Posts Tagged ‘disaster recovery’

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Cloud Storage Accelerates into 2012 IT Priorities

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Every year, our friends at ESG post results of their annual Spending Intentions Survey, indicating where many businesses are likely to spend their IT dollars over the coming year. Recently Steve Duplessie posted an article on his blog entitled Cloud – The Cost Containment Strategy that concludes cloud has finally “crossed the chasm” in IT. According to preliminary data, cloud represents the largest % projected spending increase for 2012 IT initiatives– a very exciting turn.

Truth is, cloud storage addresses long-standing IT priorities, with three of these priorities topping the list nearly every year:

  • Improving backup and recovery: Tapes and offsite backup continue to be a struggle and do not offer the reliability or recovery times that many businesses demand. Moving off-site backups to the cloud improves the recoverability of backups without tape or dedicated infrastructure. Moreover, it offers the choice of leveraging existing backup software or modernizing backup software and processes.
  • Managing data growth effectively: As capacity grows, storage array life cycles mandate adding, replacing and decommissioning storage arrays whenever they run out of capacity, all involving considerable capital expense and internal administration. Cloud storage can instead provide an unlimited pool of storage that is on-demand and pay-as-you-go. For the financially minded, this enables replacing capital and administrative expense with pure operating expense (opex) and near-zero administration.
  • Improving business continuity and disaster recovery: For many businesses, it has become standard practice to duplicate on-site storage equipment expenses to build out a disaster recovery facility. For others, it may mean skimping on disaster recovery because of the high costs. Cloud storage enables turning disaster recovery expenses into opex while maintaining recovery time objectives that rival dedicated solutions.

So what is the challenge for cloud becoming an initiative for businesses? Let’s think of the early days of server virtualization. Priorities such as server consolidation and reducing server hardware footprint existed well before server virtualization. However, it took some time before virtualization gained mainstream acceptance. Indeed we may be in the midst of the same type of transition, with cloud storage moving from an adopter solution to a mainstream initiative.

What’s even more exciting about cloud storage is that it’s extremely simple for businesses to get started. Whereas traditional storage infrastructure requires a forklift to deliver and install, a software download of CloudArray and 10-15 minutes of configuration nets you Terabytes or Petabytes of secure storage capacity that’s ready to use. If you haven’t tried cloud storage, consider adding it to your 2012 initiatives.

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5 Cloudy Resolutions for Your Data Storage

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

With 2012 already upon us, the time has come to make resolutions for the New Year. In the world of IT, this means resolving to abandon bad habits, unreliable processes and cumbersome tasks that often get in the way of business priorities. With the emergence of cloud storage as a viable means to address growing data storage needs, IT administrators can abandon storage headaches of years past in favor of better, faster and easier processes for managing data.

Cloud storage, in combination with enterprise-class gateways like CloudArray, offers security, availability, and performance that rivals local storage with no fear of vendor lock-in. Moreover, it makes it possible to fulfill New Year’s IT resolutions that were once considered unattainable. With this in mind, here are 5 resolutions that you can live up to by augmenting existing storage infrastructure with the cloud.

  1. Never run out of storage capacity again: Cloud storage provides unlimited, elastic capacity that grows or shrinks with your business needs on a pay-as-you go basis. Not only do you never run out of storage capacity, but more importantly, you can avoid the never-ending cycle of replacing storage arrays that includes complex migrations, costly capital and maintenance expenditures. Even better, on-premise hardware footprint never needs to increase.
  2. Kiss tape backup goodbye: While tape may always have a use for long term archives, many businesses can do away with regular daily tape backups by storing backups in the cloud. With cloud storage you can continue using existing backup software and policies without the hassle, unreliability and manual labor of tape.
  3. Stop purchasing dedicated hardware for disaster recovery: Nothing depletes an IT budget faster than buying data storage systems in pairs in order to have a second system ready for disaster recovery. Typically, dedicated secondary storage systems are only active during disaster test or disaster recovery. The advantage of cloud is that storage and compute infrastructure is available when you need it on a pay-as-you go basis at a fraction of the cost.
  4. Centralize storage management across sites: It’s not easy managing storage in a decentralized environment where every site is a silo with a private storage footprint as there is no easy way to reallocate capacity across sites or cobble a unified disaster recovery strategy. Cloud storage using enterprise-class gateways centralizes storage management across remote offices, offering unlimited, elastic capacity that never requires upgrades/replacements along with built-in centralized disaster recovery to the cloud. Managing multiple sites from a central location is now a reality.
  5. Retain access to a broad ecosystem of solutions: Everyone wants an open ecosystem of solutions including cloud providers and solution providers. Whether you are looking for a private cloud solution, a public cloud solution, or a combination of both, an enterprise-class storage gateway offers you options and provides you the opportunity to choose best-of-breed solutions that meet your needs. Alternatively, if you are looking to leverage your existing storage infrastructure as a starting point, enterprise-class storage gateways can help you enjoy the attributes of cloud storage.

You should look closely at the recent advances in cloud storage and enterprise-class gateway technology.  2012 may just be the year to see your “cloudy” resolutions to fruition.

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10 Hot Trends in Cloud Data for 2012

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

As 2011 rolls to a close, it’s time to make a few predictions for 2012 in the cloud data space. 2011 was a year of adoption, during which many companies started to leverage the cloud, enjoying the economies of scale, security and ease in managing their growing data needs. Those successes promise even greater cloud adoption in 2012. With that in mind, here are 10  predictions for hot trends to watch for in the cloud data space:

  1. Hybrid data storage environments combining cloud storage with existing storage. For most companies, the notion of moving all of their data to the cloud is not fathomable. However, continuously expanding data storage needs are fueling a need for more capacity. What better way to address this need than with cloud storage? The benefits include access to a secure, limitless pool of storage capacity, no future need for upgrade or replacement and reduced capital expenses. Look for auto-tiering technologies to seamlessly combine hybrid cloud and on-premise environments in a way that operates with existing applications.
  2. Private cloud environments in enterprise companies. Enterprises looking to leverage the economies, efficiencies and scale of cloud providers are adopting cloud models in-house, such as OpenStack, for both compute and storage environments. These private clouds offer scale, agility and price/performance typically unmatched by traditional infrastructure solutions and can reside inside a company’s firewall. In the storage space, look for technologies that can combine existing SAN infrastructure and private cloud storage into a unified Cloud SAN.
  3. Disaster recovery to the cloud as a viable option. Traditionally, companies that need disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) have relied on dedicated replicated infrastructure at an offsite location to be able to recover from physical disaster. This means paying for idle hardware that’s waiting for a disaster. DR in the cloud, on the other hand, means not having to pay for this infrastructure except when it is needed. The tradeoff? While not necessarily a zero-downtime solution, look for cloud DR with recovery time objectives (RTOs) in a matter of hours.
  4. Disaster recovery from the cloud as a new need. What happens to business data stored by SaaS application in the case of a disaster? The truth is most SaaS providers do have a DR strategy, but many businesses will demand a recovery strategy under their control. Look for emergence of solutions that backup SaaS data either locally or to an alternate provider as an extra level of protection.
  5. Simplified onboarding of applications to the cloud. Certain business applications can move entirely to the cloud, thereby saving the administrative and maintenance headaches of their hardware/software platforms onsite. Many IT-strapped businesses can benefit from tools to make this migration viable. Look for robust tool sets that can migrate applications to a choice of cloud providers – and also bring those applications back on-premise should the need arise.
  6. Non-relational databases for big data. NoSQL databases, like Apache CouchDB, enable tremendous scalability in order to meet the needs of Terabytes and Petabytes of data accessed by millions of users. Big data will force many companies to consider these alternatives to traditional databases and cloud deployment models will simplify the roll-out. Look for vendors providing supported NoSQL solutions.
  7. Use of the cloud for analytics. Analytics tend to require a scalable compute and storage environment as well as rather expensive software. Similar to idle hardware for disaster recovery purposes, analytics for many businesses may represent a seasonal need that only runs in short bursts and may not justify purchasing a dedicated software/hardware environment. Analytic environments in the cloud can turn the expense into a “pay-per-use” bill, meeting business goals at a far lower price point.
  8. SSD tiers of storage in the cloud. Moving higher performance applications into the cloud doesn’t always guarantee that they will get the level of performance they need from their data storage. By offering high-performance tiers of storage that are SSD-based (i.e. flash), cloud providers will be able to address the needs for predictable and faster application response times.
  9. Improvements in data reduction technology. With cloud storage commanding a per GB operating expense, deduplication and compression technologies have become rather ubiqitous in minimizing costs. While some may argue the capacity optimization game has played out, there is still the challenge of capacity optimization on a more global scale across multiple tenants and a challenge for rich media content which does not fare particularly well with today’s reduction technologies. Look for the introduction of new data reduction technologies that address both needs.
  10. “Cloud-envy” from cloud laggards. While many companies have already adopted the cloud and many more will adopt in 2012, others may still wait and ponder well past 2012. Regardless of which category a company falls into, the economics and efficiencies of the cloud have become irrefutable. As a result, some of the laggards will likely seek ways to leverage cloud methodologies that improve IT efficiency on-premise. Undoubtedly, some will fall prey to cloudwashing by purchasing traditional IT infrastructure named “cloud” in an attempt to satisfy their “cloud-envy.”

Bottom line? Cloud deployments are becoming simpler and more secure and the economics continue to improve. Which of these trends will your business follow in 2012?

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The Remote Office Data Storage Quandary: Is Cloud the Answer?

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

If you ask IT administrators about their goals for storage infrastructure at remote and/or branch office (ROBO) locations, you’ll likely hear that they want to improve application performance and, at the same time, minimize the footprint of remote office storage infrastructure.  However, maximizing performance and minimizing footprint are competing priorities and optimizing both can be a challenge.

Having a goal to remove or minimize remote office storage infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Given most remote locations no longer have dedicated IT staffing onsite, an increased and significant burden can be avoided for the administrators working at main locations.

Improving overall application performance at remote offices also makes a lot of sense to maximize productivity of remote workers. The good news?  There currently exists in the marketplace a category of devices that provides local speed data storage access with a very small footprint: cloud storage gateways. Even better, CloudArray, an enterprise storage gateway from TwinStrata, enables local speed iSCSI access to a broad choice of public cloud storage providers, private cloud storage providers and/or existing storage, representing one of the the industry’s most flexible storage solutions.

A recent 2011 ESG survey of remote office and branch office environments revealed that a third of remote offices with over 25 employees had an average of 25TB of data at each remote office, a considerable amount of storage to maintain and manage. Taking a closer look, the following pie chart breaks down remote office storage infrastructure by type:

According to the survey results, 56% of storage deployed at ROBOs consists of SAN or NAS storage, reflecting the priority for local speed data access at those locations. The tradeoff is that managing enterprise storage infrastructure at those locations can lead to a number of headaches around

  • Hardware life cycles and upgrades
  • Running out of and replenishing capacity
  • Providing backup, replication or disaster recovery for the data stored at each site

Enterprise storage gateways are a great way to consolidate remote site storage footprint to software-only installations or small form-factor appliances while, at the same time, maintaining the plug-compatibility, speed and capacity of local storage infrastructure. Moreover, consolidation allows administrators to centralize data storage at a primary data center or in the cloud with the following advantages

  • A local iSCSI interface at each site without the iSCSI storage array footprint
  • Data reduction (compression and deduplication) before data is sent to the primary site or cloud, increasing usable centralized capacity
  • Ability to re-allocate capacity simply and dynamically between remote sites without moving hardware
  • Ability to maintain a cache or a full local copy that is replicated to the primary site or cloud for a multi-site disaster recovery strategy

Finally, a software enterprise storage gateway can be deployed virtually anywhere in the world in minutes, without additional hardware, allowing IT to rapidly meet ever-changing business needs.

If you are concerned about making the tradeoff between infrastructure footprint and performance for ROBO environments, it may be time to consider the benefits of an enterprise storage gateway solution.

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Is it Time to Look Beyond the Cloud?

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

For many businesses that haven’t yet formulated their cloud adoption plans, the notion of looking beyond the cloud may sound a bit peculiar. After all, isn’t cloud the final frontier that promises to transform traditional IT infrastructure into a control panel offering limitless resources on-demand? That is certainly the outcome that many businesses aspire to. The truth is, regardless of the outcome, much can be gleaned from examining how cloud infrastructure influences business IT efficiencies.

Let’s take a look at public cloud storage and how it has inspired new ways of thinking when it comes to storage infrastructure management. For some, it may be difficult to look beyond the logistics of public cloud storage which often dictate moving data into a distant data center and relinquishing a certain amount of control. However, the benefits of adopting the cloud bring IT efficiencies that could not be otherwise realized, eliminating one of the more burdensome aspects of data storage management.

What burdensome aspect is that? Specifically, the sprawl of storage infrastructure

  • In the primary data center – Storage arrays have a recurring life cycle that demands upgrading and replacing equipment on a regular basis as capacity needs increase.  The process is costly, disruptive, risky and causes overlap of equipment costs, underutilization and overpayment for unused capacity. Read all about the storage array lifecycle here and learn how a large school system changed that pattern once and for all.
  • In the remote office or branch office – While recent surveys such as ESG’s Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends show that a large number of businesses would prefer to centralize their data storage, the numbers reveal that most still have data storage at remote sites, primarily consisting of SAN or NAS devices. This not only perpetuates the management lifecycle described above, but does so for unmanned sites with no dedicated administrative staff, clearly an IT management nightmare.
  • For disaster recovery – Replicated storage infrastructure for disaster recovery costs as much to purchase, run and maintain as primary storage infrastructure and has the same life cycle issues described above, not to mention redundant and costly facilities.
  • For peaks and valleys in demand – Here, storage infrastructure remains primarily idle and unused except when capacity needs increase for certain projects, testing, development or analytics that may occur seasonally

The solution for this sprawl does not necessarily involve moving all storage infrastructure to the cloud. For many businesses, that is simply not a practical, realistic or fathomable near-term solution. However, the consolidation of storage infrastructure is clearly a viable strategy.

A reasonable approach might be to leave the main data center as is but start to address data storage sprawl that is occurring in remote locations. What if you could reduce the remote and branch office storage footprint to a single piece of software per site?  What if you could substantially reduce the storage capacity required for disaster recovery while at the same time pooling storage resources to address peaks and valleys in demand? Sprawl would diminish, utilization would improve and administrative burden would lessen.

The cloud can indeed be a means to this end. However, there are other options to consider. For instance, you could use CloudArray as your storage gateway and have a choice of consolidating the sprawl to a public cloud, private cloud, existing storage infrastructure or a combination of all three. Bottom line?  You can reduce sprawl without having to rely on any particular type of cloud, realize significant cost and administrative savings, and replace your ever expanding storage footprint with software, thereby eliminating a complex life cycle.

Keep in mind there is nothing magical about the storage infrastructure that backs cloud storage. Rather, cloud storage is all about the methodologies that squeeze the utmost efficiency out of commoditized storage components, culminating from years of experience on the part of cloud providers.  For this reason, businesses need to look beyond adopting cloud — and instead, look to adopt cloud methodologies that can bring them substantial IT efficiencies.

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Cloud SANs: What the Data Storage Vendors Forgot

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

Storage area networks (SANs) have become the ubiquitous deployment model for block data storage systems, interconnecting formerly siloed storage arrays with a common high-speed network running standardized protocols such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI. It was over a decade ago that the ability to connect multi-vendor storage arrays into a common network proved revolutionary and changed the way storage arrays were configured and consumed by businesses. However, with continuing advancements in cloud storage solutions, IT administrators are now rethinking the traditional SAN.

As with many mature technologies, SANs have forced IT administrators to accept a number of limitations. The most notable are

  • The traditional 3-5 year lifecycle of storage arrays, resulting in costly upgrades, frequent migrations and the introduction of considerable business risk
  • The inability to scale performance across geographical distances without storage arrays at each site
  • The inability to easily allocate and re-allocate storage capacity across sites
  • Replication and disaster recovery that require double the number of storage arrays and infrastructure

A combined cloud storage and enterprise cloud storage gateway solution, such as CloudArray, easily overcomes all of these limitations. Pay-as-you-go cloud storage breaks the traditional storage lifecycle offering an unlimited tier of data storage without a need for hardware upgrades, while enterprise storage gateway technology enables secure local-speed performance and iSCSI access from virtually any geographic location with the ability to dynamically allocate/reallocate storage across sites as needed.

TwinStrata’s recent launch of CloudArray 3.0 extends these cloud benefits beyond just public and private clouds — to existing data storage. With CloudArray 3.0, it is easier than ever to build a Cloud SAN that transcends the limitations of existing SANs. Companies can enjoy the attributes of cloud storage immediately using their existing storage as the starting point and, when ready, seamlessly expand their existing storage pool with public and/or private cloud storage.

CloudArray Cloud SAN

Cloud SANs eclipse the limitations of traditional SANs by offering high-performance, optimized data access from virtually anywhere, with a very small local footprint. This makes them ideal for remote offices or other distributed environments. Cloud SANs also offer centralized capacity management and centralized disaster recovery for flexible and robust multi-site deployments.

Key benefits of Cloud SANs include

  • Ability to work with public clouds, private clouds and/or existing storage using software or hardware caching appliances, each with access to virtually unlimited capacity
  • Ability to scale local speed performance across sites without distance limitations
  • Ability to allocate/reallocate storage capacity between sites dynamically, simplifying movement of capacity resources to locations that need them most
  • Built-in consolidated replication and disaster recovery for each caching appliance

As ground-breaking as SANs were when they launched over a decade ago, Cloud SANs represent the next revolutionary step in simplifying deployment of data storage for businesses. Whereas traditional SANs are limited in terms of multi-site scale, capacity utilization and cost, Cloud SANs offer robust, cost-effective solutions that scale geographically and optimize data storage utilization.

Find out just how simple it is to get started with a CloudArray Cloud SAN.

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Combining Storage Virtualization with Unprecedented Cloud Storage Flexibility

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

The business case for storage virtualization software isn’t new. System administrators have always sought best of breed data storage from a choice of storage vendors and a centralized management framework. With a variety of data storage devices available today, ranging from high-performance SSD and Flash cards to low-cost SATA arrays, a seamless way to automatically tier data across the diversity of storage devices and purpose-built arrays can maximize utilization and cost-efficiency. Hardware interchangeability and auto-tiering empower consumers with greater cost controls and buying power. In addition, there are numerous benefits to an enterprise-class software stack that includes data replication and disaster recovery in a footprint that persists across storage system upgrades, with no need to ever change data management interfaces and policies.

DataCore SANsymphony-V is offered by the pioneer and established leader in the storage virtualization segment and is the industry’s first storage hypervisor that provides all of the above benefits and much more. This week, DataCore’s storage virtualization software added the flexibility of Cloud Storage to its list of features with the announcement that every copy of SANsymphony-V now bundles a TwinStrata Cloudarray virtual appliance. The combination enables companies to achieve true ‘open market’ buying power across their portfolio of storage investments; TwinStrata extends the cost-saving value propostion to a broad and impressive selection of public and private cloud storage providers.

The key implication is that DataCore has opened a path for seamlessly integrating cloud storage into existing storage environments. A cost-effective auto-tiering strategy eliminates the need to orchestrate cumbersome and/or disruptive migrations of existing data –you can take advantage of cloud storage immediately in a manner transparent to existing applications. Recently, I wrote an article entitled Breaking the Storage Array Life Cycle, describing how businesses are using cloud storage to break or extend the rather undesirable 3-5 year life cycle of storage arrays. This joint announcement takes the concept one step further, providing the easiest path to date for offloading data from your expensive on-premise arrays.

With the introduction of cloud as a part of a storage virtualization strategy, there is no longer a need to deploy dedicated off-site infrastructure to move data backups off-premise for disaster recovery. Petabytes of thin-provisioned cloud storage are just a button-click away, all with CloudArray’s robust enterprise-class feature set, including dynamic caching, data reduction, at-rest local key encryption and bandwidth optimization. Augmenting or even replacing an off-site tape strategy is simpler than ever.

As an added benefit, the compelling features of storage virtualization on local storage now apply across multiple cloud storage providers. Concerned about cloud reliability? Just select RAID or mirroring across a choice of cloud storage providers and increase reliability dramatically. You can also virtualize cloud storage along with existing local storage. Want to replicate data in an existing storage array to the cloud? It’s now a simple process — no data to migrate, no APIs, no vendor lock-in and the broadest choice of cloud providers.

Bottom line? Terri McClure from Enterprise Strategy Group may have summed it up best, saying the combined solution “gives companies greater control over storage performance and helps control costs by making it easy to tier their storage across the absolute widest range of resources, from high-performance SSD arrays and legacy disk arrays, to scalable, cost-effective cloud storage.”

Learn more about the unique TwinStrata and DataCore solution today.

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