Posts Tagged ‘b2d’

TwinStrata and PEER 1 Team Up to Deliver Enterprise Class Cloud Storage

Monday, January 31st, 2011

 

TwinStrata conintues to broaden its partner ecosystem with leading cloud storage providers. Here is yet another example…

NATICK, Mass. and VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — TwinStrata, Inc., the leading innovator in iSCSI SAN, data protection and disaster recovery solutions using cloud storage, today announced it has achieved Bronze Partner Program status with international hosting provider, PEER 1 Hosting (TSX: PIX), further demonstrating TwinStrata’s continued commitment to supporting the industry’s key cloud storage providers along with their customers.

Read the full press release…

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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!

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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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Data Protection with Cloud Storage: B2D2C is easy and affordable

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

by Greg Roody

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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