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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…

Why a Massachusetts High School Picked TwinStrata CloudArray over Competition

admin — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:26:33 +0000

Kyle Jones, technology manager, Essex Agricultural and Technical High School in Hathorne, MA tested cloud gateway products from Nasuni and TwinStrata to meet specific IT budget and operational objectives. The reasons TwinStrata won out are worth reading about, especially if you are part of a small to medium size business considering cloud storage for either offsite backup, archive, or disaster recovery and business continuity.

Mr. Jones was interviewed recently by TechTarget Senior Site Editor, Andrew Burton where he discussed his requirements, offsite storage/data protection options, and why CloudArray was a better business and technology solution choice to handle the school’s backup to cloud storage needs.

You can read more about it here: High School Deploys TwinStrata CloudArray Cloud Storage Gateway

TwinStrata CloudArray Picked as Finalist in Storage Magazine/SearchStorage 2010 Products of the Year Competition

admin — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:13:40 +0000

Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) Software and Services: 2010 Products of the Year Finalists Announced

From nearly 200 entries, the judges of Storage magazine’s and SearchStorage.com’s 2010 Products of the Year awards have selected 43 products as finalists including TwinStrata CloudArray. CloudArray was selected as a finalist in the Backup and Disaster Recovery Software and Services category which covers backup, recovery, DR, snapshot, replication, electronic vaulting, and archives.

Cloud Storage Performance: I/O Does Matter

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:57:42 +0000

One of the first decisions you will need to make when tuning your environment for Cloud Storage I/O is what page size you will use to perform writes to your Cloud Storage Provider (CSP). This is one of the configuration parameters you will enter when configuring a new volume in CloudArray.

Page sizing is an important consideration, and represents the smallest unit of data that will be sent to your CSP from your CloudArray appliance, or read back when needed. Choose a size that is too small and you may have to do a lot more I/Os if you need to move a lot of data in bulk. Choose a size that’s too big and you will move more data than you need to.

For example, if your application needs to read a lot of small chunks of data that don’t already reside in your CloudArray cache, then CloudArray will have to issue read requests to the CSP for each of those chunks. If each chunk was 64K in length, and they weren’t contiguous, then CloudArray might have to issue 4 separate read requests for that data. If the data were contiguous, then only 1 read request would need to be made.

Larger Page Sizes will result in more data being read than is needed for the current operation, but it may help performance if that data is needed at any point while it is still in cache. In CloudArray, you can choose variable page sizes from 128 KB (default) all the way to 2 MB. 512 KB is the recommended value for backups and in cases where there is a lot of sequential I/O.

If you do a lot of random small block I/O, you should choose the smaller default page size. This will prevent having to move a lot of empty data between your CSP and the CloudArray appliance. A large page size here will cause slower overall performance since a lot more pages will have to be written to accommodate the data requirements. Likewise, if you are doing backups, you will want the 512 KB (or larger) page size. This will result in fewer overall writes compared to a smaller block size and performance will increase.

This can have an impact in your cost model as well, but nowhere nearly as much as some vendors selling file system-based appliances would have you believe. Some CSP’s will charge a small per transaction fee for each read or write request you make. For Amazon S3 for example, the charge is $0.00001 per write transaction. And so for a 1TB backup, that amounts to 8,388,608 x 128KB transactions, or $83. If you used a 512KB page size, that would amount to 2,097,152 write transactions, or $20 for the write transaction costs. Reads are cheaper by an order of ten. That’s a far cry from the $1K+ figure for a 100GB write that another vendor would cost you.

Visit www.TwinStrata.comfor more info about CloudArray.

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.

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

admin — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 20:17:51 +0000

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.

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

admin — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:35:11 +0000

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!

The Real Problem with Tape Storage is Recovery

admin — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 14:41:07 +0000

Tape storage has been around longer than most people have been working in IT, and it has been the subject of prolonged and brutal attacks by technologies that seek to displace it for most of that time. Yet it continues to thrive. While sales of new tape systems are down (by some measures by as much as 25%), they are not out.

Businesses continue to rely on tape for its unique role of providing long term archival and replication of data. Tape spans the entire continuum of data centers, from the self maintained racks in a storage closet to multi-million dollar facilities with multi-homed infrastructure and large organizations supporting them. It’s used and accepted up and down the economic ladder and isn’t going to go away any time soon.

So why should you consider an alternative?

There are actually several good reasons to either augment your current use of tape or eliminate it altogether. But it all comes down to recovery. Nobody backs up data thinking they will never need it again. It’s not just an exercise in compliance.

You back up to tape because at some point, you will need to restore data that isn’t recoverable any other way. But in most cases, you will do that restore within 30 days of when you wrote it. That small fact, which ESG confirmed in a recent survey that showed that 95% of all restores are done within 30 days, belies the rationale most people use to write to tape in the first place.

The reason for that is that tape is a terrible medium to use for short term backups. It stretches, it breaks, it has a high error rate per tape, they get lost and a lot of the time and in many cases data can’t be recovered from a tape because it was either never written or because the tape has too many errors. These problems are only going to get worse as tape densities and length increase and as you put multiple TB’s worth of data on each one.

But you still need long term, as in 7-10 years worth, storage requirements for both policy and regulatory compliance issues. You are caught between two competing operational goals and are forced to accept a one solution fits all answer.

Or are you?

The answer lies in your ability to separate short term data recovery and offsite storage needs from long term archival. If you could find a way to keep a near-line copy of your data, you could satisfy your short term recovery needs. If you can retain tape as a long term archival method, even if it is at a reduced retention schedule, you can meet your long term goals and greatly reduce your costs. If you can do both, your operational readiness will increase drastically and your costs will dive.

The good news is that you can do both. By deploying CloudArray along with a tape backup solution, you can meet your short term recovery goals with on-line copies of your backups locally while at the same time keeping copies in the cloud to meet your short term offsite retention requirements, and tape copies in a warehouse to meet your very long term archival requirements.

Most backup products will allow you to keep both a tape and a disk based copy of the same data set. So your basic policy would be to do daily backups to CloudArray, thus preserving your ability to restore data meeting both RPO and RTO objectives, while at the same time running 30 day full backup cycles to tape for long term storage requirements. You can set your CloudArray backups to any schedule you choose, so you can retain daily, weekly, or monthly backups for any amount of time. If you kept daily backups for 60 days, then weekly backups for one year, and monthly backups for two years, the tape copies would never have to be touched inside of that 2 year window.

It’s the best of both worlds. Do you agree? Visit www.TwinStrata.com for more information and a free 30 day trial.

CA ARCserve qualified with CloudArray – Store ARCserve data in Cloud storage

Robert Infantino — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:15:11 +0000

We continue to see a growing interest in Cloud storage from the end user community. Responding to growing requests, we recently qualified CA ARCserve Backup software with CloudArray. Below is a link to a presentation that steps you through how ARCserve software together with CloudArray protects virtualized and physical server environments. We also included a 3-year TCO summary on CloudArray vs. existing backup and replication solutions. If you are using ARCserve or any other third party data protection software solution, we’d like to hear from you on the challenges you are experiencing with your current solution. Enjoy the presentation.

Enable CA ARCserve to store and retrieve backup data to Cloud storage using CloudArray™ software

Enable Oracle® Recovery Manager (RMAN) to store backup data to Cloud storage

Robert Infantino — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:39:45 +0000

Together with one of our partners, Tricore Solutions, we are working with a number of Oracle customers to reduce cost and drive efficiency for database backups. TriCore is recognized as one of Oracle’s leading partners delivering a suite of services for enterprise accounts.

One of the challenges we are focused on is to protect Oracle databases using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Cloud storage. The challenge faced by most enterprise customers is to reduce cost and drive efficiency to protect Oracle databases and improve restore process. Companies using tape and off-site vaulting services to store Oracle database backup data are shouldering a mountain of costs that will continue to increase linearly with database growth. Costs for such items as media (tape), tape transportation, and vaulting fees to house data offsite. And the process for restoring data is difficult and time consuming taking anywhere from hours to a week to retrieve data. In today’s business environment, expectations for information retrieval should be near real-time if not “real time”.

The solution we provide is an on-demand, expandable, low cost storage tier integrated seamlessly with Oracle RMAN. This solution is made up of CloudArray software together with public Cloud storage and services performed by TriCore solutions. The CloudArray solution enables users to provision volumes on-demand having policies to store backup data locally (cache) having a replica in the Cloud. CloudArray also encrypts and compresses data prior to delivering it to Cloud storage thereby providing security and performance.

We provide an overview of the solution in the following presentation:

View presentation – Click here to best view on SlideShare

Benefits:
The solution lessens the need to store backup data to tape and eliminates the cost involved in managing tape off-site by third party tape vaulting companies. Depending upon retention policies and the amount of data stored off-site, the cost of physical media is the largest cost component of the backup process. Data vaulting services may run as much as 15% of the media costs. For example, a company spending $40,000 per year on LTO could expect to spend as much as $6,000 per year to store the data off-site. CloudArray software and public Cloud storage combined is approx 1/20th of the cost resulting in a significant savings to the customer with near immediate ROI.