Posts Tagged ‘cloud replication’

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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

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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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Data Storage and Protection Strategies for the Cloud Era

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

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

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Of 3PAR, blocks and cloud storage

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

No doubt you may have heard about the bidding war for SAN storage vendor 3PAR between HP and Dell. In case you missed it, a high-end block storage vendor (3PAR) is fetching a spectacular acquisition price that has continued to climb in a bidding frenzy, perhaps culminating this week at an astronomical $2.4B.

While there is certainly more to 3PAR than block storage, all this fuss may lead you to ask what makes block storage so desirable in customer data centers. And in the same vein, does block-access make sense for cloud storage? After all, file storage can run on similarly fast networks and offers native file sharing capability. Who needs blocks, right?

Well, the reality is that thousands of customers are purchasing block storage with good reason. While the argument between block and file can sometimes be as insightful (or uninsightful) as arguing about what type of bag to package your groceries in,  I offer three of the inherent advantages of block storage that make it attractive for a variety of customer environments:

1. The ability to support any file system

Block storage supports any file system: NTFS, ZFS, Ext3, NFS, CIFS. The choice is yours for a filesystem optimized to your applications. If you are considering an on-premise gateway to cloud storage, wouldn’t you prefer to keep using the file systems  you already have? With block storage, you can do just that as no “rip and replace” is required.

2. The ability to provision raw data volumes directly to applications

Many applications such as databases benefit from raw volumes that do not have the overhead of a file system. In fact, without the additional overhead, performance naturally improves. If you are using local copies of data that are replicated to cloud, it makes sense to optimize the performance of local access. If you are using server virtualization, VMware allows raw device mappings (RDM) from SAN attached raw volumes that minimize the I/O stack to maximize performance.

3. Benefits of block level granularity

When you are replicating data, say from a local copy of data to cloud copy, it is not always efficient to copy entire files to the cloud when only a small portion of the file is modified. For larger files especially, it is more efficient to send block level updates where a block represents only a small portion of the file. Also, with technology such as deduplication, it is more efficient to identify and consolidate duplicate blocks within files than duplicate files. See our deduplication performance blog post for more about this.

In summary, when considering deploying cloud SAN solutions or cloud storage gateway solutions, you’d be wise to consider the solution that has the maximum flexibility to meet all of your application needs, both present and future.

File or block storage? Which works best for you?

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