TwinStrata Blog » business applications

Higher Education Lunch Session: Learn How To Capitalize on Cloud Storage Today

admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:18:25 +0000

Is Data Growth Getting You Down? Then Look Up To the Cloud!

Thursday, February 10, 2001
TwinStrata Offices
24 Prime Parkway, Suite 301A
Natick, MA 01760
9:30 AM to 1:00 PM

TwinStrata Can Help Colleges & Universities Capitalize on Cloud Storage…Simply, Securely, and Affordably

Are you looking for ways to battle shrinking budgets yet still address the need for ever-increasing storage capacity, efficient off-site data protection and affordable disaster recovery across your campuses?

Using TwinStrata CloudArray®, an affordable iSCSI data protection and disaster recovery cloud storage solution, can bring relief. It’s non-intrusive and non-disruptive, requiring no “rip and replace” of any existing application or infrastructure.

Attend our Higher Education Lunch session on Thursday, February 10, 2011 and learn how TwinStrata can help you:

Turn capex into opex
Balance your capacity demand and cost
Seamlessly scale IT using cloud storage
Reduce IT complexity and increase IT efficiency

The program will include:

Lunch
A $25 VISA Gift card for attending
An opportunity to meet our Development and Management Teams
Participation in a CloudArray workshop
A grand prize drawing (must be in attendance to win)

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

admin — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 21:14:42 +0000

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…

Cloud Storage Effect on Storage Management: Reduced Complexity, Maximized Resources, Improved Efficiency

admin — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:03:00 +0000

IT administrators continue to face the age-old challenges of storage management complexity and cost while the burden of managing exponential data growth has businesses of all sizes considering the best ways to store, protect, and archive their files, Exchange, and SharePoint data. The need to maximize resources and infrastructure, optimize storage requirements, and improve efficiencies remain top drivers for most of these businesses today.

With all of these factors to consider, one of the most difficult skill sets for IT to find and retain are expert level administrators for specific storage management disciplines including storage administrators.

When you deploy an Enterprise or Mid-Range storage array, you generally need a team of people who are specialized in configuring, provisioning, and managing those storage arrays (let alone the compliance, disaster recovery, and other more advanced storage specializations). Decisions made daily include RAID configuration, performance tuning, device management, storage pool provisioning, management of remote replication, management of consistency groups, and management of capacity and storage tiering. These are highly specialized and vendor specific skills. They will extend out to your application servers with CLI and API command sets which must be used to perform even simple client side tasks.

Most, if not all of these technology skill demands will disappear once you deploy Cloud Storage. Of course, if you deploy a Private Cloud, you will merely be moving the skill pools to a different area, but they will still largely vanish from your day-to-day data center operations. With Public Clouds, they will go away almost immediately and entirely.

As Cloud Storage gets provisioned through CloudArray, your administrators will largely be working at the level of an average system administrator skill set when it comes to provisioning and managing storage. Configuration requirements will be reduced to basic volume count, volume size, encryption requirements, and page size requirements. None of this requires advanced degrees, decades of storage management experience, or high level vendor certifications.

By deploying a Cloud Storage model – especially for routine use cases such as online backup, archive, and disaster recovery operations – you can begin to free up highly skilled administrators and other IT specialists to redeploy and focus on other critical areas of your IT operations. Cloud Storage doesn’t necessarily mean direct reductions in headcount. Efficiency is in part about resource re-deployment without having to incur additional costs for people or infrastructure. Conversely, Cloud Storage might even allow growth in areas you otherwise couldn’t hire into before.

Essentially, as more leading-edge technologies begin to creep into IT shops and data centers, Cloud Storage is a direct and immediate way to reduce management complexity and costs affording IT the chance to spend more time on business applications, business continuity, and strategic IT planning and projects.

The best way to see this is to download and try it for yourself. Visit www.TwinStrata.com for more information.

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

admin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 03:54:38 +0000

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

TwinStrata 2011 New Year Resolutions and Customer Commitments

admin — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:19:12 +0000

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!

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

admin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:34:23 +0000

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.

Data Storage and Protection Strategies for the Cloud Era

admin — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:10:53 +0000

For SMBs considering traditional data backup and storage and/or for those struggling with an off-site solution, it may be time to consider the cloud as an alternative data protection solution.

Enterprise Systems Journal article by Nicos Vekiarides

Data protection and storage are substantial budgetary expenses for today’s small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs). With storage capacities increasing every year, businesses must look at leaner alternatives, especially in the face of shrinking IT budgets. For years, larger businesses have relied on remote data centers to protect and store their data, but the administrative effort, reliability concerns, and expense associated with traditional backup methods such as tape or off-site disk make this approach an unrealistic option for smaller organizations.

… to read Nicos’s full ESJ article: http://esj.com/articles/2010/11/16/Storage-and-Protection-Strategies.aspx

Business Continuity Using the Cloud

Nicos Vekiarides — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:00:39 +0000

I ran across an interesting, albeit brief article that discusses a recent IDC report on business continuity in the cloud. While words such as “nascent” and “untapped” appear in the article to describe business continuity in the cloud, we at TwinStrata have been busily making this a reality.

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.

Hosted Solutions Announces Stratus Cloud Storage & CloudArray

Nicos Vekiarides — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:22:00 +0000

Yesterday, Hosted Solutions formally announced its Stratus Cloud Storage offering as well as integration with TwinStrata CloudArray to facilitate access to cloud storage without programming. With SAS-70 Type II data centers in North Carolina and Boston and ability to replicate between the data centers, the combined solution is a great fit for applications/organizations that need to specify location of data to meet performance objectives, availability objectives and regulatory compliance. TwinStrata’s solutions portfolio enables companies to solve a variety of business problems with Hosted Solutions, including:

Off-site backup using existing backup software
Growing archival data that requires online access
Real-time data replication for disaster recovery

Of course, we like nothing more that to hear customers themselves describe the value of our combined solution. As stated by Robb Bryn, vice president of operations at Cape Fear WebMasters, Inc: “We have tested CloudArray and Stratus Cloud Storage with Solution Specialists at Hosted Solutions with impressive results. This solution gives us the ability to store our backup data in the cloud without increasing our backup window, control our costs, and scale our system. With this solution, we are able to greatly reduce our local storage requirements.”

Learn more about Hosted Solutions Stratus Cloud Storage here.

Cloud Storage That Solves Business Problems — Customer Proof Points

Nicos Vekiarides — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:13:54 +0000

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…