Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

TwinStrata’s CEO is Tapped by ESJ for 2011 Cloud Predictions

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

The Year Ahead in Cloud Computing

The pressure to create a cloud presence will only become stronger in 2011. What IT needs to know to be prepared for Cloud Storage is outlined in an Enterprise Systems Journal (ESJ) article authored by TwinStrata’s CEO and Co-Founder, Nicos Vekiarides.

ESJ approached Nicos for this article because they wanted an inside perspective of the emerging cloud storage market. TwinStrata is a leader in cloud storage enablement solutions to provide companies of any size with iSCSI SAN solutions for offsite data protection, archive, and disaster recovery.

Please take a moment and read the ESJ article: The Year Ahead in Cloud Computing

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

TwinStrata 2011 New Year Resolutions and Customer Commitments

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

 

We hope your holiday was all you wished it would be and that this blog posting finds you well rested, rejuvenated, and still enjoying the cheer and joy of the season. And as you prepare for what’s certain to be a very busy and exciting 2011 in IT, we’d like to unveil a few of TwinStrata’s New Year Resolutions or should we say TwinStrata’s Year-After-Year Resolution Extensions:

1.     We won’t rest on our past laurels

Our 2010 success is in the rear view mirror and although a great foundation to build upon going forward, our future success cannot be attained or exceeded without putting forth the same concerted focus on hard work, dedication, and commitment to your growing business needs. We value your trust and will strive to be your solution in 2011 for offsite data protection and disaster recovery.

2.     We will continue to deliver quality solutions to solve real business problems in offsite data protection/DR

IT challenges are very real – especially for small and medium size businesses – who consider economic uncertainty, keeping pace with technology and access to adequate capital at the top of the list.  Therefore, solutions ought not be complicated to deploy, difficult to use, intrusive to the business, and create vendor lock-in or dependencies. TwinStrata CloudArray, more than any of our competitors, truly “gets” the cloud. It’s not just cheap, offsite storage to us but an convergent ecosystem of fast networks, virtualization, automation and policies, diverse file and operating system environments, and a distributed enterprise infrastructure. CloudArray was designed to seamlessly enable and extend this end-to-end ecosystem to the cloud.

3.     We will continue to listen and stay apprised of our customers’ cloud storage enablement needs

Customer satisfaction is derived from many standpoints – service, support, quality, product capabilities, and reliability to name a few. TwinStrata’s success is a result of listening to our customer’s needs, demonstrating our business and technological agility to meet their needs, and being able to build their growth requirements into our short, medium, and long-term strategies. TwinStrata will always endeavor to work with customers this way to become a trusted advisor and partner enabling them to seamlessly include cloud storage in their plans.

4.      We will continue to stay true to our core CloudArray solution values and avoid “miracle” solutions

Technology usually flops when it claims to be more than it can be/do or even should be. TwinStrata’s value proposition is to provide businesses with innovative, best-in-class iSCSI storage solutions for enterprise-class offsite data protection and disaster recovery. TwinStrata’s core value is to enable businesses of all sizes to adopt cloud storage easily, securely, and economically without business interruption or change. These core values will only continue to advance in 2011.

5.     We will continue to ensure our solution claims match our substantiations

TwinStrata is confident in its CloudArray solution to enable offsite data protection and disaster recovery. Our confidence and our claims really stem from our customers including these proven testimonial areas: 1) Overall peace of mind CloudArray brings to them as a result of the product quality and reliability, 2) Ease and simplicity of deployment and usability, 3) Seamless and secure integration with cloud storage providers, 4) Investment protection from not having to change applications or policies, 5) Immediacy of business and operational results, and 6) Quantifiable savings – time, capex/opex, and resources – delivered by CloudArray.

6.     We will continue to strive to support our customers’ cloud storage goals – tactical and strategic alike

We believe that cloud storage will have a breakout year in 2011. And TwinStrata CloudArray will be leading the way with innovative ways to help businesses plan and justify tactical uses of the cloud for offsite data protection, DR, and other storage initiatives. Additionally, TwinStrata will continue in 2011 to advance how CloudArray can help companies’ today build and implement business continuity strategies that were once financially unattainable to small and medium size business.  

TwinStrata understands that our customers are a vital part of our growth and success. We value your trust in our company, and are committed to working harder to bring you the levels of innovation, quality, reliability, and support you’ve come to expect from TwinStrata to meet your business expectations in 2011.

Thank you and Happy New Year!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

BNMC Relies on TwinStrata CloudArray and Best Practices to Avoid Disastrous Data Loss

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

 

Customer Success: Critical Business Data Saved

BNMC; a Mass. based strategic information technology (IT) network services company, selected TwinStrata CloudArray® to provide backup services for their clients. A virtual appliance that runs on VMware, CloudArray can be deployed for backup, archive, or disaster recovery/business continuity requirements. Key to effective and rapid data recovery in the event of a site disaster is CloudArray‟s metadata so protecting this critical information is top of mind for system administrators. Eryck Bredy, BNMC President & CTO, has always been an advocate of following best practices and one day, he averted a disaster as a result. You see, Eryck accidentally deleted the CloudArray VM he was working on, rendering it terminal. This VM had 1TB of customer data on it. But Eryck wasn‟t worried. He knew that he could easily recover the data with CloudArray since he did, in fact, follow best practices, and had backed up the CloudArray configuration data. And because there was a full copy of the data in the cloud, he knew CloudArray was imminently recoverable in and of itself. After accidentally deleting the CloudArray VM (CAVM1), Eryck simply imported a new CloudArray VM (CAVM2), reset t he cache, and restored the backup of CAVM1 to CAVM2. That was it. When CAVM2 was powered on, it replayed the metadata and back-filled its cache with the data from the cloud on an as needed basis. Because of the rapid and seamless recovery capabilities of CloudArray, BNMC business interruption was avoided. And since all user data was in the cloud, CAVM2 simply re-enabled access to it without incident.

“Bottom line – unfortunate incidents are going to happen. The important thing is to be ready when they do. Using TwinStrata CloudArray helped us mitigate the effects of losing critical data and enabled us to protect the trust our customers have in BNMC.” – Eryck Bredy, BNMC President & CTO

As widespread adoption of cloud services increases, it‟s comforting to BNMC to know that solutions like CloudArray are in place to help. For Eryck, the combination of CloudArray and BNMC best practices helped avoid a potentially disastrous situation for their clients, the loss of their critical business data.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

TwinStrata Delivers Newest Version of its Leading CloudArray® Offsite Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Solution

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

 

CloudArray® Version 2.0 is available in both virtual and physical appliance configurations.

The new CloudArray Version 2.0 includes a broad range of updates designed to further enhance the overall operation, reliability, and performance of CloudArray’s robust and proven feature set for offsite data protection, archive, and disaster recovery. Additionally, CloudArray 2.0 expands its reach to include direct integration with Mezeo, Peer1, and Scalitycloud storage platforms, offering customers more choice and flexibility when implementing a cloud storage strategy. Other CloudArray 2.0 enhancements include support for HA clustering, Solaris interoperability, alert and portal improvements and performance improvements to the virtual appliance.

CloudArray V2.0 is available today from TwinStrata and through its network of partners. For more information, visit www.twinstrata.com/cloudarray, email sales@twinstrata.com or call 508-651-0199.  

You can also try CloudArray FREE for 30 days: www.twinstrata.com/cloudarray_evaluation

TwinStrataCloudArray is a proven solution that can significantly reduce capex/opex by enabling companies of all sizes to easily adopt offsite data protection and disaster recovery solutions in minutes without any changes to existing applications or need for new programming or APIs in order to connect with cloud storage providers. TwinStrata provides enterprise-class data protection solutions that are simple, affordable, and secure. These solutions leverage the scalability and efficiency of cloud storage while maintaining the availability, performance, and security of local storage. CloudArray software provides a substantial advantage over traditional off-site storage solutions, with a pay-as-you-go model, unlimited elastic capacity, local performance, in-cloud snapshots, AES256 bit encryption, and on-site, off-site or in-the-cloud access to data.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Introducing CloudArray® 2.0

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

We are pleased to announce availability of CloudArray 2.0, which adds a significant improvements and enhancements to our class leading cloud storage virtual and physical appliances. Read more about our latest release below:

TwinStrata, Inc., the leading innovator in iSCSI access to cloud storage for enterprise-class offsite data protection, file/archive storage, and disaster recovery solutions introduces CloudArray® Version 2.0 software. CloudArray is available in both virtual and physical appliance configurations.

TwinStrata CloudArray is a proven solution that can significantly reduce capex/opex by enabling companies of all sizes to easily adopt offsite data protection and disaster recovery solutions in minutes without any changes to existing applications or need for new programming or APIs in order to connect with cloud storage providers. TwinStrata provides enterprise-class data protection solutions that are simple, affordable, and secure. These solutions leverage the scalability and efficiency of cloud storage while maintaining the availability, performance, and security of local storage. CloudArray software provides a substantial advantage over traditional off-site storage solutions, with a pay-as-you-go model, unlimited elastic capacity, local performance, in-cloud snapshots, AES256 bit encryption, and on-site, off-site or in-the-cloud access to data.

The new CloudArray Version 2.0 includes a broad range of updates designed to further enhance the overall operation, reliability, and performance of CloudArray’s robust and proven feature set. Additionally, CloudArray 2.0 expands its reach to include direct integration with Mezeo, Peer1, and Scality cloud storage platforms, offering customers more choice and flexibility when implementing a cloud storage strategy. Other CloudArray 2.0 enhancements include support for HA clustering, Solaris interoperability, alert and portal improvements and performance improvements to the virtual appliance.

TwinStrata’s CloudArray features and benefits include:

Zero Time Restore “Like-local performance” for fast and reliable instant access to data, eliminating long RTO’s
Instant Disaster Recovery Multi-site disaster protection with innovative asynchronous replication using one or  more cloud storage providers simultaneously
Policy-Driven Dynamic Cache Flexibly assign cache resources across different applications without creating cache contention
Flexible Cache Configuration Easily create replicated data copies or shared cache configurations to meet various data access objectives across applications (RTO/RPO)
Thin Provision / On-Demand Capacity Configuration Easily provision capacity as needed using a pay-as-you-go model with no business disruption
Cloud Storage Interoperability Integrated cloud storage support allowing choice of one or many simultaneous cloud providers without the need for API programming
iSCSI Access Plug and play iSCSI access to cloud storage for offsite data protection, file/archive, disaster recovery, and storage expansion that operates across any file system or operating systems
Snapshots in the Cloud Built–in snapshot capability allowing zero-footprint volume snapshots taken inthe cloud, with zero bandwidth penalty and minimal capacity increase
Encryption and Compression Experience the highest levels of security with over–the–wire encrypted transmission and AES encryption for data at rest. Data may also be compressed in real–time to maximize network performance to and from the cloud storage provider
Portal Alerts and Reporting Manage one or many instances of CloudArray from the CloudArray Portal with reports and configurable email-based alerting



CloudArray V2.0 is available today from TwinStrata and through its network of partners. For more information, visit www.twinstrata.com/cloudarray, email sales@twinstrata.com or call 508-651-0199

You can also try CloudArray FREE for 30 days: www.twinstrata.com/cloudarray_evaluation

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

I Have NOT Lost My Mind — I Have It Backed Up On Tape Somewhere

Monday, December 6th, 2010

 

The question is: If you can eliminate tape, then can you even eliminate backup? In a recent article, George Crump (http://www.networkcomputing.com/deduplication/you-can-eliminate-backups.php) discussed the implications of eliminating backup altogether.  His argument is that with the capabilities of modern storage systems – snapshots, deduplication, compression and replication– you can preserve multiple restore points without the need for a separate backup operation. 

He specifically argues: “Using a combination of snapshots, deduplication, compression and replication is a cost-effective way of storing redundant copies. Many primary storage systems support a high number of snapshots and/or unlimited copies of data by leveraging deduplication. Most can then have that data replicated to a remote site so you are covered for a single site disaster. With these features deployed, we now have point-in-time local recovery and total system recovery in case of a disaster covered, but there are some potential drawbacks.”

Using Cloud Storage as the remote replication target in this case will work very well, and will be more cost effective than using your expensive primary storage devices for backup.  

With CloudArray, you can create instantaneous snapshots of your data, allowing you to establish multiple remote restore points from a single copy of your data.   This doesn’t have to be your primary data store. Cloud Storage can actually become an economical cog in your tiered storage strategy.

But getting back to George’s article, he discusses several drawbacks with using primary storage as your source for your restore points.  Basically, they come down to the risk, however small, of not having a separate copy of your data (both physically and logically).  Even in cases where you are replicating your data to a remote facility, a logical corruption fault could affect both sites, especially if the fault were with the logic of the de-duplication engine itself.

Some companies have eliminated separate backups very successfully, but it takes a great deal of planning in order to make sure that the restore points will be consistent across applications and data stores. It wouldn’t help you to have your accounts payable tables backed up at one point in time and your inventory shipments at a different point. 

But is it right for you? 

Maybe, but a safer approach is to still use backup software and write your backup to a physically separate data store than your primary storage.  CloudArray can do this for you as well.  If you use a backup product that can write to disk (D2D), then you can write to CloudArray and a copy of the backup images will be kept locally as well as in the Cloud.  Restores will always come from the local CloudArray disk cache if you size it properly, and in the event of a total site disruption, a copy of your data will still be housed safely offsite and can be recovered from any site you choose.

Eliminating tape is a good first step. Eliminating backup entirely might be an option for you down the road (or not). Remember the cardinal rule: “To go forward, you must backup.” So you probably shouldn’t be in a rush to eliminate it. But if you have lost your mind because you’ve backed it up on tape somewhere, then without CloudArray, you may never get it back!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Nicos Vekiarides, TwinStrata’s CEO, to Speak at Server Design Summit: Santa Clara Convention Center 12.1.2010

Monday, November 29th, 2010

 

Nicos’ presentation will cover the topic of using a disk to cloud infrastructure to attain cost-efficient strategies for VMware data recovery. Here is a little about the presentation

Backing up data is an all too common headache for VMware administrators. With numerous Virtual Machines (VMs) to back up on a vSphere server, valuable system resources get consumed when pushing multiple backups to a traditional backup server.  VMware consolidated backup (VCB) is one way to consolidate and simplify the backup process, but it requires a substantial investment in backup application software that is compatible, and a tape or local backup-to-disk (B2) solution to manage.

With vSphere, there are alternative backup solutions that use the new vStorage APIs that provide some relief to these problems. These applications are customized for VMware environments and make special use of vSphere functionality to minimize the impact on running VM’s. Additionally, many can use changed track updates with a native deduplication capability to optimize backup performance while minimizing capacity requirements.

These backup applications can be enhanced further to enable backup to a local volume that is ultimately stored on a Cloud Storage infrastructure. Usually, that infrastructure is at a remote facility or service provider, providing a critical element of data protection. This hybrid solution is termed “Backup-to-Disk-to-Cloud” (B2D2C) and seamlessly enables off-site pro-tection for VMware backups. Additionally, by adding cloud storage to a virtual server configuration, businesses can eliminate that upfront investment while securing data and making it available for recovery any time and from virtually anywhere.

Nicos’  talk will outline the investment requirements for traditional disk-based backup solutions vs. hybrid approaches. Strategies for how to easily and affordably add cloud storage to a virtual server configuration will also be provided.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »