TwinStrata Blog » Storage

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…

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.

Performance Considerations for Cloud Storage appliances

admin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 12:15:06 +0000

by Greg Roody

Everything about Computing is a trade off. The old joke is “Speed, Capacity, or Cost”, you can control 2.

Cloud Computing and Storage are no exception. How you configure your environment can have a direct impact on your performance levels, but it can also have a direct impact on your budget.

More after the fold….

One of the defining attributes of a Hybrid Cloud Storage model is there is a local storage component which gets used as local cache or buffer. This helps performance considerably because it is always faster to read or write to disk than to the Cloud. Simple approaches use one big volume as a buffer (not a cache), and everything goes through it, more or less in the order you intended. More sophisticated approaches create a real cache, with LRU/MRU policies, read ahead algorithms, and cache coherency checking.

Pure Cloud Storage clients suffer from extreme network latency, and that is usually bad for performance. If you can afford to wait days to read or write small amounts of data, that model might work for you. For everyone else, a hybrid configuration is the way to go.

CloudArray, TwinStrata’s breakthrough Cloud SAN software, uses a hybrid storage model with an advanced Intelligent Caching architecture. We allow you to configure local cache, on a per volume basis if you like, on a sliding scale from a fraction of the target volume size to 100% of the target volume size.

The larger the cache relative to the target volume, the better your local read/write performance will be. When you get to 100% of the target volume size, reads and writes occur at local disk speed regardless of the latency of your connection to your cloud Storage provider. Some vendors use a common cache volume for all managed volumes; TwinStrata allows you to use either dedicated or shared cache pools (or both concurrently) for any volume managed by CloudArray.

Remember: Cost, Speed, Capacity: Pick 2

One of the great things about CloudArray is it is infinitely configurable. We support local cache disk configurations based on DAS, SAN or NAS volumes. You can configure those connections through one port (SAN/NAS/RAID controller), or many. You can use fast disks or slow. You can use IDE, SCSI, iSCSI, FC, SAS, SSD, or any storage device that can mount using a standard protocol as a device to the CloudArray appliance.

That is also one of the performance configurations when you build out your configuration. If you attach slow disks to CloudArray, with say a 40 MB/s max throughput over your local storage network, then that is the maximum write performance you will see to CloudArray. Configure faster drives, connected over a fast network, and you will see a very high level of performance from your CloudArray appliance. It really comes down to a quality of service decision in the end.

You really need to treat CloudArray like a physical array when configuring both it’s local cache devices and the network links to your application servers. For applications that require less performance, backup applications from mirrored copies of your application environment for example, you can use slower/cheaper storage for your local cache. For those applications which are performance critical – creating remote copies of your Exchange 2010 DAG nodes for example, you want to allocate higher performance storage as your cache devices and use a larger cache device.

By doing this, you can control your costs and your performance levels on a QoS basis across all the applications you want to back up or replicate to Cloud Storage. TwinStrata is unique in allowing you to configure cache policies and volumes either in groups or individually, and it is the only product which allows a variable caching size to be configured.

We do all of this with Security (256 bit AES encryption) and advanced target data reduction techniques. You can download a copy and try it yourself, but keep in mind your performance will be related to the performance of the disk and network connection you allocate as cache and your choice of caching policy.

A Move to Cloud Storage, Companies Re-Think Data Protection Strategies

Robert Infantino — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:50:48 +0000

Ongoing discussions with customers on their challenges with existing data protection solutions are leading to changes within their data center. Customers are frustrated with the current data protection process. More specifically, storing information off-site on tape where it can take anywhere from a few hours to as much as a week to restore information. “This is just plain unacceptable and costly”. Human intervention, misappropriation of data, special security transports for tapes that contain certain types of information are all adding to the latency and cost of storing and retrieving data off-site and on tape.

New technologies and solutions with ROI measured in months are driving the need for change. Once such technology is Cloud storage. One of the many uses for Cloud storage is as a target device for data protection applications. Meaning, as opposed to pointing a data protection application to a tape device or even a disk system, point it to the Cloud. Easily accessible from anywhere around the globe, companies [applications] can securely store and access data in real time, cost effectively and with ease. Tape management and off-site tape storage challenges are mitigated or eliminated.

In the Solutions section of TwinStrata.com and on their respective blog we provide a list of data protection solutions and Cloud storage providers that are qualified to operate with CloudArray software. The list of data protection applications are from well established companies such as Oracle (RMAN), Symantec (Backup Exec), Vizioncore (VRanger Pro) and younger companies such as Veeam, PHD Virtual (esXpress). Cloud storage providers include Amazon.com (S3), EMC Atmos, AT&T and others. These applications and providers work together with CloudArray software to protect data and quickly retrieve information at a moments notice.

Check back from time to time, we will be adding more applications to the list of CloudArray supported applications and Cloud storage providers.

Also, Twinstrata is offering a free 30-day trial of CloudArray software. Click here for link.