TwinStrata Blog » storage as a service

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.

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 Enables Westway to Easily Cut Storage Costs Without Compromising Data Protection

admin — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:27:03 +0000

Westway is a company located in New Orleans, specializing in Bulk Chemical Storage and Liquid Feeds. The numerous challenges they faced included trying to figure out how to establish a way to flexibly add storage as they grew without breaking the bank and reduce onsite infrastructure complexity and costs – all targeted at cost effectively satisfying data storage and retention requirements while ensuring full data control and access and rapid recovery.

The accompanynig case study discusses Westways’ experience using CloudArray for offsite data protection that reduced their overnight backups to just a few hours making.

Enterprise class online backup and cloud storage just got easier in the Big Easy. Read more:

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.

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.

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.

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

Five Reasons to Evaluate Cloud Storage for Data Protection Today

admin — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:50:02 +0000

No doubt you have been hearing a lot about Cloud Storage, its advantages, and how it makes a lot of sense as a way to affordably move data offsite without having to deal with Tape or the expense of maintaining a second DR site.

But you still haven’t tried it.

You may be concerned about the security, or integration, or infrastructure costs. You may b e short staffed and short budget and just trying to keep up with daily demands. But you keep hearing about the benefits, and how it could help your operations today.

But you still haven’t tried it.

So without any further ado, here are 5 reasons you should download and evaluate today:

1. It’s Easy.

All you have to do is go to www.cloudarray.com and click the “SignUp Now” now button. You will be asked a few short questions, and then you will be issued a license key good for 30 days you can use to activate your trial. You will also be able to download a copy of our Virtual Appliance for Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, or Amazon EC2. Simply download the files and install them in your favorite HyperVisor. You won’t need a VMware expert, or Network expert, or MS expert, or even a storage admin to get up and running. Basic system administration skills are all that is required.

2. HyperVisors are Free.

Now some of you are thinking that you don’t have an existing Virtual Infrastructure (VI) and you don’t want to build one just to evaluate a new piece of software. Fair Enough, but you don’t need to build a complex VI to run CloudArray. CloudArray can run on just about any 64 bit platform with a modern operating system. For example, while it will run in Hyper-V or ESX/ESXi of course, but it will also run in VMware Workstation, and it will even run in VMware player. VMware player is free, although you shouldn’t expect much performance out of it, and stability might also be an issue, but it will work. Also, ALL VMware products, from vSphere all the way down to Workstation, can be downloaded for a free 60 day trial. None of these downloads and installs requires any advanced product knowledge. All are easily installable and have defaults prebuilt that will get you up and running.

3. It’s Secure

If you will be using real data as your test load, you can configure CloudArray to encrypt the data before sending it to the Cloud Service Provider. CloudArray uses 256 bit AES encryption, and you retain the keys (they don’t get sent to the CSP or to TwinStrata at any time). You won’t even have to worry about deleting the data when you are done. Just delete the keys and you are safe and secure.

4. You don’t even need a CSP

If you are just getting started, you probably don’t have a relationship with a CSP. We can help you there, and will provide temporary credentials so you can store up to 100GB of data for 30 days at a public CSP without charge.

5. It integrates easily

Once your new CloudArray storage appliance is up and running, you can integrate your existing applications with Cloud Storage as easily as you would mount a new volume. Step one is to create a new LUN and assign it to a server. Step 2 is to mount that LUN on the server and assign it to your application to use. There is no step 3 required. Go ahead and use your new volume just as you would local storage.