup process. Data vaulting services may run as much as 15% of the media costs. For example, a company spending $40,000 per year on LTO could expect to spend as much as $6,000 per year to store the data off-site. CloudArray software and public Cloud storage combined is approx 1/20th of the cost resulting in a significant savings to the customer with near immediate ROI.

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